Tag: snitching

Crowd-Sourced Suspicion Apps Are Out of Control

Technology rarely invents new societal problems. Instead, it digitizes them, supersizes them, and allows them to balloon and duplicate at the speed of light. That’s exactly the problem we’ve seen with location-based, crowd-sourced “public safety” apps like Citizen.

These apps come in a wide spectrum—some let users connect with those around them by posting pictures, items for sale, or local tips. Others, however, focus exclusively on things and people that users see as “suspicious” or potentially hazardous. These alerts run the gamut from active crimes, or the aftermath of crimes, to generally anything a person interprets as helping to keep their community safe and informed about the dangers around them.

These apps are often designed with a goal of crowd-sourced surveillance, like a digital neighborhood watch. A way of turning the aggregate eyes (and phones) of the neighborhood into an early warning system. But instead, they often exacerbate the same dangers, biases, and problems that exist within policing. After all, the likely outcome to posting a suspicious sight to the app isn’t just to warn your neighbors—it’s to summon authorities to address the issue.

And even worse than incentivizing people to share their most paranoid thoughts and racial biases on a popular platform are the experimental new features constantly being rolled out by apps like Citizen. First, it was a private security force, available to be summoned at the touch of a button. Then, it was a service to help make it (theoretically) even easier to summon the police by giving users access to a 24/7 concierge service who will call the police for you. There are scenarios in which a tool like this might be useful—but to charge people for it, and more importantly, to make people think they will eventually need a service like this—adds to the idea that companies benefit from your fear.

These apps might seem like a helpful way to inform your neighbors if the mountain lion roaming your city was spotted in your neighborhood. But in practice they have been a cesspool of racial profiling, cop-calling, gatekeeping, and fear-spreading. Apps where a so-called “suspicious” person’s picture can be blasted out to a paranoid community, because someone with a smartphone thinks they don’t belong, are not helping people to “Connect and stay safe.” Instead, they promote public safety for some, at the expense of surveillance and harassment for others.

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Universities Deputize Students As Mask Police To Snitch On Peers For Money

How much would you have to be paid to commit social suicide? What if a paycheck wasn’t the only perk, but it also entitled you to a sickening sense of self-righteousness and an air of superiority? 

This appears to be the tradeoff many college students have made this semester as universities’ “Student Health Ambassadors,” paid adult hall monitors whose job is to patrol their campuses and enforce mask policies and distancing regulations. Several different institutions have opened this position, each one slightly different but all giving students authority over their peers in the name of public health. 

One of the most egregious examples comes from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where student Covid commissars have been given the authority to “break up social gatherings” and to check students’ “clearance certificates.” Students who violate COVID policies can face suspension and expulsion. The enforcers, who are paid $15 an hour, even don vests and T-shirts emblazoned with the health ambassador logo. 

Other universities have taken similar approaches. The school that I attend, Pepperdine University, has launched a program to “train and deploy” students to “monitor” their peers for “COVID-19 policy compliance,” a gig that conveniently comes with a high visibility bright blue T-shirt. Pepperdine has also decided to use the carrot instead of just the stick, now giving out raffle tickets to those who are wearing masks. 

Similar “health ambassador” positions have opened up at various universities, including at the University of Rochester, the University of California at Davis, New York University, Penn State, and the Washington University in St. Louis, where the student workers wear yellow shirts bearing the phrase “If you can read this, you’re too close” and an elite division has been dispatched to be “cubby monitors” who monitor private study rooms.

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OSHA Might Rely On Tattletales To Force Biden’s Vaccine Coercion On Private Sector Workers

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) might rely on tattletales within companies to speed up their enforcement of President Joe Biden’s currently unenforceable directive forcing private sector businesses to mandate the COVID-19 shot for employees, Bloomberg Law reported on Wednesday.

Biden first directed OSHA to create a rule in early September, but it was this week that the regulatory agency sent its proposal to the White House for review. While the details of the rule are still under private review, OSHA told Bloomberg that “when necessary, OSHA has several methods to hold employers accountable for the safety and health of their workers.”

OSHA also told Bloomberg that a “vast majority” of businesses are already in compliance with the agency’s imminent shot standards. This aligns with accounts from companies such as Southwest Airlines, which tried to blame its COVID-19 jab requirement on Biden’s nonexistent directive. Those businesses that fail to comply with OSHA’s pending order, however, will be subject to punishment from the agency largely through reporting from workers at non-compliant companies.

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Australian NSW Police Minister: You Must Report Family and Friends Who Attend Freedom Rallies

Australia continues its bid to be the most Communist nation on earth with the latest announcement from their Draconian Police Minister.

“If you know someone who attends an illegal gathering this weekend, you must call crime stoppers.”

Australians have another Freedom Rally planned for this weekend to protest against the lockdowns and other health measures, such as vaccine passports and mandated vaccinations. All of which can be seen as violations of Australia’s Constitution.

Currently, Covid orders issued under the Biosecurity Act allow police to suspend the ordinary rights of citizens in the interest of public health.

The Following is from Rebel News:

“To anybody planning to breach public health orders and attend an illegal mass gathering this weekend, our message is clear – don’t do it. We cannot underestimate how dangerous [sic] you will be putting the NSW community into. It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that three weeks ago when we had a similar gathering that has not been a contribution to the fact that we now have an increased number of cases,” said David Elliott, Minister for Police and Emergency Services.

While Elliott tried to blame the previous Freedom Day protest for Covid case numbers, there has been no evidence to support his observation released by either the police or the NSW Health Department.

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Chinese City Offers $15,000 Reward For Snitching On Gatherings

Officials in Tai’an city, in China’s coastal Shandong Province, paid a resident $15,000 on Aug. 3. The individual reported a company group training in a hotel on July 30, according to local state media.

Authorities said organizers didn’t report the 12-day training to the local government, and its attendees came from several cities across China. After the attendees’ tests came back negative, they were ordered back to their homes.

It is the latest of a number of regions to introduce cash incentives as part of a recent campaign to battle the new outbreak. Authorities in cities, counties, districts, and even the lowest government level—neighborhood committees— from at least eight provinces announced financial rewards to members of the public for providing tip-offs about the CCP virus. The latest outbreak started in Nanjing city, with nine airport cleaners infected on July 20.

A neighborhood committee in Yangzhou city announced residents could receive a $310 reward if they reported others who had traveled from infected areas or had close contact with confirmed cases. A district office in the city offered to pay people $775 for providing information, and would double the reward if the case is confirmed, according to state news outlet ThePaper.cn.

Yangzhou, about one and a half hours drive from Nanjing, has become the latest hotspot, reporting 32 cases on Wednesday. Although this figure likely does not reflect the actual total, given that the Chinese regime is known for grossly underreporting its virus numbers, it accounted for almost half of the 73 confirmed across the country on Wednesday.

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Parler Warned FBI More Than 50 Times Before Capitol Riot, Rep. Carolyn Maloney Says

Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York revealed to the House Oversight Committee and the Reform Committee Tuesday that the conservative social media site Parler sent warnings about its users’ violence to the FBI more than 50 times leading up to the January 6 attacks on the Capitol.

Maloney, the Democratic chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, presented research into why the response was so slow to requests for aid from the Capitol Police on January 6. “The threats, I would say, were everywhere,” Maloney said. “The system was blinking red.”

Maloney questioned FBI Director Christopher A. Wray about the bureau’s lack of a response to several intelligence alerts pre-riots, particularly dozens of warnings from Parler.

The “Committee has obtained docs showing that…Parler sent the FBI evidence of planned violence in DC on January 6. Parler referred this content to the FBI for investigation over 50 times,” Maloney said. The content allegedly included “specific threats of violence being planned at the Capitol.”

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Biden Administration Asks Americans to Report ‘Potentially’ Radicalized Friends and Family

President Joe Biden’s administration announced their plans to create ways for Americans to report radicalized friends and family to the government, in an effort to fight domestic terrorism.

In a conversation with reporters, one senior administration official explained the importance of stopping politically fueled violence before it started.

“We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs,” the official said.

The official cited the Department of Homeland Security’s “If you see something say something” campaign to help stop radical Islamic terror as a domestic possibility.

“This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence,” the official said.

Biden began his presidency with a stark warning in his inauguration speech about the “rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.” On June 1, Biden described the threat from “white supremacy” as the “most lethal threat to the homeland today.”

The Biden administration said it would also work with large technology companies on “increased information sharing” to help combat radicalization.

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Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”—Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype

We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.

This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

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