'Covid Shield' Is Proposed As China-Level Surveillance Tool

COVID ‘Shield’ Proposes China-Level Surveillance Way Worse Than COVID Vaccine ‘Passport

by Kyle Becker

“We need a SWAT team approach for hotspots. The goal should be to isolate confirmed positives in hours, not days.”

That is a harrowing line from a University of Illinois proposal to the Biden administration for an app that would integrate medical data, geolocation and motion-tracking to ban potentially contaminated citizens from accessing certain public locations and private businesses.

The China-type mobile app would use a color-coding system to label Americans who are exposed or may have been exposed to COVID and restrict them from access, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.

“A PowerPoint produced by the school suggests scaling up the university’s intrusive contact tracing system for use across the United States,” Aaron Sibarium reported. “Its file name, ‘2020-12-14 Shield Biden Covid Team,’ indicates that it was presented to the Biden team in December, amid an ongoing search for solutions to a seemingly insoluble problem: how to stop the virus without stopping the economy? The presentation proffered an answer.”

“The school’s system uses a mobile app that records test results and Bluetooth data to determine who has been exposed to the virus—and ‘links building access’ on campus to that information,” the report continued. “Local businesses have also embraced it, making entry conditional on a ‘safe status’ reading from the app.”

As reported at BeckerNews earlier, even the slightly less privacy invasive COVID vaccine “passport” has remarkable similarities to the Chinese color-coding system, which records a user’s “health status” as green, yellow, or red. The Biden “Shield” would use yellow, orange and red instead — a superficial difference.

In March 2020, the New York Times reported on China’s state surveillance system.

“As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces,” the Times reported.

“But a New York Times analysis of the software’s code found that the system does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk,” the report continued. “It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.”

China released the mobile app in February 2020 that “tracks people and alerts them if they have been in ‘close contact with someone infected’ with the new coronavirus,” CNBC reported.

“The ‘close contact detector’ was released Saturday night, according to China’s state news agency Xinhua,” the report continued. “Users scan a QR code on popular Chinese apps like WeChat and QQ, and submit their name, phone number and government-issued ID number to request information about whether they have been in close contact with anyone infected by the virus.”

“Once users enter their name and ID number, the app will tell them whether they were in close contact with someone infected,” the report said, adding that “each registered phone number can run the search for three different ID numbers.”

On Sunday, the Washington Post broke the news that the Biden administration is planning to use similar technology to track if Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine.