Wordfence and Wordpress caching plugins

(Note: This applies to self-hosted Wordpress installations, not blogs hosted by Wordpress.com.)

Although the Wordfence security plugin claims to work with Wordpress caching plugins, such as WP Super Cache, it does not operate as completely as it would otherwise. Namely, it may not process requests for pages for which a cached version is available. The two plugins both want to handle requests before Wordpress runs. If a requested page has a cached version available (i.e., html instead of php), Wordpress and thus Wordfence are not run. So if you want Wordfence to handle every request, the cache plugin needs to be set up to run after. What follows is the example of WP Super Cache. Apache 2.4, PHP 8.0, Wordpress 6.2, Wordfence 7.9.2, WP Super Cache 1.9.4.

In Wordfence, the firewall protection is enabled and the protection level is “extended”, such that “All PHP requests will be processed by the firewall prior to running.” This entails its adding a directive to the htaccess file of the Wordpress directory to prepend Wordfence.

But WP Super Cache in Expert mode also adds directives to the htaccess file to return cached html files if available instead of running Wordpress (and its huge resource demand). Thus, if the request is for a page that has a cached copy, it bypasses the Wordfence firewall.

For Wordfence to act on every request, WP Super Cache needs to be run in simple mode. And the advanced setting of “late init” (“Display cached files after WordPress has loaded”) needs to be turned on as well.

In summary, to allow the Wordfence firewall to work when cached files are returned, any caching plugin has to operate in PHP mode rather than via Mod_Rewrite in htaccess. Furthermore, it needs to operate after Wordpress is initialized.

On the other hand, serving cached html files is not only faster, but also avoids running PHP code, obviating the vulnerability that Wordfence protects against. As for DDoS attacks, your server should be providing that protection (and serving cached html pages makes it much more able to withstand such attacks).

Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation

A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, by Jacob Siegel, Tablet, March 28, 2023 [excerpts]:

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.

Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. ...

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama [had] made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. ...

To win the information war — an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace — the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens. ...

Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government’s lead counter-disinformation agency, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), declared that its mission entailed “seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector.” To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars. ... In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role. ...

It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros–funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals [cf. “Gleichschaltung”]. Never-Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.” ... The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives. ...

What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization ... A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. ...

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. ... Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. ...

I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The Origins of Contemporary “Disinformation”

The foundations of the current information war were laid in response to a sequence of events that took place in 2014. First Russia tried to suppress the U.S.-backed Euromaidan movement in Ukraine; a few months later Russia [reclaimed] Crimea; and several months after that the Islamic State captured the city of Mosul in northern Iraq and declared it the capital of a new caliphate. In three separate conflicts, an enemy or rival power of the United States was seen to have successfully used not just military might but also social media messaging campaigns designed to confuse and demoralize its enemies — a combination known as “hybrid warfare.” These conflicts convinced U.S. and NATO security officials that the power of social media to shape public perceptions had evolved to the point where it could decide the outcome of modern wars — outcomes that might be counter to those the United States wanted. They concluded that the state had to acquire the means to take control over digital communications so that they could present reality as they wanted it to be, and prevent reality from becoming anything else. ...

II. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”

... [I]t’s easy to forget that Republican officials and the party’s donor class saw Trump as a dangerous radical who threatened their business ties with China, their access to cheap imported labor, and the lucrative business of constant war. 

The phenomenon was not unique to Trump. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist candidate in 2016, was also seen as a dangerous threat by the ruling class. But whereas the Democrats successfully sabotaged Sanders, Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, which meant that he had to be dealt with by other means.

Two days after Trump took office, a smirking Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that it was “really dumb” of the new president to get on the bad side of the security agencies that were supposed to work for him: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” ...

Immediately after the election, Hillary Clinton started blaming Facebook for her loss. ... The press repeated that message so often that it gave the political strategy the appearance of objective validity ... The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification — just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War — to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the backend of the internet’s biggest platforms.

Though there was never a public order given, the U.S. government began enforcing martial law online.

III. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?

The American doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare famously calls for “winning hearts and minds.” ... When that fails, there is another approach in the modern military arsenal to take its place: counterterrorism. Where counterinsurgency tries to win local support, counterterrorism tries to hunt down and kill designated enemies. ...

The Pentagon built the proto-internet known as ARPANET in 1969 because it needed a decentralized communications infrastructure that could survive nuclear war — but that was not the only goal. The internet, writes Yasha Levine in his history of the subject, Surveillance Valley, was also “an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft.” ...

As Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, at the start of the war on terror “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism.” ...

Those efforts culminated in January 2016 with the State Department’s announcement that it would be opening the aforementioned Global Engagement Center ... Just a few months later, President Obama put the GEC in charge of the new war against disinformation. ...

In the wake of the populist upheavals of 2016, leading figures in America’s ruling party seized upon the feedback loop of surveillance and control refined through the war on terror as a method for maintaining power inside the United States. ...

But those were just branding changes; the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged. The human art of politics, which would have required real negotiation and compromise with Trump supporters, was abandoned in favor of a specious science of top-down social engineering that aimed to produce a totally administered society.

For the American ruling class, COIN replaced politics as the proper means of dealing with the natives.

IV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon

... It is a supreme irony that the very people who a decade ago led the freedom agenda for other countries have since pushed the United States to implement one of the largest and most powerful censorship machines in existence under the guise of fighting disinformation. ... These people — politicians, first and foremost — saw (and presented) internet freedom as a positive force for humanity when it empowered them and served their interests, but as something demonic when it broke down those hierarchies of power and benefited their opponents. ...

Declaring the platforms guilty of electing Trump ... provided the club that the media and the political class used to beat the tech companies into becoming more powerful and more obedient.

V. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!

If one imagines that the American ruling class faced a problem — Donald Trump appeared to threaten their institutional survival — then the Russia investigation didn’t just provide the means to unite the various branches of that class, in and out of government, against a common foe. It also gave them the ultimate form of leverage over the most powerful non-aligned sector of society: the tech industry. The coordination necessary to carry out the Russian collusion frame-up was the vehicle, fusing (1) the political goals of the Democratic Party, (2) the institutional agenda of the intelligence and security agencies, and (3) the narrative power and moral fervor of the media with (4) the tech companies’ surveillance architecture.

The secret FISA warrant that allowed U.S. security agencies to begin spying on the Trump campaign was based on the Steele dossier, a partisan hatchet job paid for by Hillary Clinton’s team that consisted of provably false reports alleging a working relationship between Donald Trump and the Russian government. While a powerful short-term weapon against Trump, the dossier was also obvious bullshit, which suggested it might eventually become a liability. ...

[Disinformation] provided a means to attack and discredit anyone who questioned the dossier or the larger claim that Trump colluded with Russia. All the old McCarthyite tricks were new again. ...

The claim that Russia hacked the 2016 vote allowed federal agencies to implement the new public-private censorship machinery under the pretext of ensuring “election integrity.” People who expressed true and constitutionally protected opinions about the 2016 election (and later about issues like Covid‑19 and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan) were labeled un-American, racists, conspiracists, and stooges of Vladimir Putin and systematically removed from the digital public square to prevent their ideas from spreading disinformation. ...

And here’s the climax of this particular entry: On Jan. 6, 2017 — the same day that Brennan’s ICA report lent institutional backing to the false claim that Putin helped Trump — Jeh Johnson, the outgoing Obama-appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that, in response to Russian electoral interference, he had designated U.S. election systems as “critical national infrastructure.” The move placed the property of 8,000 election jurisdictions across the country under the control of the DHS. It was a coup that Johnson had been attempting to pull off since the summer of 2016 ...

VI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended

... Twitter had the chance to stop the Hamilton 68 hoax before it got out of hand, yet chose not to. Why? The answer can be seen in the emails sent by a Twitter executive named Emily Horne, who advised against calling out the scam. Twitter had a smoking gun showing that the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), the neoliberal think tank behind the Hamilton 68 initiative, was guilty of exactly the charge it made against others: peddling disinformation that inflamed domestic political divisions and undermined the legitimacy of democratic institutions. But that had to be weighed against other factors, Horne suggested, such as the need to stay on the good side of a powerful organization. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote in February 2018.

The ASD was lucky to have someone like Horne on the inside of Twitter. Then again, maybe it wasn’t luck. Horne had previously worked at the State Department, handling the “digital media and think tank outreach” portfolio. According to her LinkedIn, she “worked closely with foreign policy reporters covering [ISIS] … and executed communications plans relating to Counter-[ISIS] Coalition activities.” From there she became the director for strategic communications for Obama’s National Security Council, only leaving to join Twitter in June 2017. Sharpen the focus on that timeline, and here’s what it shows: Horne joined Twitter one month before the launch of ASD, just in time to advocate for protecting a group run by the kind of power brokers who held the keys to her professional future.

It is no coincidence that the war against disinformation began at the very moment the Global War on Terror (GWOT) finally appeared to be coming to an end. Over two decades, the GWOT fulfilled President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the rise of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence.” It evolved into a self-interested, self-justifying industry that employed thousands of people in and out of government who operated without clear oversight or strategic utility. It might have been possible for the U.S. security establishment to declare victory and move from a permanent war footing to a peacetime posture, but as one former White House national security official explained to me, that was unlikely. ... He described “huge incentives to inflate the threat” that have been internalized in the culture of the U.S. defense establishment and are “of a nature that they don’t require one to be particularly craven or intellectually dishonest.”

“This huge machinery was built around the war on terror,” the official said. “A massive infrastructure that includes the intelligence world, all the elements of DoD, including the combatant commands, CIA and FBI and all the other agencies. And then there are all the private contractors and the demand in think tanks. I mean, there are billions and billions of dollars at stake.” ... But it was not enough to sustain the previous system; to survive, it needed to continually raise the threat level. ...

Today, to keep America safe, it is no longer enough to invade the Middle East and bring its people democracy. According to the Biden White House and the army of disinformation experts, the threat is now coming from within. A network of right-wing domestic extremists, QAnon fanatics, and white nationalists is supported by a far larger population of some 70 million Trump voters whose political sympathies amount to a fifth column within the United States. But how did these people get [radicalized]? Through the internet, of course, where the tech companies, by refusing to “do more” to combat the scourge of hate speech and fake news, allowed toxic disinformation to poison users’ minds. ...

Americans are no longer presumed to have the right to choose their own leaders or to question decisions made in the name of national security. Anyone who says otherwise can be labeled a domestic extremist.

VII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”

A few weeks after Trump supporters rioted [sic] in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier wrote an article for The New York Times advocating for the United States to wage a “comprehensive counterinsurgency program” against its own citizens.

Counterinsurgency, as Grenier would know, is not a limited, surgical operation but a broad effort conducted across an entire society that inevitably involves collateral destruction. Targeting only the most violent extremists who attacked law enforcement officers at the Capitol would not be enough to defeat the insurgency. Victory would require winning the hearts and minds of the natives — in this case, the Christian dead-enders and rural populists radicalized by their grievances into embracing the Bin Laden–like cult of MAGA. ...

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots. They start with words,” Clint Watts [who headed up the Hamilton 68 initiative] proclaimed in 2017 when he testified before Congress. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations.” Watts is a career veteran of military and government service who seems to share the belief, common among his colleagues, that once the internet entered its populist stage and threatened entrenched hierarchies, it became a grave danger to civilization. ... The standard Watts and others introduced, which quickly became the elite consensus, treats tweets and memes — the primary weapons of disinformation — as acts of war. ...

VIII. The NGO Borg

In November 2018, Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy published a study titled “The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis.” The scope of the paper is comprehensive, but its authors are especially focused on the centrality of philanthropically funded nonprofit organizations and their relationship to the media. ... To save journalism, to save democracy itself, Americans should count on the foundations and philanthropists — people like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Open Society Foundations’ George Soros, and internet entrepreneur and Democratic Party fundraiser Reid Hoffman. In other words, Americans were being asked to rely on private billionaires who were pumping billions of dollars into civic organizations — through which they would influence the American political process.

There is no reason to question the motivations of the staffers at these NGOs, most of whom were no doubt perfectly sincere in the conviction that their work was restoring the “underpinning of a healthy society.” But certain observations can be made about the nature of that work. First, it placed them in a position below the billionaire philanthropists but above hundreds of millions of Americans whom they would guide and instruct as a new information clerisy by separating truth from falsehood, as wheat from chaff. Second, this mandate, and the enormous funding behind it, opened up thousands of new jobs for information regulators at a moment when traditional journalism was collapsing. Third, the first two points placed the immediate self-interest of the NGO staffers perfectly in line with the imperatives of the American ruling party and security state. In effect, a concept taken from the worlds of espionage and warfare — disinformation — was seeded into academic and nonprofit spaces, where it ballooned into a pseudoscience that was used as an instrument of partisan warfare.

Virtually overnight, the “whole of society” national mobilization to defeat disinformation that Obama initiated led to the creation and credentialing of a whole new class of experts and regulators. ...

Everywhere one looks now, there is a disinformation expert. They are found at every major media publication, in every branch of government, and in academic departments, crowding each other out on cable news programs, and of course staffing the NGOs. There is enough money coming from the counter-disinformation mobilization to both fund new organizations and convince established ones like the Anti-Defamation League to parrot the new slogans and get in on the action.

How is it that so many people could suddenly become experts in a field — “disinformation” — that not 1 in 10,000 of them could have defined in 2014? Because expertise in disinformation involves ideological orientation, not technical knowledge. ...

It is not unusual that a government agency would want to work with private corporations and civil society groups, but in this case the result was to break the independence of organizations that should have been critically investigating the government’s efforts. The institutions that claim to act as watchdogs on government power rented themselves out as vehicles for manufacturing consensus.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the fields that have been most aggressive in cheerleading the war against disinformation and calling for greater censorship — counterterrorism, journalism, epidemiology — share a public record of spectacular failure in recent years. The new information regulators failed to win over vaccine skeptics, convince MAGA diehards that the 2020 election was legitimate, or prevent the public from inquiring into the origins of the Covid‑19 pandemic, as they tried desperately to do.

But they succeeded in galvanizing a wildly lucrative whole-of-society effort, providing thousands of new careers and a renewed mandate of heaven to the institutionalists who saw populism as the end of civilization.

IX. Covid-19

By 2020, the counter-disinformation machine had grown into one of the most powerful forces in American society. Then the Covid‑19 pandemic dumped jet fuel into its engine. In addition to fighting foreign threats and deterring domestic extremists, censoring “deadly disinformation” became an urgent need. To take just one example, Google’s censorship, which applied to its subsidiary sites like YouTube, called for “removing information that is problematic” and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations” ...

President Biden publicly accused social media companies of “killing people” by not censoring enough vaccine disinformation. Using its new powers and direct channels inside the tech companies, the White House began sending lists of people it wanted banned, such as journalist Alex Berenson. Berenson was kicked off Twitter after tweeting that mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” As it turned out, that was a true statement. The health authorities at the time were either misinformed or lying about the vaccines’ ability to prevent the spread of the virus. In fact, despite claims from the health authorities and political officials, the people in charge of the vaccine knew this all along. In the record of a meeting in December 2020, Food and Drug Administration adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated, “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.”

Dystopian in principle, the response to the pandemic was also totalitarian in practice. In the United States, the DHS produced a video in 2021 encouraging “children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge U.S. government narratives on Covid‑19.” ...

Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum and capo di tutti capi of the global expert class, saw the pandemic as an opportunity to implement a “Great Reset” that could advance the cause of planetary information control: “The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise.”

X. Hunter’s Laptops: The Exception to the Rule

The laptops are real. The FBI has known this since 2019, when it first took possession of them. When the New York Post attempted to report on them, dozens of the most senior national security officials in the United States lied to the public, claiming the laptops were likely part of a Russian “disinformation” plot. Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operating as fully integrated branches of the state security infrastructure, carried out the government’s censorship orders based on that lie. The press swallowed the lie and cheered on the censorship.

The story of the laptops has been framed as many things, but the most fundamental truth about it is that it was the successful culmination of the years-long effort to create a shadow regulatory bureaucracy built specifically to prevent a repeat of Trump’s 2016 victory. ...

While the laptop is the best-known case of the ruling party’s intervention in the Trump-Biden race, its brazenness was an exception. The vast majority of the interference in the election was invisible to the public and took place through censorship mechanisms carried out under the auspices of “election integrity.” The legal framework for this had been put in place shortly after Trump took office, when the outgoing DHS chief Jeh Johnson passed an 11th-hour rule — over the vehement objections of local stakeholders — declaring election systems to be critical national infrastructure, thereby placing them under the supervision of the agency. Many observers had expected that the act would be repealed by Johnson’s successor, Trump-appointed John Kelly, but curiously it was left in place.

In 2018, Congress created a new agency inside of the DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that was tasked with defending America’s infrastructure — now including its election systems — from foreign attacks. In 2019, the DHS added another agency, the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch, which was focused on countering foreign disinformation. As if by design, the two roles merged. Russian hacking and other malign foreign-information attacks were said to threaten U.S. elections. ...

The latitude inherent in the concept of disinformation enabled the claim that preventing electoral sabotage required censoring Americans’ political views, lest an idea be shared in public that was originally planted by foreign agents.

In January 2021, CISA “transitioned its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM [misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation],” according to an August 2022 report from the DHS’s Office of Inspector General. After the pretense of fighting a foreign threat fell away, what was left was the core mission to enforce a narrative monopoly over truth. ...

Kept a secret from the public, the switch was “plotted on DHS’s own livestreams and internal documents,” according to Mike Benz. “DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that ‘domestic disinformation’ was now a greater ‘cyber threat to elections’ than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.”

Just like that, without any public announcements or black helicopters flying in formation to herald the change, America had its own Ministry of Truth.

Together they operated an industrial-scale censorship machine in which the government and NGOs sent tickets to the tech companies that flagged objectionable content they wanted scrubbed. That structure allowed the DHS to outsource its work to the Election Integrity Project (EIP), a consortium of four groups: the Stanford Internet Observatory; private anti-disinformation company Graphika (which had formerly been employed by the Defense Department against groups like ISIS in the war on terror); Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public; and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. ...

XI. The New One-Party State

... Not so long ago, talk of a “deep state” was enough to mark a person as a dangerous conspiracy theorist to be summarily flagged for monitoring and censorship. But language and attitudes evolve, and today the term has been cheekily reappropriated by supporters of the deep state. For instance, a new book, American Resistance, by neoliberal national security analyst David Rothkopf, is subtitled The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation. ...

Faced with an external threat in the form of Trumpism, the natural cohesion and self-organizing dynamics of the [ruling] class were fortified by new top-down structures of coordination that were the goal and the result of Obama’s national mobilization. ...

What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe, I argue [link], “in informational and management solutions to existential problems” and in their “own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures.” As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. If any other group were to rule, all progress and hope would be lost, and the dark forces of fascism and barbarism would at once sweep back over the earth. While technically an opposition party is still permitted to exist in the United States, the last time it attempted to govern nationally, it was subjected to a years-long coup. In effect, any challenge to the authority of the ruling party, which represents the interests of the ruling class, is depicted as an existential threat to civilization. ...

XII. The End of Censorship

The public’s glimpses into the early stages of the transformation of America from democracy to digital leviathan are the result of lawsuits and FOIAs — information that had to be pried from the security state — and one lucky fluke. If Elon Musk had not decided to purchase Twitter, many of the crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era would have remained secret, possibly forever.

But the system reflected in those disclosures may well be on its way out. ... The ultimate goal would be to recalibrate people’s experiences online through subtle manipulations of what they see in their search results and on their feed. The aim of such a scenario might be to prevent censor-worthy material from being produced in the first place.

In fact, that sounds rather similar to what Google is already doing in Germany, where the company recently unveiled a new campaign to expand its “prebunking” initiative “that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation,” according to the Associated Press. The announcement closely followed Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ appearance on a German podcast, during which he called for using artificial intelligence to combat “conspiracy theories” and “political polarization.” Meta has its own prebunking program. ...

Meanwhile, the military is developing weaponized AI technology to dominate the information space. According to USASpending.gov, an official government website, the two largest contracts related to disinformation came from the Department of Defense to fund technologies for automatically detecting and defending against large-scale disinformation attacks. The first, for $11.9 million, was awarded in June 2020 to PAR Government Systems Corporation, a defense contractor in upstate New York. The second, issued in July 2020 for $10.9 million, went to a company called SRI International.

SRI International was originally connected to Stanford University before splitting off in the 1970s, a relevant detail considering that the Stanford Internet Observatory, an institution still directly connected to the school, led 2020’s EIP, which might well have been the largest mass censorship event in world history — a capstone of sorts to the record of pre-AI censorship.

Then there is the work going on at the National Science Foundation, a government agency that funds research in universities and private institutions. The NSF has its own program called the Convergence Accelerator Track F, which is helping to incubate a dozen automated disinformation-detection technologies explicitly designed to monitor issues like “vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism.” ...

In March, the NSF’s chief information officer, Dorothy Aronson, announced that the agency was “building a set of use cases” to explore how it could employ ChatGPT, the AI language model capable of a reasonable simulation of human speech, to further automate the production and dissemination of state propaganda.

The first great battles of the information war are over. They were waged by a class of journalists, retired generals, spies, Democratic Party bosses, party apparatchiks, and counterterrorism experts against the remnant of the American people who refused to submit to their authority.

Future battles fought through AI technologies will be harder to see.

XIII. After Democracy

Less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times published an important article titled “The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.” The essay’s author, Times staff writer and Yale Law School graduate Emily Bazelon, argued that the United States was “in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation” that she compares to the “catastrophic” health effects of the novel coronavirus. She quotes from a book by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley and linguist David Beaver: “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.”

So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself — specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. This view may be jarring to people who are still attached to the American heritage of liberty and self-government, but it has become the official policy of the country’s ruling party and much of the American intelligentsia. ...

To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy’s demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists — a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.

A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the “infodemic,” we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance — surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.

[[[[ ]]]]

Babylon Bee: Democrats Vow to Arrest As Many Political Opponents As It Takes to Defeat Fascism

RT: UK to use AI to detect foreign threats. “The AI unit will also be used to target distributors of alleged ‘disinformation’.”

Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club

From the last 10 or so minutes of episode 104, August 4th, 2021, of Weird Studies:

Phil Ford: There’s a specificity to Sgt. Pepper’s, that it is something rather than something else. That is a very surprising thing to find in a piece of truly popular culture, like really really popular culture. And that is, it’s an incredibly aestheticist piece of art, like it is a piece of art that doesn’t argue so much for the total autonomy of imagination and the artwork as it just does it. It just substantiates it. And it’s all about the total freedom and autonomy of the imagination to go where it will go. ...

It is an album that asserts “all power to the imagination”. And that was maybe a more popular utterance in 1967 than it is in 2021. But listening to it and the degree of open-hearted acceptance of what is and the willingness to find beauty in anything and for that beauty to be enough. For that beauty not having to serve some kind of function, it doesn’t have to get in line and start marching, it doesn’t have to rap anything, it doesn’t have to build anybody’s brand, and it sure as shit doesn’t have to play into somebody’s political agenda. That degree of freedom that it models and that it imagines is something that is – to use a very over-used word – is subversive. In an age now that feels to me that all of the major voices in our culture are about negating exactly that freedom.

JF Martel: Yes ... You kind of hit it there, because when we talk about art as being apolitical, we don’t mean that art exists in a separate realm. It’s funny, because you just said that “all power to the imagination” first of all was used as a slogan by the ... ’68 revolutionaries and students – it’s funny how in a sense this call to the apolitical, to the imagination, has a commonness[?] free of all the machinery of history and politics. The assertion of the freedom of the imagination is itself the most subversive claim you can make. ...

It exists in itself for no reason, and that precisely is what makes it subversive. That’s precisely what makes it irreducible to anybody’s ideology. ...

Phil: I feel I should jump in here and say that when I talk about the autonomy of the imagination, or the autonomy of the aesthetic, that doesn’t mean that it is in a realm separate from politics. —

JF: Exactly, that’s my point—

Phil: What it means is that it turn into anything. It can turn into politics, or it can turn into sex, or it can turn into a blue door, it can turn into fucking anything. But it is not determined by any of the things it could turn into. ...

JF: ... I may seem like I’m contradicting myself but ... The cover of the album establishes a kind of tribe, or lineage, or party. ... It’s making a statement that flowing underneath the surface of what we call the social-political landscape, subterranean currents assert themselves retroactively in moments like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that suddenly not only is the earlier Beatles material reinvented in that album, but Aleister Crowley in a sense finds new [affordances?], channeled in a new way through the album, merely by being present on the cover of the album. Marilyn Monroe is there ... suddenly everything about her changes in light of the fact that she’s on the cover of this album, which is performing the operation we’ve been describing in this show: It’s calling forth a people ...

So the truly autonomous, let’s say, apolitical and yet deeply political work of art is always calling forth a people that doesn’t yet exist. And it’s not just calling for that people out of the future or out of the present, calling forth those of the listeners who will get it, it’s also calling out of the past, a lineage, a tribe, that by its very existence substantiates a world that does not yet exist.

Phil: Yeah, which is a political kind of thing to do, to define a people, but it’s defining a people of the imagination, and everybody can join. It’s like this album isn’t calling you – are you in the Sgt. Pepper Party? – which is a kind of party of the imagination ... It is, from a certain point of view, an enormous political act, to ask the world to join this people, but without defining it and without defining, like demands or like a 12-point program for change or whatever. It’s a political act of a very sixties kind, and there haven’t been many such acts like that since. It is an extraordinarily generous-hearted act to the extent that it doesn’t feel like politics at all ...

It’s very difficult to imagine politics as it is actually enacted in the world without the spirit of hatred, without the spirit of division. Like to define a people, you have to define it against something, and then the people that you define has to be compared favorably to the people who are outside, that you’ve othered, right? Somehow the Beatles managed to articulate a vision of the Sgt. Pepper party that doesn’t do that. ...

JF: There’s only one prerequisite.

Phil: And that is?

JF: It’s having a lonely heart.

Phil: How you figure?

JF: Well, a loneliness. You have to be able to extract yourself, transcend the collectivizing organic vicissitudes of your time. You have to access the untimely. And you can only do that alone. But what happens when you do that, when you take that lonely flight, is that you find yourself in a kind of angelic company that transcends time. Yeah.

Phil: Yeah.

Worldwide Lockdown, March–May 2020

Compiled by CJ Hopkins, Consent Factory

"As well as enforcing quarantine measures, the law also allows the authorities to force people to be vaccinated, even though there is currently no vaccination for the virus." thelocal.dk/20200313/denma…

“During the state of emergency, people will only be allowed out on to public streets for the following reasons: to buy food, basic or pharmaceutical items; to attend medical centres; to go to and from work ..." theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"Police are patrolling the streets to ensure we only leave our homes for work and health-related reasons ... we must fill and carry certificates stating our reasons. If caught out without a certificate, we will be fined and face up to three months in jail. newsweek.com/italy-life-qua…

"Spain, the worst-affected European country after Italy, announced on Saturday that citizens would be confined to their homes for 15 days unless they had to buy food or medicine" ... or, you know, "go to work." theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"We are going to take the powers to make sure that we can quarantine people if they are a risk to public health, yes, and that’s important." metro.co.uk/2020/03/15/pol…

"If you want to leave the house, you now have to print off a document to explain to police your timing, destination and motive." theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"There are also plans for soldiers to protect quarantine zones with the police, if that ever came into force." news.sky.com/story/coronavi…

"Israel has authorized the country’s internal security agency to tap into a vast and previously undisclosed trove of cellphone data to retrace the movements of people who have contracted the coronavirus and identify others who should be quarantined ..." nytimes.com/2020/03/16/wor…

“We are at war – a public health war, certainly but we are at war, against an invisible and elusive enemy,” Macron said, outlawing all journeys outside the home ... anyone flouting the new regulations would be punished, he said. theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, said 100,000 police officers would be deployed to enforce the lockdown ... Macron said that if necessary, the government would legislate by decree ..." theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

“We will intervene where necessary to make sure that people respect the confinement decree.” theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"The Ministry of Defence is to double the size of the military’s civil contingency unit to create a 20,000-strong Covid support force ... the armed forces need to be prepared for the threat of a breakdown in civil order." theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/m…

"The new force — made up of 10,000 military personnel who are regularly deployed to civilian activities, plus an extra 10,000 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic — has been placed at 'high readiness'." ft.com/content/5e4640…

“We have the ability to do martial law ... if we feel the necessity.” news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-ca…

"Police and immigration officials would be able to place people in 'appropriate isolation facilities' under plans." bbc.com/news/uk-politi…

"Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law." newsweek.com/exclusive-insi…

"Twitter will remove tweets that run the risk of causing harm by spreading dangerous misinformation about Covid-19 ... it will be applying a new broader definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources." theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"Some 100,000 police have fanned out across France to enforce the lockdown, with people allowed out of their homes only to buy groceries, go to work, exercise alone or seek medical help." metro.co.uk/2020/03/19/wom…

"He is in a specially cleaned area designated for those who should be self-isolating." Minister Quayle said, "we cannot allow our critical health services to become overwhelmed and must have the means to prosecute those who choose to act irresponsibly." bbc.com/news/world-eur…

"Dane County, Wisconsin residents now have a method to report violations of the governor's ban on gatherings of 10 or more people." wkow.com/2020/03/19/her…

"Germany’s 83 million citizens have been told they risk being confined to their homes from Monday unless they behave responsibly this weekend." theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"These [social restrictions] would need to be in place for at least most of a year. Under such as policy, at least half of the year would be spent under the stricter social distancing measures." independent.co.uk/news/health/co…

Suppression, which requires “social distancing of the entire population,” can save more lives and prevent hospitals from becoming extremely overburdened. But it needs to be maintained “until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more).” vox.com/science-and-he…

"The government has now agreed that the military can be used to help enforce the lockdown." edition.cnn.com/2020/03/20/eur…

"As of Wednesday, the camps have been locked down from 7pm to 7am. In the daytime, only one person is allowed out per family, and the police control their movements." theguardian.com/global-develop…

"The National Guard is expecting a rapid increase in unit activations over the next few weeks, leaders said at the Pentagon Thursday, filling roles like coronavirus testing and potentially law enforcement." militarytimes.com/news/your-army…

"[T]he U.S. military is preparing forces to assume a larger role in the coronavirus response, including the controversial mission of quelling 'civil disturbances' ..." newsweek.com/inside-us-mili…

“These provisions will be enforced" ... “the violation of any provision of [the] order constitutes an imminent threat and creates an immediate menace to public health.” theguardian.com/us-news/2020/m…

'When MK Yoav Kish (Likud) sought to clarify whether she meant a total lockdown or curfew, Sadetsky replied ... “A lockdown and personal monitoring of people, and a total halt to personal freedoms.”' haaretz.com/israel-news/.p…

"A final option: 'Permanent changes in our behavior that allow us to keep transmission rates low' ... that could include strict policies of testing and quarantine for anyone who comes down with COVID-19 — or even long-term bans on large gatherings." nypost.com/2020/03/21/cor…

"The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States." politico.com/news/2020/03/2…

Germany has issued a "contact ban, limiting interactions of more than 2 people ... there will be fines of up to €25,000 for those not keeping a 2 meter distance between people. The measures will be enforced by police and stay in place until April 19." dw.com/en/coronavirus…

"The Justice Department is using the COVID-19 outbreak to press for sweeping new powers that include being able to detain Americans indefinitely without a trial." reason.com/2020/03/21/jus…

"Quebec City police have arrested a woman, who has tested positive for the coronavirus, for being out in the city's Limoilou neighbourhood despite being under a quarantine order."
cbc.ca/news/canada/mo…

"Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he’s considering his most drastic move yet ... moving certain people at risk to isolation shelters.
miamiherald.com/news/coronavir…

Counter-terrorism troops have been redeployed across Italy to beef up police ... patrol cars are circulating in every major city with a voice warning citizens over a loudspeaker not to leave their residences ... “Go back into your homes,” the voice warns. thedailybeast.com/covid-19-is-co…

"Some police departments in California plan on using drones to enforce a coronavirus lockdown and to, in part, monitor the homeless population." foxnews.com/tech/southern-…

"A woman in Spain was arrested after she was caught visiting the home of a man she had met on a dating app, breaking mandatory home confinement rules put in place due to the coronavirus pandemic." newsweek.com/woman-arrested…

"Prime Minister Édouard Philippe gave a national address to give details of the new rules ... [French citizens] must have their 'justification' paper - signed, dated and with the time they have left home - to show if stopped by the police or gendarmes." theguardian.com/australia-news…

"The UK government has sent a mass text message to as many phones as possible, urging citizens to stay at home during the coronavirus lockdown: “CORONAVIRUS ALERT. New rules in force now: you must stay at home. Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.” independent.co.uk/life-style/gad…

"This is not about retribution," U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explained. “This matter is going forward — we are in a live exercise here to get this right.” globalresearch.ca/secretary-stat…

"The Government is set to publish its coronavirus bill in Parliament this week. It gives officers from the police and immigration powers to detain people in appropriate isolation centres if they are a risk to public health." theargus.co.uk/news/18318214.…

"One area of concern is that the powers detailed under the bill, as published, remain in force for two years ... among the most draconian possible powers is for police, public health and immigration officers to detain people suspected of having Covid-19." theguardian.com/society/2020/m…

"People who intentionally spread the coronavirus could face criminal charges under federal terrorism laws, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official said Tuesday. ... 'Threats or attempts to use COVID-19 as a weapon against Americans will not be tolerated.'" politico.com/news/2020/03/2…

"A police force has defended using a drone camera to shame people into not driving into a national park during the lockdown, while another force said it was introducing roadblocks to stop drivers heading to tourist hotspots." theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"Humberside Police has created an online reporting portal where people can send details of those not following social distancing rules." itv.com/news/calendar/…

"An Austin, Texas based technology company is launching 'artificially intelligent thermal cameras' that it claims will be able to detect fevers in people, and in turn send an alert that they may be carrying the coronavirus." vice.com/en_in/article/…

"As the jogger struggled with police, screaming for help, she was filmed by residents who had absolutely zero sympathy for her plight. 'What's not fair is that you go out running, you bloody idiot!', shouted the woman apparently filming the encounter." en.as.com/en/2020/03/21/…

"Gordon Brown has urged world leaders to create a temporary form of global government to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic ... involving world leaders, health experts and international organisations that would have executive powers to coordinate the response." theguardian.com/politics/2020/…

"South African police enforcing a coronavirus lockdown have fired rubber bullets towards hundreds of shoppers queueing outside a supermarket in Johannesburg ... the police used whips to get the shoppers to observe social distancing rules." theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…

"President Trump said Saturday he may announce later in the day a federally mandated quarantine on the New York metro region, placing “enforceable” travel restrictions on people planning to leave the New York tri-state area because of the coronavirus." washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/…

"Rhode Island police began stopping cars with New York plates Friday. On Saturday, the National Guard will help them conduct house-to-house searches to find people who traveled from New York and demand 14 days of self-quarantine." bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

A Police force has had a surge in calls from people reporting neighbours for "going out for a second run" and "gathering in their back gardens." ... "We are getting (dozens of) calls from people who say 'I want you to come and arrest them'. bbc.com/news/uk-englan…

"Police with batons and guns have moved in to protect supermarkets on the Italian island of Sicily after reports of looting by locals who could no longer afford food." thelocal.it/20200329/we-ha…

"The National Guard will be deployed to enforce a mile-radius coronavirus “containment area” in overwhelmed New Rochelle ... the National Guard will enforce the mandated closure of 'large gathering areas' — including schools and houses of worship." nypost.com/2020/03/10/nat…

"From a technological perspective, the coronavirus pandemic is one massive testbed for surveillance capitalism ... governments are rolling out surveillance measures, all in the effort to ensure that policies of mass behaviour modification are successful." forbes.com/sites/simoncha…

"New Zealanders have become so keen to report their neighbours for breaking coronavirus lockdown rules that police on Monday said a website dedicated to addressing the issue crashed soon after going live." thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news…

"New York City residents who break social distancing rules will be subject to fines up to $500, Mayor de Blasio said Sunday ... he also announced that NYPD and MTA workers would do checks of subway cars and force riders off cars that are too crowded." politico.com/states/new-yor…

"Anyone who leaves their house without a reasonable excuse could spend up to 6 months in prison and face an $11,000 fine under a directive [that] gives police sweeping power to enforce restrictions designed to limit the spread of coronavirus in Australia." smh.com.au/national/nsw/s…

'A coronavirus app that alerts people if they have recently been in contact with someone testing positive for the virus "could play a critical role" in limiting lockdowns ... but the academics say no-one should be forced to enroll - at least initially.' bbc.com/news/technolog…

"As coronavirus lockdowns have been expanded globally, police across the world have been given licence to control behaviour in a way that would normally be extreme even for an authoritarian state." theguardian.com/global-develop…

"It is likely that we are not heading towards a general deconfinement in one go and for everyone," Prime Minister Philippe told parliament ... the interior minister noted 359,000 fines for violating the lockdown had been issued since lockdown began." france24.com/en/20200401-fr…

'Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned he would order the country's police and military to shoot dead anyone "who creates trouble" during a month-long lockdown of the island of Luzon enforced to halt the spread of the coronavirus.' aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/d…

'French interior minister Christophe Castaner warned that "roadblocks would be set up on major highways and axes and extra police, gendarmes or soldiers dispatched to train stations and airports to verify the documents of anyone stopped out and about."' theguardian.com/world/live/202…

"Around the world, police forces are testing how far to go in punishing ordinary behavior." nytimes.com/2020/04/02/wor…

"Western governments aiming to relax restrictions on movement are turning to unprecedented surveillance to track people infected with the new coronavirus and identify those with whom they have been in contact." wsj.com/articles/u-s-a…

"If a person becomes infected, the app will automatically send a push notification to anyone they have crossed paths with in the past two weeks, to warn them of the risk of infection." thelocal.de/20200402/priva…

"Google will use its mammoth collection of mobile location data to measure whether people across the globe are following government directives ..." politico.com/states/new-yor…

"Traffic along I-95 was slowed for miles at the Florida-Georgia border Sunday after a checkpoint was put in place to screen for travelers coming from COVID-19 hot spots on the East Coast ... the Florida Highway Patrol is facilitating the checkpoint 24/7." news4jax.com/news/local/202…

"There is potentially a much larger, and more fraught, role for the armed forces in this crisis: They might need to backstop and backfill police forces ... clearly, this step would be momentous." washingtonpost.com/opinions/start…

'Police arrested 3 people in Brooklyn after they “failed to maintain social distancing” ... an informant observed a group of people “hanging out” and the defendants “refused to leave the location and disperse” despite the informant asking them to do so.' theintercept.com/2020/04/03/nyp…

"Residents who have been in contact with coronavirus patients but refuse to isolate themselves are being made to wear ankle bracelets ... another man was put under house arrest after he went out shopping despite having tested positive for the coronavirus." edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/us/…

"A man who boasted that he spent two hours walking through his local hospital to see how bad things were for himself has been jailed for three months" for "causing a public nuisance and breaking emergency movement restrictions." metro.co.uk/2020/04/03/man…

"Having the right antibodies to the virus in one’s blood — a potential marker of immunity — may soon determine who gets to work and who does not, who is locked down and who is free." nytimes.com/2020/04/04/wor…

"Snitches are emerging as enthusiastic allies ... phoning police and municipal hotlines, complaining to elected officials and shaming perceived scofflaws on social media." time.com/5814488/busine…

"In European countries under coronavirus lockdowns, a multitude of aspiring watchmen seem to feel that their moment has finally come, with untold numbers keeping an eye on their neighbors’ every move and reporting them to the authorities if they slip up." politico.eu/article/corona…

“In this early phase of isolation, people’s awareness is quite high, but the longer it goes on, their frustration at not being able to do what they want will grow. The real test will be in two or three weeks’ time. How long can we keep a lockdown going?” theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

"Tunisia has deployed a police robot to patrol the streets of the capital and enforce a lockdown ... 'PGuard' calls out to suspected violators of the lockdown: 'What are you doing? Show me your ID. You don't know there's a lockdown?'" news.yahoo.com/tunisia-roboco…

"The consequences for not following the 'Stay at Home' order for Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Douglas, and Jefferson counties [Colorado] is a Class 1 misdemeanor. It carries a penalty of up to a $5,000 fine and 18 months in jail." coloradocitizenpress.com/18-months-in-j…

"Germans risk being fined up to €500 for standing too close to each other." thelocal.de/20200403/coron…

"Individuals could be jailed for six months and/or fined $11,000, plus a $5,500-per-day fine if they keep breaking the rules." abc.net.au/news/2020-04-0…

"A man paddle boarding near the Malibu Pier was arrested Thursday after authorities said he disobeyed lifeguards and violated a statewide stay-at-home order ..." latimes.com/california/sto…

"... people are only allowed out of their homes for absolutely essential trips and everyone needs a signed, dated and timed form every time they step out." thelocal.fr/20200401/jail-…

"Could immunity passports create a kind of two-tier society, where those who have them can return to a more normal life while others remain locked down?" edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/hea…

"Married life got off to an unexpected start for a pair of newlyweds in South Africa when police showed up to the party ... all 50 wedding guests, the pastor who conducted the ceremony, and the newlyweds themselves were promptly arrested." bbc.com/news/world-afr…

"Local police in the U.S. are arresting people who fail to comply with social distancing and stay-at-home orders." forbes.com/sites/alexandr…

"There are seven legitimate reasons to leave home under France’s current lockdown restrictions. They can all be found on the government’s official permission form, which people must carry on them at all times when outside." thelocal.fr/20200406/coron…

"On April 2, 2020, the Danish Parliament passed a new law that makes it possible to shut down websites and impose fines or imprisonment on persons who publish information on Covid19 that does not follow the authorities' guidelines." newsvoice.se/2020/04/danmar…

"Authorities in Paris have banned exercise outside during the day ... the new rules are in force between 10:00 and 19:00 local time." bbc.co.uk/news/amp/world…

"Checkpoints will be set up around a number of locations, police say ... people [will] be stopped and asked about where they [are] headed." nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/articl…

"A 101-year-old German woman escaped her senior home in violation of a nationwide lockdown to visit her daughter on her birthday ... the officers allowed the woman to see her daughter – from behind the patrol car’s window – before bringing her back." foxnews.com/world/german-w…

"Gardaí are to launch a nationwide policing operation to discourage people from leaving their homes and travelling to holiday locations over the Easter weekend ... patrols are also to be stepped up at key locations such as parks and natural beauty spots." rte.ie/news/2020/0407…

"... a recent report from Pew Research showed that 93% of the world’s population lives in countries and territories that are subject to movement restrictions." forbes.com/sites/jamesasq…

"One day, daily routines will be started up again, step by step. But there is no effective date on which everything will be the way it used to be. Even once the ‘contact ban’ has been lifted, there will be new rules," Berlin Mayor Michael Müller said. berlinspectator.com/2020/03/31/cor…

"The next phase is not a return to normality. It is learning how to live with the pandemic - possibly for quite a long time ..." nytimes.com/2020/04/08/wor…

"What the new normal will look like is unclear, though it is likely to involve mandatory masks in public and smartphone apps tracking contact with people who are potentially infected. Going back to work and traveling might be contingent on test results." nytimes.com/2020/04/08/wor…

"... what has been so remarkable to those of us who have been in the science field for so long is how important behavioural change is and how amazing Americans are in adapting to and following through on these behavioural changes." theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

"Police in Texas are searching for an 18-year-old girl who claimed to have tested positive for and to be 'willfully spreading' the coronavirus ... the teenager faces a charge of making a terroristic threat." nbcnews.com/news/us-news/t…

"America’s top coronavirus expert has warned Covid-19 is the new normal – and that the killer virus might never go away." metro.co.uk/2020/04/07/top…

"Security officers in several African countries have been beating, harassing and, in some cases, killing people as they enforce measures aimed at preventing the spread of Covid-19." bbc.com/news/world-afr…

"World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine." venturebeat.com/2020/04/08/aft…

"White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system ..." politico.com/news/2020/04/0…

"East Asian countries have demonstrated that a robust regime of surveillance is essential to fighting a pandemic. Western democracies must rise to meet the need for 'democratic surveillance' to protect their own populations." foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-…

"It’s an extraordinary moment that might call for extraordinary surveillance methods." theintercept.com/2020/04/02/cor…

"Australia will deploy helicopters, set up police checkpoints and hand out hefty fines to deter people from breaking an Easter travel ban ... Police said they will block roads and use number plate recognition technology to catch those infringing the bans." theguardian.com/world/live/202…

"Forces will move to an 'enforcement phase' rather than issuing advice ... Pembrokeshire council said it would help police catch those visiting second homes in the area, including those who arrive late at night to try and evade officers." bbc.com/news/uk-wales-…

"A former Colorado State Patrol trooper was handcuffed in front of his 6-year old daughter on a near-empty softball field Sunday by Brighton police officers enforcing social distancing rules." abcnews.go.com/US/police-offi…

"Bobby Edwards, of Boynton, Florida, was arrested last week after police say he landed on the island without proof of accommodations ... officials warn that those wanting to come to Hawaii with no accommodations may not make it out of the airport." nypost.com/2020/04/08/haw…

"Officers say they responded to a synagogue in Monsey after receiving complaints. They found 30-50 men praying together. Eight were arrested for disorderly conduct. Police say they will arrest more people if the gatherings continue." newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/04/09/cor…

“'These drones will be around the City with an automated message from the Mayor telling you to STOP gathering, disperse and go home,' the police department said." vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/c…

"Dr. Fauci acknowledged the government is considering issuing Americans certificates of immunity from the coronavirus ... in parts of China, citizens are already required to display colored codes on their smartphones indicating their contagion risk." politico.com/news/2020/04/1…

"A video shows what appears to be four police officers, backed by about six more, forcibly pulling a man not wearing a face covering off of a SEPTA bus ... the video appears to exemplify SEPTA’s new police-enforced mandate that riders wear face coverings." whyy.org/articles/viral…

"Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19 ... it has the potential to monitor a third of the world’s population." bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

"A Louisville resident—not diagnosed with COVID-19 but living with someone who had been—got a court-ordered GPS tracking monitor ... in New Orleans' Acadia Parish, anyone outside between 9pm-6am will have to present a permission slip from their employer." reason.com/2020/04/08/cov…

'Police will record the license plates of residents who attend church on Easter and report them to health departments for quarantine ... "Health departments are going to come to your door with an order for you to be quarantined for 14 days," -Gov. Beshear' nypost.com/2020/04/10/ken…

"The French police have come down hard, responding to perceived lapses in the confinement rules with beatings, harassment, humiliation and intimidation ... “It’s like a prison,” said Drissa Fofana, an out-of-work construction worker." nytimes.com/2020/04/10/wor…

"In a video circulating on French social media, a young man in the suburb of Les Ulis can be heard screaming in pain during a police 'check' for a missing release form. 'He was savagely beaten with truncheons, fists and kicks until he fell to the ground.'" nytimes.com/2020/04/10/wor…

"... the officer then demands he puts his hands on his head and handcuffs him ... [he] is then told he faces arrest for “breaking Covid guidelines” ... the officer threatens to spray him if he does not comply." manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-m…

"Police in Frankfurt were attacked by men with stones and iron bars while enforcing social distancing measures to stop the spread of coronavirus, authorities said on Saturday." dw.com/en/germany-pol…

"Police have arrested 28 people throughout Maryland for violating Gov. Hogan's executive orders related to coronavirus, as of yesterday afternoon." wjla.com/news/local/upd…

"In California, a federal judge denied a San Diego church's request to hold an Easter service, even with social distancing measures including possibly requiring members to wear hazmat suits." eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nat…

"Technology firms are processing confidential UK patient information in a data-mining operation ... Palantir, founded by rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel, is working with Faculty, a UK artificial intelligence startup, to consolidate government databases." theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

"Once a person has been confirmed to be infected, their close contacts could automatically be traced ... the infected person’s compliance with lockdown instructions could be tracked using digital tools that monitor individual travel and behavior patterns." foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/10/cor…

"The counter-terrorism analogy is useful because it shows the direction of travel of pandemic policy ... Your cell-phone signal could be used to enforce quarantine decisions. Leave your apartment and the authorities will know." foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/10/cor…

"Residents in Riverside County, CA, are now required to wear face coverings and could face a fine of $1,000 per violation per day if the mandate is ignored. 'This is a valid order and enforceable by fine, imprisonment or both,' said Sheriff Chad Bianco." newsweek.com/california-cou…

'A family claimed a 500-mile round Lake District trip was acceptable if they wore masks and gloves, police said. The family were criticised as "absolute idiots" and called "clowns" after the force posted about it on Twitter.' bbc.com/news/uk-englan…

"A 70-year-old township man was arrested twice on Saturday after police alleged he tried to enter two different Wawa convenience stores without a mask and became belligerent ... he was charged with second-degree terroristic threats during an emergency." eu.app.com/story/news/202…

'A woman in Victoria says she was left feeling “heartbroken” and like a criminal after uniformed police officers carrying weapons interrupted her father’s funeral over the Easter long weekend to enforce social distancing rules.' theguardian.com/australia-news…

'The coronavirus pandemic has led to an unprecedented global surge in digital surveillance, researchers and privacy advocates around the world have said, with billions of people facing enhanced monitoring that may prove difficult to roll back.' theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

'Protesters rallied to reopen North Carolina ... at least one was arrested. “You are in violation of the executive order,” said police. “You are posing a risk to public health. If you do not disperse, you will be taken and processed at Wake County jail.”' newsobserver.com/news/politics-…

The Raleigh, North Carolina Police Department issued this Tweet, announcing that no one is allowed to protest, as it "violates the Governor's Executive Order."

"Officers have become public health police, breaking up crowds at stores ... the department has mobilized the Citywide All-Out Task Force, which is usually assembled to flood high-crime areas and other assignments." nytimes.com/2020/04/14/nyr…

"A South Australian couple was hit with a hefty fine from cops for nonessential travel amid the pandemic after the pair posted vacation snaps from 2019 on Facebook ... the couple was warned that if they 'posted any more photos,' they would “be arrested." nypost.com/2020/04/14/cou…

"Attorney Beate Bahner challenged Germany's coronavirus regulations in the Constitutional Court and failed. Now she has been taken to a psychiatric facility." heidelberg24.de/heidelberg/cor…

"Ms Bahner submitted a 36-page urgent motion to the Constitutional Court regarding the unlawfulness of all 16 German federal states' Coronavirus measures ... [her] interview for "incitement to commit criminal acts" is scheduled for Wednesday 15 April. ukcolumn.org/article/corona…

"Police in Berlin broke up a large birthday gathering in the early hours of Monday ... a 16-year-old girl was celebrating with 31 other people ... all 32 party attendees [are] being investigated for criminal offenses." dw.com/en/berlin-poli…

"Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures and it is about protecting the public." cbc.ca/news/politics/…

'The UK's health secretary, Matt Hancock, has suggested "something like an immunity certificate or a wristband" in the future.' news.sky.com/story/coronavi…

"Attempting to issue some kind of immunity certificate to millions of Americans would be unprecedented." thehill.com/changing-ameri…

"The COVID-19 Credentials Initiative (CCI) is working on a digital certificate, [that] lets individuals prove (and request proof from others) they’ve recovered from the novel coronavirus or have received a vaccination, once one is available." coindesk.com/covid-19-immun…

"[T]he drones use computer vision systems to monitor temperatures and heart and respiratory rates of people from above and single out people sneezing or coughing ... Draganfly also sees a possible security use around borders or critical infrastructure." businessinsider.com/draganfly-pand…

"Mobile phone tracking software could be compulsory if not enough Australians voluntarily download the application to help in coronavirus case tracing." 9news.com.au/national/coron…

'The three-page document, entitled "what constitutes a reasonable excuse to leave the place where you live", is designed to help police enforce the emergency restrictions that came into effect three weeks ago and are set to be extended.' bbc.com/news/uk-englan…

"[T]here is a danger that these new, often highly invasive, measures will become the norm around the world ..." businessinsider.com/countries-trac…

"Developers in several European countries are working on similar apps to inform people quickly when they have been in contact with someone who is infected with the virus, as part of a pan-European privacy preserving proximity tracing (Pepp-PT) initiative." theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

'Norway unveiled its Smittestop app, which will notify users if they have been less than 2 metres from an infected person for more than 15 minutes. “To get back to a more normal life ... we all have to make an effort and use this app,” PM Solberg said.' theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

"Officials say they routinely saw people visit the skatepark, even children accompanied by their parents, according to the San Clemente Times ... city officials followed in the footsteps of other cities and filled the skatepark with 37 tons of sand." losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/04/17/cor…

"In one [Michigan] county, anyone deemed a 'carrier and health threat' can be detained by police and taken to an Involuntary Isolation Facility." lifesitenews.com/news/michigan-…

'Imagine an America divided into two classes ... "It will be a frightening schism,” a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19 predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”' nytimes.com/2020/04/18/hea…

"Riots have broken out in Paris amid anger over police 'heavy-handed' treatment of ethnic minorities during the coronavirus lockdown." dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8…

"... law enforcers have killed 18 people in Nigeria since lockdowns began on 30 March. Coronavirus has killed 12 people, according to health ministry data." bbc.com/news/world-afr…

'Police must prepare for a “more volatile and agitated society” after the end of the UK’s coronavirus lockdown, a senior officer has warned.' independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…

'Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg on Monday told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that protests of stay-at-home orders that violate state social distancing rules organized through his social media platform qualify as "harmful misinformation" and will be taken down.' thehill.com/homenews/media…

"Saxony is threatening to get court orders to commit those refusing to respect the coronavirus lockdown to psychiatric facilities." n-tv.de/mediathek/vide…

"Riot police in Peru have blockaded a major highway and fired teargas into crowds of people attempting to flee the capital city and return on foot to their rural hometowns as the country’s strict coronavirus lockdown entered its sixth week." theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

"NYC police arrested three men outside a closed Brooklyn synagogue ... officers were dispatched to the synagogue in response to calls of New Yorkers not social distancing, NYPD’s top uniform cop Terence Monahan said." foxnews.com/us/nyc-police-…

"A policeman has been suspended after he was filmed 'threatening to make something up' so he could arrest a man for breaching coronavirus lockdown laws." dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8…

"A man was brought into custody Sunday after police were called to Main Street in Port Jefferson for a report of a large group of people not practicing social distancing ... [the man] 'refused a request to social distance or put a mask on,' police said." patch.com/new-york/portj…

"Facebook is blocking anti-quarantine protesters from using the site to organize in-person gatherings ... [it] has removed protest messages in California, New Jersey and Nebraska from its site, a company spokesperson said Monday." politico.com/news/2020/04/2…

UPDATE: "Louisville residents who have been in contact with coronavirus patients but refuse to isolate themselves are being made to wear ankle bracelets ... Jefferson County courts has set up an on-call judge for these types of cases." edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/us/…

"A Connecticut police department is using a drone equipped with virus-detecting technology to help battle the coronavirus ... the department also plans to use drone technology to enforce social distancing at beaches, train stations, parks and other areas." nypost.com/2020/04/22/con…

"A company in the U.S. has adapted a drone so that it can be used by police to measure people’s temperature from nearly 200ft away, as well as monitor their heart and breathing rates." metro.co.uk/2020/04/22/pol…

"The police are deploying technology to help stop spread of coronavirus among the homeless population ... while hovering above, the drone [plays] a recording that says, 'members of the public are reminded to keep a safe distance of six feet from others.'" nbcdfw.com/news/coronavir…

"New York City residents submitted 14,000 complaints to the city’s police about people violating social-distancing rules enacted to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus." wsj.com/articles/new-y…

"Over the weekend, a large gathering of Amish was broken up by police, with one person getting arrested, another issued a summons ... Police were called to the property after someone called them to report a violation of the state’s stay-at-home orders." dailywire.com/news/police-br…

"Landing AI has created a new workplace monitoring tool that issues an alert when anyone is less than the desired distance from a colleague ... these [surveillance] systems flag up warnings in real time when behaviors deviate from a certain standard." technologyreview.com/2020/04/17/100…

"In the video, the cops can be seen flying the drone to survey the beach from above before finding the unaware sunbather and the closing in on him while riding quad-bikes." thesun.co.uk/news/11447452/…

"The secretive 77th Brigade of the British Army is involved in countering coronavirus misinformation online ... the unit was set up in 2015 to specialise in "non-lethal" forms of psychological warfare ...” thenational.scot/news/18398012.…

"Homeless people have faced fines or arrest for failing to comply with coronavirus lockdown restrictions ... a woman living in a Delhi shelter said “we have heard that homeless people have been rounded up by the police from the streets and taken to camps.” reuters.com/article/us-hea…

"Federal guidelines for helping slow the spread of coronavirus call for people experiencing homelessness to either be sheltered in large 'congregate' shelters, like recreation centers or auditoriums, or in encampments like the one in Fort Collins." eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nat…

"A French woman was reprimanded by police for displaying a banner with the words “Macronavirus, when is the end?” The incident follows several others in which residents who have displayed banners with “political overtones” have been visited by the police." rt.com/news/486824-wo…

“A dramatic increase in technological surveillance is a 'price worth paying' ... Covid-19 is not an ideology, and rebalancing the contract between citizens and the state to take advantage of the capabilities of new technologies is not capitulation.” theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

"The Home Secretary will underscore her warning to stay indoors with the threat of beefing up the police's powers to enforce social distancing. A source close to Patel told the Daily Express: 'We are seeing a worrying increase in people moving around.'" dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8…

"It was mere months ago that data privacy was becoming more clearly defined in corridors of power ... now, that consensus is being replaced with a new reality: Less data privacy, not more, may be what’s best for public health." fortune.com/2020/04/20/pri…

"Officers have made 78 arrests and issued 1,637 fixed penalty notices in Scotland since 27 March. "If you are out and about, officers may ask you why ... please, explain your individual circumstances, listen to their instructions and obey the law." bbc.com/news/uk-scotla…

"Police have recorded 477 prosecutions, 3844 warnings and 131 youth referrals, Coster said - as well as fielding more than 55,000 reports of breaches from members of the public." newshub.co.nz/home/new-zeala…

"As of this afternoon, officers had handed handed out 214 fines to people who were out and about without good reason ... the force is receiving up to 150 calls a day from people who believe they have seen someone ignoring the regulations." leicestermercury.co.uk/news/local-new…

"More than 10,000 people have been arrested in the state in connection with the violation of lockdown ... nearly 80,000 personnel of Rajasthan Police and 20,000 home guards have been deployed across the state to ensure compliance of the lockdown." deccanherald.com/national/north…

"A woman says she was 'named and shamed' by neighbours after she fell asleep and missed the weekly clap for carers tribute to NHS staff and key workers." news.sky.com/story/coronavi…

"German police wearing riot gear and face masks clashed with dozens of protesters demonstrating in central Berlin against the coronavirus lockdown on public life." dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8…

"[P]ublic unrest has been breaking out across the world by frustrated people demanding an end to the coronavirus stay-at-home measures. This includes Russia, Germany, Brazil, the USA and India. In France there were reports of gangs fighting police ..." thesun.co.uk/news/11454210/…

"Thousands of protesters descended on the Wisconsin State Capitol on Friday as they called for coronavirus restrictions implemented by Gov. Tony Evers to be lifted."
thehill.com/homenews/state…

"The California Highway Patrol said Wednesday that it is temporarily banning rallies at the state Capitol and other state facilities because of the pandemic." kusi.com/california-hig…

"San Diego County police say three people protesting beach closures were arrested in Encinitas, California, on Saturday for violating health orders ... the arrests occurred after [they] ventured off the sidewalk and into the beach's sand." eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nat…

"Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values." theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

'German police on Saturday busted two underground hair salons operating in violation of the country’s lockdown orders during the coronavirus pandemic. "People were having their hair done,” police said.' foxnews.com/world/german-u…

"It took five hours for Australians to download the COVIDSafe app at a rate the Government expected would take five days ... COVIDSafe uses Bluetooth to record anonymised IDs from users who are within 1.5 metres of each other for about 15 minutes." abc.net.au/news/2020-04-2…

"Governments around the world are weighing different privacy-enhancing designs, with some saying a [contact tracing] app would be voluntary to begin with, but not ruling out making it compulsory." coindesk.com/coronavirus-co…

"The Administration has classified all its discussions about COVID-19, and it later denounced Politico for reporting that the White House was in talks with tech firms to create a national coronavirus surveillance system." newyorker.com/tech/annals-of…

"Palantir, a secretive data-analytics firm ... has a contract from the Administration to build a database to track the spread of the virus. Palantir is known for its work with the NSA and ICE, where its software is used to track undocumented immigrants." newyorker.com/tech/annals-of…

"Authorities have been quick to insist the masks do not have to be medically approved ... decision-makers have stressed the psychological importance of wearing a face covering, saying it sends out a signal to people who might come too near." theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

"The app will help, just by ensuring authorities know they can contact people quickly when there is an infection, so they can trace us and warn us that we need a test.” skynews.com.au/details/_61522…

"There will be a huge risk that data would live on well beyond the pandemic, giving governments and corporations easy access to information about people’s movements and healthcare needs that eclipses what they now have." latimes.com/politics/story…

'The application will only be used during the pandemic, the companies said. But it's unclear when the health emergency will be over. Social distancing could be necessary "into 2022 .... resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024."' businessinsider.com/coronavirus-co…

"We may need to reevaluate how we think about 'contact' and 'tracing' and ask: can we strip them of their moral and punitive overlays? We have to break the social and cultural associations of the past to use these tactics most effectively in the future." technologyreview.com/2020/04/12/999…

"While governments and tech companies are working on voluntary [tracking] tools ... companies could make [such] tools mandatory ... employees [would] wear badges, key rings or wristbands embedded with inexpensive Bluetooth beacons." ft.com/content/caeb25…

"In the UK, nearly two-thirds of people polled are in favour of using mobile data to track coronavirus sufferers and those they come into contact with—a reflection, perhaps, of the public’s desperation to see lockdown rules lifted." forbes.com/sites/alasdair…

"Senior Greek officials explained that popular destinations will open for business once strict lockdown measures are relaxed. However, international visitors will have to provide immunity certificates or health passports to be allowed into the country." thesun.co.uk/travel/1148910…

"Authorities in India have debuted a unique device meant to detain those who are not cooperating with a coronavirus lockdown while maintaining social distancing. The device appears to resemble a claw-like grabber that many use to pick up trash." foxnews.com/world/india-co…

"When someone tests positive, authorities can siphon up the patient’s location data and contacts, making it easy to 'quarantine the right people' ..." cnbc.com/2020/04/28/cyb…

"[T]he pandemic has brought surveillance cameras closer to people's private lives: from public spaces in the city right to the front doors of their homes — and in some rare cases, surveillance cameras inside their apartments." edition.cnn.com/2020/04/27/asi…

"Questions about the precise role of the UK’s domestic spy agency in key decisions about the NHSX’s choice of a centralized app architecture means privacy concerns are unlikely to go away — with Gould dodging the committee’s questions about GCHQ’s role." techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/uks…

"My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups ..." - NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio nytimes.com/2020/04/28/nyr…

"Authorities in a Spanish coastal resort have apologised after spraying a beach with bleach in an attempt to protect children from coronavirus ... the bleach 'killed everything on the ground, nothing is seen, not even insects.'" bbc.com/news/world-eur…

"Gov. Gavin Newsom will order all beaches and state parks closed starting Friday after people thronged the seashore during a sweltering weekend despite his social distancing order ..." eu.usatoday.com/story/travel/n…

"CTP UK warns that the impact of COVID-19 and social isolation could make society’s most vulnerable more susceptible to radicalization ... people concerned that someone they know may be at risk from being radicalized by extremists are urged to seek help." hstoday.us/subject-matter…

"'Protecting the public against infection takes precedence over everything, including the [May Day] demonstration' ... Participation in unauthorized demonstrations is currently a crime." bz-berlin.de/berlin/friedri…

"Instead of de-escalation and tolerance, the rules 'have to be interpreted more strictly this year,' [the Interior Senator] announced. Demonstrations should not 'become the Ischgl of Berlin'. 5000 police officers are reported to be on duty." bz-berlin.de/berlin/friedri…

"While the usual left-wing protesters have vowed to observe social distancing, others are plotting a 'hygiene demo' which typically attracts conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers who scorn the lockdown measures." dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8…

"The [German] government plans to introduce a corona immunity card ... the Infection Protection Act allows the state to force people who are contagious or "suspect" to quarantine, or forbid them "to enter certain places ..." sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona…

"Just hours after announcing it would be relaxing lockdown measures aimed at stemming the spread of the coronavirus, Malaysia arrested hundreds of migrant workers and refugees in a crackdown on Covid-19 ‘red zones’." scmp.com/week-asia/poli…

'“The time for educating people into compliance is over,” [the Chicago Mayor] said. “Don’t be stupid. If you host a party, promote a party, or go to a party, we are not playing games. We mean business, and we will shut this down one way or another.”' nbcchicago.com/news/coronavir…

"Police have had to bust up hundreds of parties in the last few days ... since the country moved from level 4 to level 3 last week, police say they've had 1200 reports of mass gatherings." newshub.co.nz/home/new-zeala…

“The excuse of the pandemic has meant the threshold for justifying arrests under terrorism laws has dropped further ... it has also become almost impossible to get a court hearing to determine whether an action is illegal or unconstitutional." theguardian.com/world/2020/may…

'A New Jersey high school teacher was caught on video shouting at teenagers playing football in a park that they should “die a long, painful death” from the coronavirus.' mercurynews.com/2020/04/27/wat…

"The NYPD’s enforcement of social distancing over the weekend included a tense fracas in the East Village ... Officer Garcia wrestles [the bystander] to the sidewalk, repeatedly slapping his head and punching him, as another cop moves in, the video shows." nypost.com/2020/05/03/tas…

"Facial biometrics could be used to help provide a digital certificate – sometimes known as an immunity passport – proving which workers have had Covid-19 ... proposals, which have reached pilot stages in other countries, could be executed within months." theguardian.com/politics/2020/…

'The U.S. government is getting its vaccine supplies ready in anticipation of a working cure. Two separate orders signed off on May 1, 2020, total $100 million and specify needles and syringes “for a COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Campaign.”' forbes.com/sites/thomasbr…

"A Dallas salon owner was sentenced to seven days behind bars Tuesday for disobeying coronavirus shutdown orders." nbcnews.com/news/us-news/d…

'A SWAT team used an armored vehicle to raid a Texas bar that opened for business in defiance of the coronavirus lockdown, eighty-sixing the owner — and six heavily armed “vigilantes” who were defending her, according to reports.' nypost.com/2020/05/06/swa…

"American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines said Thursday they will soon require passengers to cover their faces during flights, following the lead of JetBlue Airways." apnews.com/445ac414e3be79…

"The [United States’] economic distress came into greater focus on Friday, offering a snapshot unseen since the Great Depression." nytimes.com/interactive/20…

"A four-legged robot will be patrolling Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park to remind people of safe distancing measures starting from Friday ... GovTech has enhanced Spot with various functions such as remote control, 3D-mapping and semi-autonomous operations ..." straitstimes.com/singapore/robo…

“There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology,” Anuja Sonalker, CEO of Steer Tech, said. “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.” theintercept.com/2020/05/08/and…

"Dramatic footage has surfaced of a woman being pulled away from her screaming son by a number of police officers while protesting during the coronavirus pandemic ... [and] dragged into a police van as her screaming son is torn from her arms." news.com.au/national/nsw-a…

"The Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD) has published a step-by-step guide for law enforcement agencies to identify 'fake news' and videos intended to spread panic through hatred and communal violence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic." thehindu.com/news/national/…

"Tensions are increasingly flaring in black and Hispanic neighborhoods over officers’ enforcement of social-distancing rules, leading officials to charge that the NYPD is engaging in a racist double standard as it shift[s] to a public health role ..." nytimes.com/2020/05/07/nyr…

"In German cities, thousands of people demonstrated on Saturday against the coronavirus restrictions ... several wore the armbands with the yellow Star of David used to identify Jews in the Nazi era ... the police ordered 'compliance' over loudspeakers." focus.de/politik/deutsc…

"'Liberation is a decision for the police based upon the circumstances of the individual incident,' a [police] spokesperson said. "The police can detain any person to protect the public from risk of harm." bbc.com/news/uk-scotla…

"California’s counties are building an army of 20,000 'contact tracers' ... the goal is to track and trace every person in the state who may have been exposed, then quickly isolate and test them." mercurynews.com/2020/05/06/cor…

"The steps under consideration ... face masks, surgical gloves, immunity passports, on-the-spot blood tests and sanitation disinfection tunnels ... all-biometric check-in systems ... passengers will need to show some type of immunity document/passport." forbes.com/sites/ceciliar…

"Two screaming toddlers watched on as their father was dramatically dragged to the ground by police at a tense anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne on Sunday ... three other officers then pulled the pram with the distressed children away from the father." dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8…

"Nashville Police have charged a man who was under quarantine with escape for leaving the homeless shelter at the Nashville Fairgrounds ... according to the arrest affidavit, [he] was quarantined on Thursday after testing positive for COVID-19 on Monday." cbs6albany.com/news/police-ma…

"Passengers on Ryanair will have to ask permission to use the toilet under new rules laid out by the airline ... [they] will undergo temperature tests at the airport, must wear face masks, and wash their hands and use hand sanitiser in terminals." theguardian.com/business/2020/…

"Los Angeles County’s stay-at-home orders will 'with all certainty' be extended for the next three months ... when beaches reopen this week, face coverings will be required when not in the water, and sunbathing won’t be allowed." latimes.com/california/sto…

"A German ministerial adviser has been sacked for circulating a report that described coronavirus as a 'false alarm' and accused the government of causing 'a large number of avoidable deaths' through its lockdown." thetimes.co.uk/article/german…

"Police have now charged a homeless man for violating the lockdown, according to Court News ... the man was accused of leaving the place where he was living, which was ‘no fixed abode’." spiked-online.com/2020/05/12/now…

"The US Senate has voted to give law enforcement agencies access to web browsing data without a warrant, dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance powers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic." vice.com/en_us/article/…

"A video of police grabbing a woman and pushing her to the ground as her child looks on has turned up the heat on law enforcement ... the incident began when the woman was stopped from boarding a train because she was wearing her face mask incorrectly." independent.co.uk/news/world/ame…

"Robots and drones equipped with infrared cameras could patrol holiday destinations and enforce social distancing rules under new EU plans ... alongside infection tracing mobile apps. dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar…

"Piers Corbyn used a megaphone to tell the crowd that the pandemic was a 'pack of lies to brainwash you and keep you in order' ... he [was] arrested under the Health Protection Regulations, which make gathering in a group of more than two people illegal." independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/…

'A tourist was arrested after he posted beach pictures on Instagram when he was supposed to be in quarantine ... "authorities became aware of his posts from citizens who saw posts of him on the beach with a surfboard, sunbathing, and walking around."' edition.cnn.com/2020/05/16/us/…

"Miami Beach Police have arrested a woman after, they said, she violated an emergency order that does not allow people on the beach ... video showed [her] sitting in the sand while holding a sign that read, 'We are free,' Sunday afternoon." foxnews.com/us/miami-beach…

"Video footage shows police officers beating eight handcuffed Romani men and one 13-year-old boy for allegedly having a barbecue outside one of their houses. Several policemen and gendarmes, in and out of uniform, take part in the collective punishment." aljazeera.com/indepth/opinio…

It was nightfall along the Hudson and people were still out on a warm Saturday night, mindful that a Stay at Home order for New York City and the metro area has been extended ... more than 2,000 social distancing patrols and supervisors were out in force." abc7ny.com/health/nyc-par…

"Hundreds of protestors gathered in Warsaw’s Old Town in the early afternoon ... police blocked the planned march, saying in a statement published on Twitter that public gatherings are still banned under the government restrictions." reuters.com/article/us-hea…

"The federal government has ramped up security and police-related spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic, including issuing contracts for riot gear ... [it] also extended special contracts for coronavirus-related security services." theintercept.com/2020/05/17/vet…

"... the [smart] helmet could do any of the following: measure the temperature of a specific individual [or] people in larger crowds; scan a person's QR code for personal data; spot people in the dark; or recognize people using facial recognition." businessinsider.com/coronavirus-it…

"A 'lockdown rollover' of 50 days on and 30 days off should be introduced until 2022, say British scientists ... month-long intervals of relaxed social distancing would be followed by much more austere measures lasting almost twice as long." msn.com/en-gb/news/cor…

"Close to 39 million Americans have lost their jobs in just nine weeks. The rate of weekly losses has slowed sharply from its peak of 6.6m at the start of April but remains at levels unseen since the 1930s Great Depression." theguardian.com/business/2020/…

"Matt Hancock stopped short of confirming jab would be mandatory when asked at today’s Downing Street press conference, but he didn’t rule it out either." metro.co.uk/2020/05/21/mat…

“The details they provide the authorities will allow them to be traced ... if their planned accommodation does not satisfy the authorities, arrivals will be put up in facilities arranged by the government, the Home Office says." theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/m…

"The power to impose fines on people who disobey exists under emergency legislation ... another detail to be decided on is whether spot checks will be carried out on people at home to make sure they are not secretly going out or working as normal." standard.co.uk/news/uk/matt-h…

"'Disaster' ... Malibu Beaches Overwhelmed By Visitors Not Wearing Masks ... the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has instituted horse patrols on the sand." deadline.com/2020/05/malibu…

"AiRISTA’s platform allows employers to continuously upload a record of close encounters to a corporate cloud, providing an up-to-date list of presumed social distancing violators that would double as a detailed record of workplace social interactions." theintercept.com/2020/05/25/cor…

"Millions of Indians have no choice but to download the country’s tracking technology if they want to keep their jobs or avoid reprisals." technologyreview.com/2020/05/07/100…