It does, actually
It doesn’t? Really?
I can think of way more dystopian it can get. Lots of it. Surveillance cameras in every room, recording-transmitting devices on every surface, militarized police everywhere you go, food shortages, criminalization of all dissent, closure of all independent sources of knowledge and discussion, harsh prison sentences for the smallest infractions, death penalties for the smallest infractions, mandatory prostitution, mandatory impregnation and childbirth, disfavored races and ethnic groups and immigrants sent to camps in miserable climates, most people denied health care, schools eliminated…and so on and so on.
It’s laughably easy to think of more dystopian societies than ones that issue proof of vaccination at the height of a lethal pandemic.
These people are such whining snowflakes. Governor Newsome is a TYRANT worthy of Hitler we are being told. We pay too many taxes and it is all Newsome’s fault! Wearing a mask is a horrible infringement on my leb-urrr-teeeee. Kill me now. I am ashamed to be an American. Or, maybe given that other countries have similar issues, to be human being.
Agreed, but there are good reasons to be cautious. There are problems with having a national or international ID scheme then attaching information to those IDs that could be used to discriminate.
The problem, as always, is that it’s on a ratchet and as soon as a government gets a taste (and legislation) for this kind of thing, there’ll be no stopping it attaching more and more bits of data to the ID that everyone now needs to conduct any sort of business. That’s when we do move very quickly toward a dystopia.
So yes in principle to our being able to prove anonymously that we’ve had a recent negative COVID test and yes to discretionary powers of discrimination by service providers for a set period (although not without concerns of scope and time creep). But no to attaching data like this to national ID schemes or to making a national ID a de facto mandatory thing to have and to carry.
We can keep ourselves safe without giving up too much, but we really need to keep an eye on how it is being done.
latsot, I can see your concerns, and I agree with them…but…this is a serious issue for so many people, there needs to be some way to verify you are vaccinated, or cannot be vaccinated, before you are allowed to partake of certain activities. When you get on an airplane, you will not be socially distanced. If you are traveling by yourself, you will be sitting by a stranger. So if someone who is, say, immune suppressed needs to fly somewhere, they need to be certain they are going to be safe.
I don’t know that it needs to be on the passport or ID, but there needs to be some means of confirming that you either (1) are vaccinated; or (2) have some legitimate medical reason, such as immune suppressive disorder, that you cannot be vaccinated. We show so many other forms of documentation for so many activities, I fail to see that it is going to be invasive to be asked to show a vaccine card, or to have “vaccinated” stamped on your passport. Yes, the slippery slope and all of that, but there needs to be an answer.
And kids already have to prove they’re immunized to go to school…or to have an exception. The wide range of possible exceptions in schools is leading to serious problems with outbreaks of measles, mumps, and whooping cough, so the exceptions need to be only for a valid, verified medical reason, not some vague “my freedoms”. You have freedoms, yes, but you also have responsibilities.
I do think giving up liberty for safety often leads to bad consequences, especially since the safety we are embracing is usually more an illusion of safety than it is real. But I already submit to body scans, luggage searches, taking off my shoes, emptying my pockets, and once I had to undergo a pat down because my metallic shoulders gave them a panic of some sort. We put our shampoo in little bottles, we don’t carry dangerous items on the plane (though they do allow nail clippers now). I have to show my driver’s license to get on a plane; my passport if I’m going out of the country. We have already curtailed a lot of our freedoms, and some of those curtailments have brought tangible benefits, I’m sure. Others are not so certain. Vaccination in a pandemic seems little enough to ask, and flashing a vaccination card that cannot be faked would, to me, be a better way to do it than stamping it on the passport, but I think every government has a real interest in making sure unvaccinated people don’t carry infections all over the world, and don’t risk the lives of everyone else on the plane/train with them.
Perhaps he’s taking a page from the playbook of those who will lovingly don pounds of camouflage clothing, body armour, bandoliers, and assault rifles in glorious display of their power and manliness, yet won’t wear a little piece of cloth over their face because it somehow makes them weak, craven and cowardly.
Yes, exactly.
iknklast:
I don’t disagree at all, evidently I didn’t make that clear.
There are plenty of ways – some very sophisticated – to have some means to prove a fact such as “I have been recently tested/vaccinated” anonymously. And in the case of COVID, I wouldn’t necessarily be against a scheme that tied this data to an official ID, providing appropriate safeguards were put in place.
I’m just saying it needs to be done very, very carefully and transparently. Sweeping new laws must not be rushed in because of the COVID threat. We need to keep a very firm eye on our rights as we are doing it.
Because we’re seeing in other areas how easy it is to fritter away our rights without realising it…
here you need flu vaccination for certain jobs.
When you get vaccinated you get a card from your doctor. The only information on it is your name and the doctor’s name.
I do not understand the paranoia
takshak,
People keep calling me paranoid, there must be a conspiracy….
The UK government for one is proposing measures that are much more invasive than that. Besides, an easily-forged card seems unlikely to cut it, especially if we’re going to use it to get into busy pubs and restaurants, as has been suggested.
As I’ve said about nine times there are ways to prove you’ve been vaccinated that are not dangerous. The flu vaccine model you mention is an example. There are much better ones. I’m just saying we need to make sure our governments don’t get carried away and pass sweeping new laws that cost us dearly later on.
I suspect that, at least within the United States, it’s too late to implement a vaccine passport system. You would have needed to have one up and running by now for it to do any good.
States are already “re-opening” and repealing mask mandates, etc. We’re about two months away from having everyone vaccinated who’s willing to be, at which point pretty much every state is going to be more or less done with restrictions. There just won’t be the political will to impose such requirements even in blue states. And private businesses are unlikely to want to bear the costs and hassle of imposing them on their customers. Not to mention that many states will pass laws banning any such rules by private establishments.
Possibly there will be an exception for schools, though the relatively low rates of serious cases among schoolchildren will make that a tough sell. I realize that will suck for, say, an immunocompromised teacher who can’t get the vaccine, and I’m not saying this is the right outcome, just a statement about what is likely.
(I can certainly imagine needing proof of vaccination to be admitted to other countries, and other nations may have restrictions internally because of differences in political culture as well as the vaccine roll-out problems.)
Screechy,
Given the UK government’s abysmal performance in rolling out its track and trace system, I’m not overly concerned that we’ll end up with an invasive COVID passport system. But I am worried that they’ll pass laws that enable such systems to be built by governments without much limit or oversight.
latsot, having visited the UK many times, I understand and agree with your fears. I still recall being absolutely shocked the first time I realized that cameras were tracking absolutely everything and everyone in any even lightly populated area. I wondered to myself: how did the people allow this? And here we are in the USA, rapidly approaching the same level of surveillance.
FWIW, the laws-on-a-ratchet notion is why so many 2nd Amendment people in the USA fight so strenuously against a national gun registry. It’s interesting to me that some of the same people whom I have seen arguing in favor of such a registry in the past are now firmly against any kind of national vaccine registry/passport. Granted, the two cases are different in their proximate details, but at a higher level they are both ways to track a person and their activities. I would be interested to know if any anti-vaccine-passport persons have changed their mind vis a vis 2nd Amendment laws, in light of recent events.
That card sounds like a nice, easy, safe way to do the job.
Having been annoyed/creeped out by having “customized” online ads show up for me after performing some internet search (which indicates that somebody or some algorithm has noted and tracked that search), I can see the potential for abuse. Asking the question “What’s the worst that could happen?” might give one pause before wanting too much of your information and activity all joined up and accessible in one spot. Look at the voter supression laws being enacted in many US states. These are designed to target non-white, Democratic voters, using fairly blunt, demographic instruments. If the sort of Big Data system that latsot is opposing were to be put into place, one that establishes an “official” ID to which more and more connections and information is added, the unscrupulous use of such systems could indeed become nightmarishly Orwellian. What happens when someone who doesn’t like you and or your beliefs gets hold of your information? Seeing what gender critical women put up with against gender-captured institutions can give you a bit of a taste of what’s possible. Much of this has been out in the open, on social media, but it could be happening quietly behind the scenes, too, undiscovered until the subject comes across some obstacle that shouldn’t be there.
Given latsot’s cautions about ratcheting, scope creep and time creep, I think such concern is warranted. It’s probably easier to prevent the creation of such a powerful, obtrusive database than it is to try to dismantle one after the fact.
James,
The CCTV situation isn’t quite as bad as it seems. There is no central authority monitoring them and many are privately owned and operated. Privacy geek though I am, the cameras don’t actually worry me too much. It’s when cameras get hooked up with facial recognition technology that we have a real problem. Then we run the risk of going from using footage to assemble a picture of what happened after a crime to automatically constructing plausible-seeming crimes based on who is present in a given area. Or triggering an alarm when a certain face shows up. Or automatically building databases of people’s movements and association.
There are, of course, moves in the UK to roll out facial recognition on a widespread basis. This is, generally speaking, strongly opposed by the public. The problem is that the police keep doing it by stealth. For example, some police forces have been operating facial recognition cameras in public under the guise of a ‘trial’ (which has been going on for about six years now.) Technically, these ‘trials’ have been carried out with consent, in that there have usually been notices to inform the public that the cameras are in operation. However, whenever people have covered their faces when entering the area or avoided the area altogether having seen the signs, the police have hauled them off for questioning. They’ve also been used at festivals without any sort of consent or notification.
So my point is that our government, and especially our police, are very keen indeed to roll out horrifying surveillance laws and technology by stealth and under the guise of protection from threats real and imagined. We really do have to be careful and keep an eye on what they’re doing with COVID passports.
James,
Good point. People tend to view such measures in terms of the immediate, proximate, personal impact to them, of course. I’d argue, though, that a gun registry and a vaccine registry are quite different in practice. For one thing, the latter could be used to control access to services and locations, to divvy up blame if there’s a COVID outbreak and so on. But I think you’re right and people generally aren’t thinking about these things when they decide whether they’re for or against a particular measure.
Given the way that UK police have been willing to dedicate so many (any) resources to monitoring alleged “non-crime hate incidents” by people questioning gender ideology, literally policing pronouns, that’s a very real concern. I sure as hell wouldn’t want a Stonewall Diversity Champion armed with that sort of surveillance and intelligence-gathering ability looking over my shoulder and tracking my movements.
Exactly.
And with way too many people cheering it on. I remember a friend of mine in college who visited Israel; he was saying if you even stopped to talk to a child on the street, an armed soldier would jump out at you and make sure you went away. I was horrified; he said he wished we had the same thing here. This was, mind you, a very liberal individual in almost every way. He just thought it would make our kids safer. Maybe…maybe not…(especially since a lot of the violence against children happens in their own home)…but at what cost?
What really creeps me out is how they can do that even on a computer where you never did that search. For instance, I listen to Randy Rainbow on my home computer. When I went to YouTube to show something to my students in class, YouTube was recommending Randy Rainbow, which I have never listened to on my work computer. They know way too much about me, and I’m not even on social media.
iknklast,
There are things you can do to protect yourself from being tracked online. I won’t give a masterclass here, there are plenty of resources on the web. But I can point you in the right direction if you’re (rightly) concerned.
There are some simple things you can do, such as use a privacy-based search such as DuckDuckGo instead of Google, use anti-tracking browser add ons such as Privacy Badger from https://www.eff.org/ (lots of good resources there)…
And there are increasingly extreme lengths you can go to if you are so inclined.
Assuming you have an account on YouTube, it’s not terribly surprising (at least to me) that the account remembers what you’ve done, regardless of where, and it’s actually annoying to me if I were searching (while logged in) on one device and another device later is oblivious. That’s what accounts are for, right?
And Google remembers searches across devices, assuming again that you are logged in. For me that’s usually helpful, but sometimes it’s creepy, too.
It’s particularly creepy when it’s not the same account, when it’s Facebook reacting to information that comes from Google, for instance.
Sackbut, I do not have an account on YouTube. I am signed in on Google, and probably need to remain with Google since we use Google Docs at work often enough to make it worthwhile. But I may look into some of the things latsot mentioned.
YouTube is owned by Google. I suspect being signed in on Google means you are equivalently signed in on YouTube. I know there has been some merging of the account system.
This seems to very much be the case… everything Google knows all Google services (and Facebook, etc) seem to know.
It’s all rather complicated, I’m afraid. Yes, if you’re logged in, your activity is going to be tracked across multiple devices (which you might want, as Sackbut says, although it comes with a privacy cost). Similarly, if you use one account – say, your Google account – to log into other services (say, WordPress) for convenience, then information is going to be shared between those services. I’d avoid that, if I were you.
But you don’t need to be logged in to be tracked. Most sites have 3rd party cookies which can track your browsing habits across multiple sites. The companies that plant those cookies can share this data and aggregate it, to find out more about you. Even if you think they know an enormous amount about you, I guarantee they know an enormous amount more than you think.
This tracking ought to at least be limited to the browser you’re using on the machine you’re using it on… but in fact there are cunning ways for companies to identify you across multiple machines. For example, social networking sites, sites like Amazon etc can leak identifiable data that can be picked up by tracking cookies in a third site so that a company might be able to work out who you are even if you’re not logged in to that site. Facebook is especially good at tracking your movements and behaviour even if you’re not logged in (and even if you’ve never had an account).
There are other tricks, such as examining the fingerprint of your browser (what plugins you use, resolution, time zone, fonts, privacy settings etc) which can be used with surprising accuracy to track you across multiple machines.
There are things you can do about this and it’s up to you to decide what measures to take depending on how private you want to be. This is far too big a topic to go into here; you don’t know what you want until you know what the options are and you don’t know what the options are until you know what you want. But the basics are: don’t log into anything unless you really want to and don’t stay logged in longer than you need to. Don’t connect accounts (eg use Google to log into WordPress or give access to access to other services from apps) unless you have a good reason to and understand the implications. Use Privacy Badger from the aforementioned EFF site. This blocks 3rd party and tracking cookies. Use the Tor browser, which gives you some measure of privacy and use DuckDuckGo for searches. Use a VPN. Disable tracking on your devices as well as your browsers (including laptops and desktops). Disable location tracking everywhere.
This will put a dent in the amount you’re tracked and make it more difficult for companies to connect you across devices. If you need more privacy than that, I can help but the meter starts running ;)
I don’t see the passports as a problem, particularly if you need one to work abroad. I have had a commercial driver’s license for 35 or so years, and it requires a medical certification every other year to be valid for commercial use. I am considering getting a vaccine verified passport whether I really need it or not. I really don’t see anything wrong with having credentials. People who don’t need or want such things are certainly not being forced to travel or work in fields that require travel abroad, don’t get one then. Easy peasy.
Bloody hell, what snowflakes. Worried about a “vaccination passport” when you already have the all-knowing, all-seeing, Social Security Number.
A similar thing’ the “Australia Card” was proposed here by a leftish government in the 1980s. Never got off the ground.
I still have my New Zealand driver’s licence, and unlike the other ones I have seen, it has NO address. The Police can look up my address with their computers and no one else needs to know it.
Dystopia, thy name is SSN.
Social Security numbers are not supposed to be used for general identification purposes. It’s only allowed in its guise as a taxpayer ID for employment and financial records. It is actually illegal to require it otherwise. Of course a lot of businesses don’t care, and they routinely demand your SSN even when prohibited. I didn’t see this sort of thing in Massachusetts, but it is very common in Alabama for a doctor’s office form to have a space for SSN, and I’ve been given grief for refusing to provide it.