Censorship Industrial Complex
Biometric and Digital ID in Crisis Zones: Is the Red Cross Paving the Way for a Privacy Nightmare?
From Reclaim The Net
The Red Cross (ICRC) is the latest long-established and operating international organization of considerable repute, that has found itself enlisted to, essentially, help the biometrics data-reliant ID happen.
Specifically, the Switzerland-based ICRC seems to have gotten involved in a scheme developed to such an end by Germany’s CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and also Switzerland-based Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL).
The scheme is called the Janus system.
While formally and generally working in any region affected by natural or human-created disasters – helping refugees, casualties, the issue of missing or displaced persons – the ICRC is mandated first and foremost by the 1949 Geneva Convention.
But the times have in the meantime clearly changed quite considerably – and now there’s the initiative to “hoover up” ICRC’s many decades of experience, and repute, into a “new reality.”
Such as creating new tools “aimed at verifying the identities of humanitarian aid recipients.”
And once again, the focus is on developing nations. This time – not entirely unlike the stated rationale behind recent UK’s recent mass surveillance effort under the guise of fighting tax money fraud – the focus is supposedly to make sure that those caught up in humanitarian crises areas do not submit “multiple registrations.”
It’s either to make sure humanitarian aid gets to as many people as possible – or, a handy opportunity to present this problem as one without a solution, other than drastic things like biometric data getting introduced into the mix.
There has now been a disturbingly high number of instances of Western-based and/or majority-funded organizations, formal (like the UN), or informal but powerful ones, “testing abroad” the tech that they know would face serious and strong opposition at home.
And that’s in countries and societies where the dangers to privacy and security are either not well-advocated or are simply voided by the everyday bare necessity to survive.
Biometric data harvesting, retention, usage, and (ab)use fall in this category, and as much as civil rights organizations in developed countries are to be praised for the work they do or attempt to do at home, it should be said that the “backdoor experiments” taking place in poorer countries not getting enough spotlight is something these groups definitely need to work on.
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PayPal’s internal documents reveal a politically charged decision-making process behind Covid-era account closures.
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It seemed pretty obvious as it was happening – but now there appears to be proof that PayPal was punishing users for their Covid-era speech that didn’t align with official narratives.
One of the critics of pandemic mandates that got “debanked” is UsForThem founder Molly Kingsley, who has been told by PayPal that her account got frozen because it was used to receive donations, and that was found to be outside the payment giant’s “acceptable use” rules. The parent campaign group and Kingsley were vocal critics of obligatory Covid vaccination of children, forcing them to wear face masks, as well as school closures. And now PayPal has spelled it out. The Telegraph reported the account was terminated because of “content published by UsForThem relating to mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations and school closures.” PayPal had to reinstate the account less than a month after it was shut down in September 2022 because UK’s financial regulator FCA intervened. This was not the only account targeted, that belonged to groups and individuals opposed to Covid restrictions, but when they got shut down, PayPal chose not to officially explain why. Among those affected was Toby Young, a free speech advocate who’s Daily Skeptic blog was critical of Covid mandates, as well as lawyers gathered in the Law or Fiction group who shared similar views, and said that depriving them of access to their money on PayPal was a China-style “blatant assault on free speech.” The information PayPal has come out with now regarding UsForThem and Kingsley was revealed in (legal) pre-action phase documents, which also show that the company spent four months leading up to the September 2022 account freeze putting together “a dossier of information about Kingsley.” That dossier included quotes from her book, The Children’s Inquiry. Around the same time, the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit – known for trying to suppress speech about lockdowns that was skeptical of the official line – was carrying out surveillance of Kingsley’s social media activity. PayPal is now refusing to comment on what it calls “individual customer accounts” but the company claims its approach is objective and not politics-driven. However, Kingsley believes that PayPal “appears to have admitted what we had suspected all along: that it was engaged in politically motivated debankings of those of us who criticized the government’s response to Covid, and the lockdown narrative in particular.” “For more than two years, PayPal has resisted my efforts to uncover what happened,” the campaigner added. |
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