A few years ago, commentators argued that “data is the new oil”:1 a precious commodity that makes the world go ‘round. Instead of wars for control over natural resources, à la Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the new battles will be fought across informational landscapes by tyrannical tech monopolies whose software is based on designs that emerged from the state-funded military sector and whose power is too vast for governments to break.
For-profit transhumanism was the plan all along. Referring to brain implants, the founder and head of what became the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, said in 2016: “first we will implant them in our clothes as ‘wearables’ and then we could imagine that we will implant them in our brains or in our skin.” Schwab said that this will eliminate the boundaries between digital and physical space.2 In 2017, Jun Wang, co-founder of the health company iCarbonX, said: “We want an exact 3-D figure of you: the fat, the muscle – your entire body shape, plus facial recognition, and what’s going on with your skin.”3
Governments’ responses to the Covid pandemic worldwide have given our new biotech overlords the perfect opportunity to roll out and impose a myriad of next-generation gadgets for the control of humanity.
SELLING YOUR DATA
Consider how anti-democratic forces have exploited national health services for profit. Billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”4 In-Q-Tel is a US Central Intelligence Agency seed-funding company whose investments, with others, helped to set up Google and Thiel’s Palantir: an AI and analytics company.5 Palantir was awarded US Defense Department contracts in foreign battlefields, including Afghanistan, to build biometric databases of the world.6
NHSX is a unit of the British National Health Service (NHS) designed to put the final nails in the NHS coffin by digitising patient care. In July 2019, long before the world was aware of the growing pandemic, Palantir UK’s Louis Mosley dined with the chair of NHS England, David Prior. The pair discussed selling NHS data to the US-based firm.7 In 2020, with Covid ripping through Britain, Palantir was awarded a £23 million contract under the secret Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 Framework.8 The NHS later developed its own App for track and trace, which in April 2021 the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, said could be used for vaccine travel passports.9
GenVis is an Australian company specialising in surveillance analytics. It describes itself and its products as building and presenting “compelling criminal cases underpinned by video forensics,” “real time intelligence,” and “people management.”10 A snazzy GenVis video promotes Australia’s 500 per cent increase in CCTV over the last decade, adding that 80 per cent of footage is unused due to monitoring costs. GenVis’s “intelligence path mapping” software can rectify this alleged problem by tracking targets and using visuals to make data easy to understand.11 The authorities in both South and Western Australia gave GenVis a contract to monitor Covid patients in quarantine via the G2G Now app, which the police also utilise to enforce travel restrictions.12