Patrol Drones Urge People to Stay Indoors

From Dan Robitzski's 3-16-20 Futurism article entitled "SPANISH POLICE USING DRONES TO YELL AT PEOPLE BREAKING QUARANTINE":

In response to a sudden increase in confirmed cases of COVID-19, police in Spain are using drones to patrol towns and urge people to stay indoors.

The country issued a state of emergency on Friday, and on Saturday the government ordered everyone in the country to stay home for all but the most crucial trips outdoors, according to Business Insider. And now, like in China earlier this year, Spanish police are hoping to shame people into staying indoors without having to approach them and risk spreading disease.

Footage from the BBC shows police speaking into a radio and urging people walking through a Madrid park to go home. Meanwhile, a drone flying overhead relays the message to the people who were outside in spite of the quarantine.

Cops using drones to yell at people to stay inside sounds like something straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia....

To read the entire piece, click HERE.

Coronavirus Narcs

From a 3-19-20 New York Post article entitled "Californians Are Calling 911 on Their Coughing Neighbors Over Coronavirus Fears":

Multiple police departments in Southern California say they have been receiving more 911 calls from residents concerned that their coughing neighbor may have the coronavirus.

The phone calls have increased concurrently with the number of coronavirus cases in Riverside and San Bernardino County, the Desert Sun reported.

Sgt. Mike Casavan of the Palm Springs Police Department told the outlet on Monday that dispatchers have received at least five of these types of calls in the past week. Police Cmdr. Paul Herrera of neighboring Cathedral City said dispatchers have received similar calls.

Dispatchers there have been instructed to ask each caller whether the person they were calling about had recently returned from a trip abroad. But as the outbreak grew worse, they began asking callers whether the person has had contact with someone who has tested positive for the coronavirus....

To read the entire article, click HERE.

"What Would Jello Do?"

Jello Biafra: "What Would Jello Do?" Part 73 - Coronavirus Masks

Jello Biafra: "Message From Our Sponsor 2020"

Jello Biafra just released an updated version of his classic monologue “Message From Our Sponsor” (the opening track on his first spoken word album No More Cocoons) as a brand new spoken word track for this wonderful, enlightened future in which we all find ourselves. 

Click HERE to check out this new version.

And if you want to hear the original (from 1987), click HERE. 

"Coronavirus vs. the Mass Surveillance State"

From John W. Whitehead's 3-12-20 Counterpunch article entitled "Coronavirus vs. the Mass Surveillance State: Which Poses the Greater Threat?":

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”

—Philip K. Dick

Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expands its powers.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

Now we find ourselves on the brink of a possible coronavirus contagion.

I’ll leave the media and the medical community to speculate about the impact the coronavirus will have on the nation’s health, but how will the government’s War on the Coronavirus impact our freedoms?

For a hint of what’s in store, you can look to China—our role model for all things dystopian—where the contagion started.

In an attempt to fight the epidemic, the government has given its surveillance state apparatus—which boasts the most expansive and sophisticated surveillance system in the world—free rein. Thermal scanners using artificial intelligence (AI) have been installed at train stations in major cities to assess body temperatures and identify anyone with a fever. Facial recognition cameras and cell phone carriers track people’s movements constantly, reporting in real time to data centers that can be accessed by government agents and employers alike. And coded color alerts (red, yellow and green) sort people into health categories that correspond to the amount of freedom of movement they’re allowed: “Green code, travel freely. Red or yellow, report immediately.”

Mind you, prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese surveillance state had already been hard at work tracking its citizens through the use of some 200 million security cameras installed nationwide. Equipped with facial recognition technology, the cameras allow authorities to track so-called criminal acts, such as jaywalking, which factor into a person’s social credit score.

Social media credit scores assigned to Chinese individuals and businesses categorize them on whether or not they are “good” citizens. A real-name system—which requires people to use government-issued ID cards to buy mobile sims, obtain social media accounts, take a train, board a plane, or even buy groceries—coupled with social media credit scores ensures that those blacklisted as “unworthy” are banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among the activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.

That same social credit score technology used to identify, track and segregate citizens is now one of China’s chief weapons in its fight to contain the coronavirus from spreading. However, it is far from infallible and a prime example of the difficulties involved in navigating an autonomous system where disembodied AI systems call the shots. For instance, one woman, who has no symptoms of the virus but was assigned a red code based on a visit to her hometown, has been blocked from returning to her home and job until her color code changes. She has been stuck in this state of limbo for weeks with no means of challenging the color code or knowing exactly why she’s been assigned a red code.

Fighting the coronavirus epidemic has given China the perfect excuse for unleashing the full force of its surveillance and data collection powers. The problem, as Eamon Barrett acknowledges in Fortune magazine, is what happens after: “Once the outbreak is controlled, it’s unclear whether the government will retract its new powers.”

The lesson for the ages: once any government is allowed to expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to pull back.

To read the rest of Whitehead's article, click HERE.

The EARN IT Act: "A Sneaky Attempt to End Encryption"

From Casey Newton's 3-12-20 The Verge article entitled "A Sneaky Attempt to End Encryption Is Worming Its Way Through Congress":

One risk of having the world pay attention to a single, all-consuming story is that less important but still urgent stories are missed along the way. One such unfolding story in our domain is the (deep breath) Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (“EARN IT”) Act, which was the subject of a Senate hearing on Wednesday. Here’s Alfred Ng with an explainer in CNET:

The EARN IT Act was introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (Republican of South Carolina) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Democrat of Connecticut), along with Sen. Josh Hawley (Republican of Missouri) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Democrat of California) on March 5.

The premise of the bill is that technology companies have to earn Section 230 protections rather than being granted immunity by default, as the Communications Decency Act has provided for over two decades.

For starters, it’s not clear that companies have to “earn” what are already protections provided under the First Amendment: to publish, and to allow their users to publish, with very few legal restrictions. But if the EARN IT Act were passed, tech companies could be held liable if their users posted illegal content. This would represent a significant and potentially devastating amendment to Section 230, a much-misunderstood law that many consider a pillar of the internet and the businesses that operate on top of it.

When internet companies become liable for what their users post, those companies aggressively moderate speech. This was the chief outcome of FOSTA-SESTA, the last bill Congress passed to amend Section 230. It was putatively written to eliminate sex trafficking, and was passed into law after Facebook endorsed it. I wrote about the aftermath in October:

[The law] threatens any website owner with up to 10 years in prison for hosting even one instance of prostitution-related content. As a result, sites like Craigslist removed their entire online personals sections. Sex workers who had previously been working as their own bosses were driven back onto the streets, often forced to work for pimps. Prostitution-related crime in San Francisco alone — including violence against workers — more than tripled.

Meanwhile, evidence that the law reduced sex trafficking is suspiciously hard to come by. And there is little reason to believe that the EARN IT Act will be a greater boon to public life.

Yet, for the reasons Issie Lapowsky lays out today in a good piece in Protocol, it may pass anyway. Once again Congress has lined up some sympathetic witnesses who paint a picture that, because of their misfortune, whole swathes of the internet should be eliminated.

To read Newton's entire article, click HERE.

"Armpits, Asshole, Crotch, and Teeth"