Bio-Surveillance: Singapore Issuing Bluetooth Tracking Tags for Citizens

More often than not, you will see one small island state leading the way on all things related to futurism and technocracy. As a self-described ‘smart nation,’ Singapore proudly takes the lead on any new developments in surveillance technology, like facial recognition, and it’s normally sold as something which will ‘improve lives, economic opportunity and build communities.’ So it’s a natural fit to play the role of beta testing ground for the new global bio-surveillance regime now being forced through under the guise of the current internationalized ‘pandemic.’

Thus far, we’ve seen a breathtaking leap forward in terms of tracking and social engineering applications related to COVID-19, including new mobile apps which assign green/yellow/red traffic light-style quarantine status levels to people, and governments using mobile phone signal triangulation and geofencing in order to track citizens and enforce isolation quarantines. There’s also disturbing Big Brother apps like FluPhone. We’ve also seen government sucking up data and then using mobile alerts to inform persons of anyone who has tested positive within 100 meters of their location.

“It kind of looks like the Apple AirPods case.”

Singapore is rolling out Bluetooth #Covid19 contact-tracing tokens to its residents. @mkcheok went and got hers. More @business: https://t.co/fJbDqiyb5j pic.twitter.com/U9Az1hUCXP

— Bloomberg QuickTake (@QuickTake) September 22, 2020

The new personal track and trace tag is  supposed to complement the government’s existing mobile phone app with a goal of reaching 100% of the population.

The initial models are fairly plain, but the government say they plan to launch a trendier version with new colours to try and make this surveillance device more fashionable.

Since day one, COVID policies in Singapore were among the most obsessive in the world, with state officials seemingly believing they could somehow achieve near “Zero COVID” by constantly tweaking their lockdown strategies, and re-calibrating “exit strategies.” Six months on, there seems to be no sign of pulling back, as the “New Normal” culture has become a new state religion in Singapore.

Lipservice to Privacy Concerns

In this age of global media, authoritarian governments and technocrats are getting hip to need to be portraying new authoritarian applications as having a ‘democratic’ feel, and something which is only for the collective good, hence the program’s name, “Trace Together.” Any concerns over about data protection are usually allayed with platitudes from authorities claiming that the new surveillance technology is there to ‘help vulnerable groups to feel safer.’

Still, in many countries aggressive government COVID contact-tracing programs have triggered public concerns about privacy and surveillance.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg News, Janil Puthucheary, Minister-in-Charge of GovTech Singapore, the new ‘token’ won’t track users’ location and the data collected on each device will be deleted after 25 days, and the adoption will also be voluntary.

However, the government gave a totally different answer to the BBC, which reported that Bluetooth ‘token’ device “helps elderly people keep a precise record of their whereabouts.”

So which is it? It should be pretty clear by now that when governments make claims giving lipservice to fundamental issues like privacy and civil liberties – they are simply telling the press and people what is politically expedient for that moment in time. In general, technocrats pay believe that concepts like personal privacy and rights are relative to the juggernaut of technology, and are really outdated relics of the past. Technocracy’s ideology strongly believes brave new systems are needed to ‘face the challenges of the future.’

Governments have now enabled an unprecedented global grid of social tracking, but where does it end? People should not be so naive to think that it will not be relatively easy for the state to convert these instruments of bio-surveillance into tools social control and exclusion. We’re seeing this unfold already in this COVID crisis.

Unless people wake up to this fact and begin to push back, then governments and corporations will simply take their silence as implied consent to the new technocracy police state.

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