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"Imagine a day in the future when everyone, from the moment they step outside their home, has to live with the knowledge that their every movement is being recorded by powerful cameras circling in the skies above. Not just where they work, shop, eat and drink, and whose homes they visit, but details about their political, religious, sexual, and medical lives — all captured and stored in databases without a warrant and available to law enforcement upon request.
That day is here."
On Tuesday, David told Perth's Magistrates Court that he first broke the country's lockdown laws to get food and then violated the rules once again, just a few hours later, to visit his girlfriend, whom he said he missed.Although David managed to get by hotel staff members, he was caught escaping via the fire exit on video surveillance.
A German app developer has warned that the Covid-19 pandemic gives Silicon Valley tech giants perfect cover to suck up personal data. However, while the government may intervene, the tech firms aren't known for listening.
Apple and Google unveiled an app last week that uses bluetooth connections to trace the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. Put simply, the app tracks whether a smartphone user has come in contact with another, infected, user. Similar apps rolled out in South Korea and Singapore have been credited with arresting the spread of the deadly pathogen.
In Europe, the rollout of such apps has been met with privacy concerns. "We do not think it is the best solution that Google and Apple own the server on which all the contacts plus the medical status of citizens around the world are uploaded," Julian Teicke, a leader of Germany's Healthy Together startup initiative, told Reuters on Tuesday.
"What we need is an independent party that allows governments some kind of control over what happens with this medical and contact data," he added.
The data collected will not be stored on a physical server in a physical location, but in cloud storage, where the firms insist it will be scrubbed of all personal signifiers and deleted after 14 days. By contrast, a German led platform — The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) platform — would store data in a centralized location, and would comply with Europe's GDPR data protection laws. Several European countries, including France, Germany and Ireland, are developing apps on the PEPP-PT platform.
However, almost every single smartphone in Europe uses Google's Android or Apple's iOS operating systems, and the two companies have said that the contact-tracing functionality will eventually be built into these operating systems by default.
Apple and Google have promised that this tracking technology will be remotely deactivated once the pandemic subsides, and until then will function on a strictly "opt-in" basis. Europe's GDPR law holds them to this.
But Silicon Valley has a spotty track record when it comes to privacy. Apple presents itself as a responsible handler of user data and has famously refused to allow the FBI to access the phones of terror suspects. Yet, behind the scenes, the company reportedly dropped plans to let users encrypt backups of their phone data after it was pressured by FBI agents. Given that multiple governments have criminalized the breaking of quarantine measures, it remains possible that Apple's contact-tracing data could be used to identify lawbreakers.
Google, on the other hand, is a data-hungry 'Big Brother,' with capabilities beyond Orwell's wildest dreams. Everything you've ever searched for on any of your devices is recorded and stored by Google — every web page visited, every photograph and message sent through apps, and every file stored or document edited on Google Drive, and every journey tracked by Google Maps.
Google says it's not associating the data with you, as a person — instead, it's linked to your "advertising ID," and never shared unless you want it to be. Or unless a government agency requests that Google turn it over. This happened 165,000 times in the first half of last year, with Google granting three quarters of these requests.
Crucially, the firm was recently revealed to have gathered detailed medical records — including names, hospital records, diagnoses and lab results — on millions of Americans without their consent. Though Google insists the operation was legal, it nevertheless tried to keep it under wraps for over a year.
If data collection in the age of Covid-19 is to be an inevitability, lawmakers and citizens must now decide who they trust to handle that data: the old Big Brother of government or the new data kingpins of Silicon Valley. If the latter is chosen, then privacy advocates would do well to look at these firms' histories, particularly with regard to sensitive medical data.
In the West, we have seen politicians tearing themselves apart to recover votes; advocate herd immunity, thus abandoning their citizens alone in the face of the viral massacre.
Beate Bahner, in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg, has a 25-year career and has won three cases before the Federal Constitutional Court (German Supreme Court) in the domain of unlawful infringements of the right to practise one's profession. She has written five books on medical law, most recently an analysis of the 2016 federal act to tackle corruption in the healthcare system.
On Friday 3 April 2020, Ms Bahner issued a press release decrying the German government's Coronavirus measures as "flagrantly unconstitutional, infringing to an unprecedented extent many of the fundamental rights of German citizens". The statement argued that the small minority of the public that was at risk of serious harm in the event of contracting Covid-19 could be far more suitably protected by means of targeted measures based on the principle of adult responsibility for safeguarding one's own health.
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Violent committal to psychiatric clinic
On Easter Monday, a recording was uploaded of a calm 12½-minute voicemail left by Ms Bahner for her sister, describing a massively brutal swoop on her home on Easter Sunday evening (12 April). The voice in the recording matches a previous video recording of Ms Bahner (ironically, one in which she describes nursing liability law). In the voicemail, Ms Bahner recounts:She goes on to describe in the voicemail her unfamiliarity with the psychiatric facility to which she was taken, even though she is a local lawyer who apparently had to visit clients in that clinic in the past:I went into the garage and found a car following me suspiciously. After standing in front of my car for ten minutes, I sensed something was not right and ran back out of the garage. Stupidly, I didn't run into the house, because my secretary had gone to get her car on Voss-strasse and she just didn't show up again ... I asked a passing car to call the police for me. They simply kept refusing to [respond] for five minutes, and then I realised it had been a huge mistake to call the police, because at the moment I'm Number One Enemy of the State.
When the police did arrive, I told them I felt threatened. They brought the handcuffs out and pushed me to the ground with massive force. They kept me sitting in their car for ten minutes with my hands cuffed behind my back, then they drove me around the corner to the psychiatric clinic. There were four police officers there, three nurses, and a doctor, though she only arrived ten minutes later.
I asked to be allowed to sit down and was shown to a bench. Then I asked to have the handcuffs taken off, since it was actually I who had requested police protection. But instead, I was thrown to the floor again, having my head hurled onto the stone floor from a metre (3 ft) height, which nobody reacted to. Then they asked me whether I wanted a face mask, which of course I declined.
Because I refused to move, they physically carried me to the doctor, who asked me "why I felt threatened", even though they all know perfectly well who I am. I was told I would not be given a lawyer.After a further ten minutes of description of how Ms Bahner was "upgraded" from the floor of an isolation cell to a proper furnished room with good nurses, she ends the voicemail to her sister with the observation:Then I was forced to spend the night lying on the floor in some high-security Guantanamo psychiatric clinic, which I didn't recognise; it's been renovated. There was no toilet, no sink, though they did allow me water, and there was a bell I could ring, though they ignored it after the third time I pressed it.Ms Bahner's presence at the Klinik für Allgemeine Psychiatrie on Voss-strasse in Heidelberg, a university clinic, was confirmed on Tuesday 14 April in a telephone call by journalist Hagen Grell. The clinic told him that it had put out a public statement on the case and refused to allow him to speak to Ms Bahner, but suggested that if he were able to obtain her mobile telephone number, he would be able to call her directly.I have been held here for 20 hours now. If people don't finally wake up, this is going to turn into the worst régime of terror ever ... We are being tyrannised by evil, evil, evil forces. Last night, I was petrified of being killed, of being forceably injected. I am fearful of being disappeared ... Because I had been without a mobile phone at the time I was arrested, I had no way of contacting anyone ... I have a summons for Wednesday [15 April] because I allegedly breached Article 111 of the Penal Code, "Incitement to Criminal Acts". I called upon people to demonstrate! Freedom of speech was the most fundamental constitutional right in Germany, and in the space of three months it has become a criminal act.
The detention has also been reported by local Heidelberg media, regional media and a national news source. Ms Bahner's interview for "incitement to commit criminal acts" is reportedly scheduled for 1 pm on Wednesday 15 April at the K6 Heidelberg Criminal Police Department on Römerstrasse.
On Tuesday 14 April, Attorney W. Schmitz wrote to the German Federal Bar Association that it should take up Ms Bahner's case, if only because the Psychiatric Treatment Act did not in his understanding justify the committal of a person to an institution on the "alleged perception of a police officer" that she appeared confused. He added:Confinement of whistleblowers in psychiatric institutions, an old Soviet technique, has previously been reported by UK Column from Lancashire (in our most viewed ever video, an interview with social worker Carol Woods, who we understand has recently been released but remains at threat from persecutors); from North Yorkshire (in the Hofschröer case, extending to Germany and Austria); from Nottinghamshire (the case of Melanie Shaw, who is now being well looked after in another institution); and from Cornwall (the case of Emma, a mother who had reported apparent sexual grooming going on at her child's primary school).I should not have to add that Ms Bahner's claims of very grave abuse have very untoward connotations of the darkest chapters of German history. The mere fact that she claimed to have been so badly abused was what prompted me to write to you.
Ms Bahner is in the company of over 50 well-known experts in criticising the nationwide lockdown; I would be glad to furnish you with a list of their names.
If it really is the case that lawyers critical of government measures can now be intimidated using the state legal apparatus or psychiatry, and can be professionally and socially destroyed, then it is five minutes to midnight in this country.
UPDATE: A statement on Ms Bahner's website of Wednesday 15 April indicates that she was released from psychiatric committal the previous evening. In the early afternoon of 15 April, dozens of protestors rallied in front of the Heidelberg Criminal Police building where Ms Bahner had just been interviewed for alleged incitement to commit criminal offences. Ms Bahner told the assembled crowd that she had been given a date, apparently for a further interview.
Ms Bahner's statement ends:A statement of 14 April by the Heidelberg Public Prosecutor, the body's second press statement on Ms Bahner, announces that her prosecution by criminal police and the State Security Department is continuing and insists that the criminal proceedings against her have nothing to with "either the psychiatric committal of the accused or any other use of force by law enforcement".Beate Bahner requires no legal representation, since practically the whole legal profession and the whole judicial system has utterly failed in the past two weeks, thereby contributing to the abolition of the rule of law and the lightning-quick setting-up of the most monstrous and appalling régime of injustice that the world has ever seen.
"It's very simple to me. President Trump's handling of the economy, his support for historically black colleges and his criminal justice initiatives drew me to endorse his campaign. This is not about switching parties. There are a lot of African Americans who clearly see and appreciate he's doing something that's never been done before. When you look at the unemployment rates among black Americans before the pandemic, they were at historic lows. That's just a fact."
Comment: And in other recent surveillance state developments: