If you’re looking for good news about the coronavirus, check out this morning’s Daily Cut AM.
Our tech expert, Jeff Brown, showed why we’re closer to the end of the coronavirus panic than most people think.
Jeff also explained how the virus is a lot less deadly than the public generally understands.
Now, we’re going to tackle some disturbing developments…
Basically, to do your part to stop germs, governments want you to cancel your right to privacy.
As you’ll see today, they’ve started digitally tracking us using GPS (satellite geolocation) and other data from our phones.
Every time I (Chris) write about this subject, I get a ton of great feedback from readers. So today, I’ll get you up to speed on what’s going on. Then I’ll feature some of your thoughts about it… and the steps you can take to protect yourself.
Every day, hundreds of new readers sign up to the advisories we publish at Legacy Research.
So if you just became a reader of Teeka Tiwari, Jeff Brown, E.B. Tucker, or one of our other gurus… welcome.
The Daily Cut is a premium bonus e-letter we send you each weekday. It keeps you up to date with the latest ideas about how to protect and grow your wealth.
We’ve also made it our mission to get the word out about the Surveillance Society we see coming.
There’s no point in being wealthy if you don’t live in a free society. And with always-on surveillance, you can’t be free. The government’s always watching, monitoring, and recording you.
That’s not much different from the idea of a “panopticon”…
As regular readers will recall, the term “panopticon” (from the many-eyed Greek giant Panoptes) was first used in the 18th century to describe a radical new prison design.
The guards in the central tower of the panopticon could see inside every cell 24 hours a day. But the inmates could never see inside the tower.
They were never sure if someone was watching them or not. So they had to be on their best behavior at all times.
I’ve laid out for you the first two in these pages already.
The first step is proof of concept.
Thanks to its Social Credit System… face-recognition-powered CCTV cameras… and online tracking, the Chinese government has shown what’s possible.
The second step is boiling the frog.
We get used to increased surveillance as part of our daily lives in the U.S. and other Western democracies.
For instance, I’ve shown you how 27 U.S. international airports use face-recognition scans as boarding passes.
I’ve also shown you how cops in Orlando, Florida, have placed a face-recognition dragnet across the city.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is even monitoring your phone and internet traffic by way of windowless-concrete data “fortresses” across America.
By now, most Americans are used to some form of surveillance. And they just don’t care.
Governments are using the pandemic to test new surveillance tools.
You may not know it, because they didn’t tell you. But U.S. government officials have been tracking your cell phone data… and the data of millions of other Americans… to monitor the spread of the virus.
This may sound like a tinfoil-hat thing to say. There was a time when it would have been. Today, that’s no longer true.
Governments are being so obvious about it… even the mainstream media is finally catching up. From a report in The Wall Street Journal last month…
Government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and how they may be affecting the spread of the disease.
The federal government, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state and local governments have started to receive analyses about the presence and movement of people in certain areas of geographic interest drawn from cellphone data, people familiar with the matter said. The data comes from the mobile advertising industry rather than cellphone carriers.
Let me translate that into plain English for you. If you have a smartphone connected to the internet… and you have certain apps running on it… the authorities know where you are 24/7.
In Brazil, politicians in the city of Recife are tracking at least 700,000 smartphones to find out where people are disobeying lockdown rules.
In India, people suspected of having the coronavirus have had their hands indelibly stamped, and are being tracked using their mobile phones and personal data…
And the Israeli government is using technology it developed for counter-terrorism operations. It can track the physical locations of all cell phones in the country, as well as monitor calls and messages.
Meanwhile, governments in Britain, Germany, and Russia are rolling out apps to track the movement of people diagnosed with coronavirus.
Since we launched The Daily Cut last August, we’ve been showing you different ways to take back your privacy.
If you haven’t taken our pointers yet, it’s not too late to start with the following…
- “The Battle Against Online Snooping Starts Here” – Teeka Tiwari (The Palm Beach Letter, Palm Beach Confidential) shows how you can use cryptocurrencies to keep your financial transactions safe from online snoops.
- “Your Guide to ‘Going Dark’ Online” – Four simple steps from Bonner-Denning Letter coauthor Dan Denning you can use to reduce your digital footprint.
- “How to Escape the Digital Prison” – Teeka has an important addition to Dan’s “going dark” action plan that will come in handy when you’re surfing the web – no matter where you are.
- “Your Roadmap to Escape America” and “More Spots to Consider for Your ‘Escape America’ Roadmap” – If you’d rather get out of Dodge altogether, check out some of our top destinations.
And stay tuned for more on this important subject in future dispatches. By the looks of things, there are going to be a lot of new surveillance measures to cover.
Regards,
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Chris Lowe
April 8, 2020
Dublin, Ireland
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