Nothing to see here, move along.
The UK government has signed off on a deal for COVID passports with a tech firm that previously suggested the technology could be easily redeployed as a national ID system, promoting accusations of a further stealth crackdown on freedoms.
An iNews report notes that IT company Entrust (that's not disturbingly Orwellian at all, is it?) has been awarded the £250,000 contract to provide cloud computing software for the so called ‘Covid-status certification’ scheme. The company has previously worked on developing national ID systems in Albania, Ghana, and Malaysia, and in a February blog post, the company’s Product Marketing Director, Jenn Markey, bragged that “Vaccine credentials can become part of the infrastructure of the new normal.”
The post also proclaimed “With the infrastructure and investment necessary to ensure a viable vaccine passport, why not redeploy this effort into a national citizen ID program that can be used for multiple purposes including the secure delivery of government services, secure cross-border travel, and documentation of vaccination.”
Whilst Entrust’s Senior Product Manager, John Beijjani, previously spoke about how vaccine passports could be used by governments in the post-COVID world “to collect valuable data” from citizens going on to say: “You’ll understand why it’s not just for travel, you can take it and repurpose it to do such things as national IDs and permits.”
“Deploying something like a mobile travel credential also enables governments to collect valuable data,” he continued, adding “It can provide governments a quick and standard mechanism for securing their citizens. It also doesn’t hurt that this information can be used to identify criminals and other bad actors as they move around the same system trying to hide anonymously in the crowds.”
There are some reports suggesting that Entrust is linked to the Tony Blair Institute who have been pushing ID cards in one form or another for 15 years, however, as yet these reports have not been confirmed.
The fact that the government has chosen this firm to develop COVID passports when it has expressed such brazen advocacy of a surveillance state has enraged liberty advocates. Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch asserted that “Covid certificates would introduce ID cards in the UK by the backdoor”, further emphasising “The fact that the government has done a deal with Entrust, a company which is openly plotting a route from vaccine passports to digital identity cards, only underlines what a serious threat Covid passes would be to our civil liberties and our privacy.”
Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, former director of civil liberties group Liberty, said “This isn’t a mere question of competence but far more sinister. This is studied chaos. We need to be explicitly reassured that the Government has not already decided in favour of some kind of national ID system.”
David Davis,a member of the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Conservative Members of Parliament declared “The health department is able to go around signing these contracts without explicit Parliamentary permission. But it is doubly extraordinary that they sign one with a company with this sinister attitude to surveillance of citizens.”
The development follow a government source who told the Daily Mail last night that the government is planning to use the COVID passport system in a much wider context than has been previously revealed. They said: “The reason we are trialling Covid certification this summer is partly to get mass events open more safely with bigger crowds, but also partly to get people used to the idea,”
wait, what?
The comments have prompted fears that the threat of lockdowns next winter will be used to force the COVID passport system on to the public for use not only at mass gatherings but in pubs, restaurants, cinemas and theatres. That is exactly what the government is ‘reviewing’ currently while trialling the system at sports events. The government has claimed that the current NHS app, which has always had a COVID certification status feature in it but only recently was it switched on said that it will not be turned into a national ID system. So that means it will.
We have previously reported that plans to adapt a simple vaccine status app and use it domestically have always been in the works. Alarmingly polls suggest that the majority of British people are willing to accept the vaccine passports in order to engage in basic day to day activities, and that they are willing to go along with the digital ID card system PERMANENTLY. Sheeple.
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