Covid Response at Five Years: The Fourth Amendment

By April 2020, Americans were living in a regime of government surveillance that would have been previously unrecognizable. Politicians, newspapers, and activists touted a “Manhattan Project-level operation” aimed at enforcing lockdown orders via mass surveillance and house arrest orders. While insisting their operations were in support of public health, they used familiar tracking programs that obliterated the safeguards of our Fourth Amendment. Silicon Valley forged lucrative partnerships with state and national governments, selling users’ habits and movements without their consent. Rather suddenly, supposedly free citizens were the subject of “track and trace” programs as if they were UPS packages. 

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel famously remarked. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” State actors and tech profiteers embraced Emanuel’s philosophy in the Covid response. They took advantage of the nation’s fear to implement programs that abolished the Fourth Amendment. Technology companies saw massive gains as they implemented a panopticon that allowed law enforcement to track any citizen in any place at any time. Coronamania was an opportunity to do things that they couldn’t do before, and the results were lucrative. The wealth of billionaires increased more in the first two years of the pandemic than it had in the previous 23 years combined, primarily due to gains in the tech sector. 

In 1975, Senator Frank Church led a government investigation into US intelligence agencies. Speaking of their covert power 50 years ago, Church warned, “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

Not only did the government turn its surveillance powers on the citizenry, but it recruited the most powerful information companies in world history to advance its agenda, leaving Americans poorer, less free, and with no place to hide. Big Tech and government agencies colluded to abolish the Fourth Amendment safeguards that previously protected Americans against surveillance. This process siphoned tax dollars to the country’s wealthiest industry, forcing citizens to subsidize the evisceration of their liberties.

A Safeguard against Tyranny

The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be free from unreasonable government searches and seizures. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state cannot utilize new technologies to circumvent its protections. In 2018, the Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the Government violated the Fourth Amendment when it obtained a citizen’s cell phone location data from his wireless carrier. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Fourth Amendment’s “basic purpose” is to “safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by government officials.” Government “could not capitalize” on the technology to evade constitutional scrutiny.

The Carpenter Court cited Americans’ right to protect their record of “physical movements” from Government surveillance. “Mapping a cell phone’s location, ” the Court explained, creates an “all-encompassing” and unconstitutional “record of the holder’s whereabouts.”

Before March 2020, the law was clear: Silicon Valley’s latest fads did not create a government loophole for impermissible searches. Suddenly, the panic surrounding the coronavirus obliterated the safeguards of the Fourth Amendment, and Americans sacrificed their privacy to private-public partnerships. State and federal agencies used mobile data to track and trace American citizens, utilizing new technologies to infringe upon their rights. This surveillance state became supra-national as Silicon Valley giants partnered with countries across the world to expand tyranny beyond geographic borders.

From Snowden to Covid

The foundations of the Covid panopticon – public-private collusion, mass surveillance, and domestic spying – started long before 2020. In 2013, a 29-year-old NSA contractor discovered illegal mass surveillance programs while working on a Hawaii base. He raised his concerns to the appropriate internal channels, but supervisors repeatedly ignored his reports. He boarded a flight to Hong Kong with thousands of classified NSA documents and met with a group of journalists, including Glenn Greenwald.

The reports revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had conducted a secret program of mass government surveillance that logged millions of Americans’ phone calls and communications. They directly contradicted the sworn testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper from just months before. “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” asked Senator Ron Wyden. Clapper responded, “No, sir…not wittingly.”

The documents uncovered by Edward Snowden exposed a litany of crimes, including Clapper’s brazen perjury. The Intelligence Community had logged the phone calls, emails, and financial information of millions of Americans. In a preview of 2020, the Snowden reports revealed the tyrannical merger of state and corporate power. AT&T and Western Union sold bulk records of phone calls and international money transfers to the CIA. The NSA collected telephone records from Verizon that detailed millions of Americans’ call logs on an “ongoing, daily basis” through a secret court order.

Snowden also revealed a covert government operation called “Prism” that gave the NSA direct access to citizens’ data from tech companies including Facebook, Google, and Apple. Without any public debate, the Intelligence Community had access to citizens’ search history, file transfers, live chats, and email communications.

Two U.S. Courts of Appeal later ruled that the NSA’s warrantless spying program was illegal. In ACLU v. Clapper, the Second Circuit wrote that the “bulk collection of data as to essentially the entire population of the United States…permits the development of a government database with a potential for invasions of privacy unimaginable in the past.” The Ninth Circuit later cited Snowden’s revelations half a dozen times in its unanimous opinion ruling that the bulk collection of Americans’ metadata is illegal.

Congress codified these holdings into law, and President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act into law in 2015, outlawing the bulk collection of Americans’ metadata. The law did little to curb the Intelligence Community’s extra-constitutional pursuits. In 2021, US Senators revealed that the CIA continued its domestic spying operations. “…Congress’s clear intent, expressed over many years and through multiple pieces of legislation, to limit, and in some cases, prohibit the warrantless collection of Americans’ records,” wrote Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich to the CIA Director and Director of National Intelligence. “Yet, throughout this period, the CIA has secretly conducted its own bulk program.” Other agencies were guilty as well. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security admitted to purchasing precise GPS data from mobile phone companies.

The Intelligence Community’s disdain for Americans’ privacy and disregard for constitutional liberties set the stage for the Covid crisis to usher in a new era of mass surveillance.

March 2020: No Place to Hide

Central governments immediately pushed for digital surveillance as Covid cases rose in March 2020. On March 17, the Wall Street Journal reported, “government agencies are putting in place or considering a range of tracking and surveillance technologies that test the limits of personal privacy.” The White House launched a task force with tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The CDC partnered with Palantir to launch data collection and contact tracing initiatives. The EU requested that European telecommunications companies share users’ mobile data “for the common good” amid the spread of Covid-19. 

The WHO called on nations to track smartphones to monitor and enforce isolation orders.“It is all very well and good to say self-isolate, now is the time to say it must be done,” said Marylouise McLaws, an advisor to the WHO’s Infection Prevention and Control Global Unit. As McLaws indicated, technological surveillance was a means for demanding compliance and ensuring that it must be done. A police force could not contain millions of citizens, but digital platforms enabled mass surveillance and, in turn, mass compliance.

In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson invited more than 30 technology companies to join the government in its efforts against Covid. British scientists called on the companies (which included Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) to “invest in society” by turning over customers’ data to the government. They wrote in the scientific journal Nature:

“Digital data from billions of mobile phones and footprints from web searches and social media remain largely inaccessible to researchers and governments. These data could support community surveillance, contact tracing, social mobilisation, health promotion, communication with the public and evaluation of public health interventions.”

Unlike the Snowden controversy, the proponents of state authority were straightforward with their aims. The program was designed to implement community surveillance. Within weeks, Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir agreed to contracts to share citizens’ data with the British government. In the US, state agencies met with Silicon Valley companies to develop facial recognition systems and data-mining technology to track infected citizens. The Federal Government used data from Google and Facebook to track citizens’ GPS locations.

By May, nearly 30 countries were using data from cell phone companies to track citizens.“This is a Manhattan Project-level problem that is being addressed by people all over the place,” John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a research center at the University of Toronto, told the Washington Post.

The article continued:

“In a matter of months, tens of millions of people in dozens of countries have been placed under surveillance. Governments, private companies and researchers observe the health, habits and movements of citizens, often without their consent. It is a massive effort, aimed at enforcing quarantine rules or tracing the spread of the coronavirus, that has sprung up pell-mell in country after country.”

Just two months earlier, that article would have been unrecognizable to Americans. Tens of millions of people were placed under surveillance, often without their consent, in a Manhattan Project-level operation aimed at enforcing quarantine (house arrest) rules. That type of dystopian hellscape sounded extreme even for authoritarians in China, yet the United States embraced the program within six weeks of Covid reaching its shores.

In April 2020, the New York Times touted a contact tracing program “that would previously be considered unimaginable.” The article’s blueprint came from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by Democratic operative John Podesta and funded by Bill Gates, George Soros, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (Big Pharma’s lobbying entity). The Times marketed the proposal for an “enormous information technology monitoring system” that would use Americans’ cell phone data “to monitor where they go and whom they get near, which would allow contact tracing to be done instantaneously.” 

The United States adopted the core proposals of the Center for American Progress. Later that month, the Department of Health and Human Services agreed to two multi-million contracts with Palantir to monitor citizens in response to Covid. Five months later, the National Institute of Health awarded Palantir a government contract to build the “largest centralized collection of Covid-19 data in the world.” State governments used cell phone data to track citizens and punish the non-compliant. As Senator Church warned, there was “no place to hide,” and the powerful enjoyed massive windfalls. 

“The new normal” was immensely profitable for tech companies that partnered with government agencies. Palantir went public in September 2020. Three months later, its market cap had skyrocketed to ten times its IPO value. From March 2020 to June 2023, Amazon’s market cap increased by 40%, Google’s increased by 75%, and Apple’s increased by 127%.

Covid accelerated a process in which centralized powers weaponized data in the pursuit of social control and profit. The full extent of the surveillance state remains unclear, but independent programs suggest that the Covid response eradicated the privacy that the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect. Warrantless tracking targeted the enemies of the Covid state, including churchgoers, the unvaccinated, and the working class. More alarmingly, global power structures are eager to repurpose Covid tracing programs to implement a permanent system of mass surveillance.

Tracking Church Attendance

In May 2022, Vice revealed that the CDC purchased cell phone data from Silicon Valley company SafeGraph to track the location of tens of millions of Americans during Covid. At first, the agency used this data to track compliance with lockdown orders, vaccine promotions, and other Covid-related initiatives. The agency explained that the “mobility data” would be available for further “agency-wide use” and “numerous CDC priorities,” including monitoring religious observation. 

SafeGraph sold this information to federal bureaucrats, who then used the data to spy on millions of Americans’ behavior. The tracking included information on where they visited and whether they complied with house arrest orders. Unshackled from Constitutional restraints, bureaucrats tracked Americans’ movements, religious observances, and medical activity.

In California, the Santa Clara County Health Department purchased cellular mobility data from SafeGraph to target religious observance. The company collected GPS locations and aggregated data on 65,000 users’ locations. They used this information – known as points of interests (POIs) – and sold it to government agencies. In Santa Clara, they focused their attention on a local evangelical church called Calvary Chapel. 

SafeGraph and the local government created a digital boundary – known as a “geofence” – around Calvary Chapel’s property and monitored cellular devices that spent time within the geographic limits of the church. County officials insist that the GPS data remained anonymous, but journalist David Zweig explains that the anonymity is easily cracked:

“The SafeGraph data ostensibly does not provide personal information on individuals. Yet I spoke with a scientist who utilizes similar data in their work who said it would, of course, be easy to identify an individual user. You can track the location at one POI, in this case the church, and then follow the device back to its home address…an entity could easily figure out individuals’ identities if SafeGraph gave them the data.”

The “anonymous” data does not prevent groups from identifying the user. In 2020, a Catholic news site deanonymized a Wisconsin priest’s data to reveal that he had visited gay bars. In 2021, Google banned SafeGraph from its app store after pro-choice activists warned that the data could be used to track women who visit abortion clinics.

With the aid of digital surveillance, Santa Clara implemented a police state. In August 2020, the county established a “civil enforcement program” to investigate and punish violations of the health department’s orders. That month, enforcement officers targeted the church with financial punishment. By October, the county had fined Calvary $350,000.

Their high-tech totalitarianism inadvertently revealed the arbitrary and capricious nature of government lockdowns. As Santa Clara tracked its citizens, it monitored the most popular areas in the county. By Thanksgiving 2020, the six busiest locations in the area were shopping centers and malls. Unlike local churches, the commercial groups did not have bans on indoor gatherings. While the county ordered stakeouts, on-site surveillance, and recordings at Calvary Chapel, the strip malls and shopping centers did not face harassment from law enforcement. The “geofences” proved to be compliance tests, devoid of reason.

The essence of the program would have been considered un-American before the Covid Coup. Nine months before the coronavirus emerged, the New York Times decried how the Chinese had created a “virtual cage” through a digital information program that “taps into networks of neighborhood informants” and “tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior.” The article described the system of “high-tech surveillance” that President Xi implemented to stifle dissent and restrict liberty. “The goal here is instilling fear – fear that their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life,” Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author, told the Times. “The amount of people and equipment used for security is part of the deterrent effect.”

One year later, the United States had set up its own system of “virtual cages.” Ultimately, the goal was the same: instill fear, demand conformity, deter dissent. By tracking citizens, they could look into every corner of Americans’ lives, arbitrarily enforcing punishment against the disfavored. 

MassNotify and Mass Surveillance

In Massachusetts, the state Department of Public Health worked with Google to secretly install Covid-tracing software on citizens’ smartphones. The state launched “MassNotify” in April 2021, but few citizens downloaded the app. Two months later, the state and Google worked together to secretly install the program on over one million mobile devices without owners’ consent or knowledge. If users discovered the program and deleted it, the Department of Public Health reinstalled the program onto their phones, again without their approval.

“MassNotify” used Bluetooth to constantly interact with nearby devices and create an ongoing log of users’ locations. That information was time-stamped and stored with the users’ personal identifiers, including wireless IP addresses, phone numbers, and personal email accounts. That data was available to the State, Google, network providers, and other third parties. Those groups could then identify the individuals and their corresponding data logs. In sum, the Government gained access to a digital timeline of their movements, contacts, and personal information. 

This clearly violated Supreme Court precedent. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter that cell phone tracking violated the Fourth Amendment. “As with GPS information, the time-stamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations,” the Court explained. Yet, under the guise of public health, Massachusetts violated this principle and siphoned tax dollars to Google to monitor its citizens’ movements and associations.

Two Americans challenged the constitutionality of MassNotify, alleging violations of the Fourth Amendment and the state constitution. Their complaint argued, “Conspiring with a private company to hijack residents’ smartphones without the owners’ knowledge or consent is not a tool that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health may lawfully employ in its efforts to combat COVID-19. Such brazen disregard for civil liberties violates both the United States and Massachusetts Constitutions, and it must stop now.”

In March 2024, the District Court of Massachusetts denied the State’s motion to dismiss the case. The Government had argued that cell phone users did not have a “constitutionally protected property interest in the digital storage” of their data and that the case was moot because the program was no longer in effect. The district court disagreed, holding that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged violations of their constitutional rights and that the Court could still grant relief related to the case. As of February 2025, the case remains in litigation, and plaintiffs have access to the discovery of the State’s communications relating to the program. 

Google is familiar with allegations of improper tracking. In 2022, the company agreed to a record $391 million settlement with 40 states for allegedly misleading users over its location tracking programs. In 2020, Arizona filed suit against Google alleging that its citizens were “targets of a sweeping surveillance apparatus designed [by Google] to collect their behavioral data en masse, including data pertaining to user location.” Google settled the case for $85 million. In a separate case, the Attorney General for Washington, D.C. claimed that “Google deceived consumers regarding how their location is tracked and used.”

The Massachusetts app was both intrusive and ineffective. By 2021, it became clear that contact tracing had not slowed the transmission of Covid-19. In December 2021, the state announced that it was ending MassNotify after spending over $150 million on the program. Even the New York Times editorial page admitted in November 2020 that “there’s little evidence showing that these contact tracing apps work, and they bring with them a host of questions about privacy.”

The Department of Public Health explicitly violated Supreme Court precedent to implement a nondiscriminatory system of mass surveillance that failed in its purported purpose. The agency enriched Silicon Valley with taxpayer funds in a clandestine scheme to strip citizens of their Fourth Amendment rights.

The Excelsior Pass

Intrusions into Americans’ privacy soon became central to the Covid regime’s vaccine fanaticism. Governor Andrew Cuomo used his 2021 State of the State Address to unveil plans for a digital Covid-19 vaccine passport. He dubbed it “The Excelsior Pass.” “The vaccine will end the COVID crisis,” Cuomo stated. “We must vaccinate 70-90% of our twenty million New Yorkers.” Like other Covid efforts, the state recruited multinational corporations – including IBM and Deloitte – to assist their efforts to strip Americans of their rights. 

Governor Cuomo launched a pilot program for the Excelsior Pass in March 2021. The New York Times called it a “magic ticket” only accessible “to people who have been vaccinated in the state.” The magic ticket became the basis for citizens to access the basic perks of civilization, including public transportation, dining, and entertainment.

Cuomo assured taxpayers that the initiative would only cost $2.5 million. It quickly ballooned to over $60 million. While the program ran 25 times over budget, the country’s most powerful companies enjoyed windfalls. IBM raked in millions from New York taxpayers to maintain the health information stored in the app. Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte received nearly $30 million for their work on the program; they later received $200 million in taxpayer funds under the state’s Covid “emergency” spending.

Profiteers capitalized on the opportunity as public officials welcomed the increase in state power. By August 2021, Cuomo had unveiled Excelsior Pass Plus, a program designed to expand the passport in other states and nations. Journalists later revealed that the plan predated the pandemic. The Times Union reported:

“New York’s expanding contract with the two firms actually began…in September 2019. The broadly worded agreement covered work ‘transforming or reengineering government business models and operations.’ State officials agreed to spend up to $59.5 million over the ensuing five years for the services of Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte, whichever organization was better suited for the work on specific projects.”

The state comptroller’s office was responsible for overseeing this government spending, but it later admitted that it lost the contract during its period of remote work in response to Covid. Regardless, the groups had undoubtedly succeeded in “transforming or reengineering” the structure of civilization. 

Most notably, Cuomo destroyed New Yorkers’ privacy rights. “Cuomo’s dystopian program also infringes upon New Yorkers’ rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment of the federal constitution,” the National Civil Liberties Alliance explained. “Numerous courts have recognized that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their medical records, meaning that the Governor cannot compel them to divulge such information in order to participate in public life.”

Cuomo’s taxpayer-funded initiative violated longstanding legal precedents. For decades, federal courts of appeal have recognized that medical records “are well within the ambit of materials entitled to privacy protection.” In 2000, the Fourth Circuit held that “medical treatment records…are entitled to some measure of protection from unfettered access by government officials.” The Supreme Court later ruled that medical tests constituted an unconstitutional search, and “benign” motives could not “justify a departure from Fourth Amendment protections.”

But the Covid vaccine passport fell under the corona-mania exemption from constitutional restraints. Medical records were publicized as an untested “emergency use” product became a prerequisite for participating in society.

Tracking the Unvaccinated

Beyond geographic tracking, the United States government secretly monitored Americans’ medical records to log whether they had received Covid vaccines. Beginning in 2022, the CDC implemented a program that instructed doctors to record patients’ vaccination status in an electronic medical record without their consent or knowledge.

In September 2021, a CDC committee met to discuss the use of “diagnostic codes,” also known as “ICD-10” codes, to respond to “underimmunization for Covid-19.” These diagnostic codes are managed and compiled by the World Health Organization.

As opposed to other ICD-10 codes, the new program did not track existing illnesses or health conditions; instead, it was a measure for compliance. The coding included detailing reasons why Americans chose not to receive the vaccine. For example, the CDC created separate codes for those who remain unvaccinated “for reasons of belief.”

Doctors explained that the codes offered no diagnostic benefit. “I have a hard time clinically seeing the medical indication of using them,” Dr. Todd Porter, a pediatrician, told the Epoch Times. “We do not do this for influenza, which in the younger age groups has a higher IFR [infection fatality ratio] than COVID-19. Using these codes also disregards the contribution of natural immunity, which research evidence shows is more robust than vaccine immunity.”

At the September 2021 meeting, CDC Dr. David Berglund discussed the “value” of being “able to track the unvaccinated.” When asked if the codes would consider natural immunity, he said that codes would only consider citizens “fully immunized” if they received the CDC-recommended dosage of vaccines and boosters. There would be no exceptions.

The following month, Dr. Anthony Fauci and three other high-ranking US health officials held a secret meeting to discuss whether natural immunity should exempt Americans from vaccine mandates. The government cabal included US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, NIH Director Francis Collins, and White House vaccine coordinator Bechara Choucair.

At the time, the CDC recommended three shots to almost all adult Americans despite widespread research indicating that natural immunity was superior to mRNA vaccines. Walensky was a signatory to the John Snow Memorandum from October 2020, which argued that there was “no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following infection” despite widespread studies to the contrary.

Following the secret October 2021 meeting, US public health officials increased their vaccine recommendations without making exceptions for those with natural immunity. Within months, the United States implemented the public health apparatus’s tracking program.

The CDC was straightforward in the goal of the initiative. “There is interest in being able to track people who are not immunized or only partially immunized,” the agency wrote. Additionally, the insurance industry advocated for the privacy intrusion, assuring health officials that it could use the data to promote Big Pharma’s liability-free products; “Creating ICD-10 codes that can be tracked via claims would provide health insurance providers key information to help increase immunization rates,” wrote Danielle Lloyd, a senior vice president at America’s Health, an insurance provider.

The program remained secret for nearly a year after implementation. When groups including The Epoch Times, Laura Ingraham, and Dr. Robert Malone revealed the tracking operation, the CDC was reluctant to answer questions.

Ten members of Congress sent a letter to CDC Director Walesnsky, writing, “we are concerned about the federal government gathering data on Americans’ personal choices – data that serves no sincere purpose in treating patients’ medical conditions – and how it may be used in the future.”

The members continued, “The ICD system was originally intended to classify diagnoses and reasons for visiting the doctor, not to conduct surveillance on the personal medical decisions of American citizens. Given the profound uncertainty and distrust felt by many Americans toward the CDC and the medical apparatus at large, it is important for the CDC to make clear the intent and purpose of these new codes.”

The CDC and Dr. Walensky declined to respond to the letter. Without a medical justification, the tracking system appears to be a compliance tool, designed at the height of vaccine mania to monitor who declined mRNA jabs and why. It was a clear violation of Fourth Amendment precedent that guarantees citizens’ medical records “protection from unfettered access by government officials.” 

“The Architecture of Oppression”

In the opening days of the pandemic, Edward Snowden warned that governments would be reluctant to relinquish the power they would accumulate. “When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky,” Snowden said in March 2020. “The emergency tends to be expanded. Then authorities become comfortable with some new power. They start to like it.”

Snowden’s warnings proved prescient. Two weeks to flatten the curve was expanded to 1,100 days of emergency orders, and leaders reveled in their new powers. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16^th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept?” Snowden later asked. “No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression.”

Even some in the US Government warned that the surveillance state would not disappear as the virus subsided. “The federal government has realized the value of the massive amounts of commercial consumer data that is freely available on the open market,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong said in 2023. “Combine [the amount of data available] with the advance in technology like [artificial intelligence], facial recognition, and more, that will allow aggregation, analysis, and identification, and we are fast approaching a surveillance state with no assurances other than the promises of our government that it will not abuse this tremendous responsibility.”

All evidence suggests that the government will continue to abuse the “tremendous responsibility” by partnering with Silicon Valley companies to usurp the Fourth Amendment.

Public officials used citizens’ GPS data to perpetuate their power over the electorate. Voter analytics firm PredictWise boasted that it used “nearly 2 billion GPS pings” from Americans’ cell phones to assign citizens scores for their “COVID-19 decree violations” and their “COVID-19 concern.” The Arizona Democratic Party used these “scores” and collections of personal data to influence voters to support US Senator Mark Kelly. The firm’s clients include the Democratic parties of Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina. 

Politicians and government agencies repeatedly and deliberately augmented their power by tracking their citizens and thus depriving them of their Fourth Amendment rights. They then analyzed that information, assigned citizens compliance “scores,” and used the spyware to manipulate voters to maintain their positions of authority. 

Other countries have developed plans to make the Covid surveillance permanent.

In May 2023, the United Kingdom reached new agreements with mobile network providers to share user data that will allow the government to continue tracking population movement. The UK Health Security Agency said the information will provide insight into “behavioral changes post-pandemic…and establish a post-pandemic baseline of behavior.”

Snowden warned that once authorities become comfortable with new power, “they start to like it.” In Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison took the unprecedented action of appointing himself minister of five departments during Covid, including the national Department of Health. Under his supervision, the Department of Health released national and state-level apps to monitor Covid infections. The programs were advertised as a means to notify people if they had been near someone who tested positive for the virus; intelligence agencies soon abused the program by “incidentally” collecting citizens’ data, and law enforcement co-opted the program to investigate crimes.

Israel similarly used pandemic data programs to augment state power. The Israeli government developed tracking technologies advertised as tools to combat the spread of Covid. Using digital information, police began appearing at Israelis’ homes if they were found to have violated quarantine orders. This “contact tracing” initiative then extended beyond Covid. Israel’s security agency – Shin Bet – used the contact tracing technology to send threatening messages to citizens that it suspected of participating in protests against the police. By using GPS locations, the government was able to identify potential dissidents and suppress dissent.

In China, the CCP implemented QR scanners during the pandemic and insisted they would be used to monitor infections. Instead, Beijing transformed the program as the pandemic ended to restrict travel, protest, and free association.

“What COVID did was accelerate state use of these tools and that data and normalize it, so it fit a narrative about there being a public benefit,” a senior researcher at an internet watchdog group told the Associated Press. “Now the question is, are we going to be capable of having a reckoning around the use of this data, or is this the new normal?”

That reckoning has yet to come. If Chinese QR codes sound like a foreign nightmare that would never come to American cities, consider how quickly the United States adopted a Manhattan Project-level operation aimed at enforcing house arrest rules. The Intelligence Community has long demonstrated its disregard for citizens’ civil liberties or constitutional restraints.

The Covid panic created an opportunity for Silicon Valley companies and the federal government to do things they could not do before, as Rahm Emanuel would advise. Big Tech profited from the erosion of citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Senator Church’s warning came to fruition; the Intelligence Community’s capabilities were turned around on the American people, and no American had any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything – health records, movement, religious worship, and more. There was no place to hide.