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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Government Could Enforce Who You’re Allowed to Socialize With Via Tracking App




(Summit News)  -  In the “new normal” of social distancing, governments could dictate who you’re allowed to socialize with and punish wrongdoers via a smart phone tracking app.

Governments are now considering a post-lockdown world of “social bubbles,” which in the UK translates into a proposal to allow people to visit “10 friends and family.”

The Belgian government is also considering permitting people to have a designated list of people they can visit in order to keep the risk of transmitting COVID-19 low.
Psychologist Dr. Linda Papadopoulos said that people who have been locked down for two months unable to see friends or family “will see it as progress and a welcome development.”


However, the proposal is completely unenforceable without draconian state monitoring and surveillance.

“From a psychological perspective, I am not sure that it works at all,” said Rory Sutherland, a behavioral scientist and vice chairman of the advertising agency Ogilvy. “Any group assembling could simply claim that everyone present was part of the same cluster, and without spectacular levels of bureaucracy, it would be impossible to establish the veracity of this. It would re-establish the sight of large groups of people as a norm.”

“I think it falls into that category of “excellent science, bad policy,” he added.

And that’s where the tracking app comes in.

“Do not worry about the enforcement of these bubbles; the government could use smartphone app(s) to track and trace bubble violaters,” writes Zero Hedge.

It’s easy to envisage a not too distant dystopia of state-enforced social distancing where the mandatory app will deduct points from your social credit score if you venture outside of your house once too often or meet with an unauthorized friend.

By giving people the ‘privilege’ of allowing them to see a select number of friends, people are also being trained that they are getting rights back.

In reality, this is prison training. Those who show sufficiant obedience to what are essentially totalitarian powers are then given a pat on the head and allowed out into the community in a limited fashion.
Summit News . . . .


"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime...".
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- George Orwell1984, Book 1, Chapter 5



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