Canada and the US violated privacy and transparency to form a biometric security state soon to make digital ID’s, claims a bioethics director at an American think tank..Dr. Aaron Khariety, a psychiatrist and director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, shared his thoughts on Episode 13 of The Illusion of Consensus. The podcast is hosted by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Rav Arora..Khariety said, “transparency…has been a guiding principle for me during the pandemic, including my critique of many of the public policies.”.The University of California tapped him to explain why ventilators would be used on a triage policy, but imposed a vaccine mandate with a different approach..“Our committee was never consulted and there was never any meaningful public discussion or debate,” the doctor said..“And I knew as soon as the policy was proposed that this was going to be the most ethically controversial policy of all the ones that we had reviewed. These vaccine mandates violated the principle of informed consent.”.Khariety believes momentum towards a biomedical security state began after 9/11 when the US foreign policy and security establishment became increasingly concerned about biological weapons..Next, the pandemic brought the security state to birth through "melding together of…an increasingly militarized public health apparatus… [and] the use of digital technologies of surveillance and control to monitor and in some cases enforce compliance with public health directives.” .All of this was “backed up by the police powers of the state and severe punishments in some cases for dissidents,” Khariety explained. .The Centres for Disease Control bought bulk cell phone data “from a very shady company” to monitor how many people were gathered at churches and schools and other public places during lockdowns..“They admitted that they were going to use that data in the future for other public health applications and while linking that to a philosophy that we're all just biohazards,” he said..“This was supposedly anonymized data, deidentified data; but there were some researchers at Princeton that showed with only four of the data points on any one of these devices, they could easily identify who it belonged to.”.The Trudeau government was equally duplicitous, Kheriaty told the podcast’s 16,000 subscribers..“Canada did the same thing even though Trudeau had publicly promised Canadians that they wouldn't be monitoring cell phone data during the pandemic in this way,” he said..Kheriaty laid out his ideas in a $35 hardcover book released last November entitled, “The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State.” .“The use of digital technologies for surveillance has only increased since the pandemic and I talk [in my book] about what the next steps in that process are going to be in terms of tying digital IDs to biometric data,” he said..“COVID accelerated the advance and the adoption and the kind of passive acceptance of new levels of surveillance and control that [was impossible] under ordinary circumstances.”
