A “dystopian surveillance system” consisting of CCTV, phone, and transaction monitoring was planned by Ireland’s government in the hopes of combatting COVID, an upcoming book will claim.
Ireland’s Europhile government along with a major international consulting firm planned out what a report has called a “dystopian surveillance system” consisting of CCTV, phone, and financial transaction monitoring in the hopes of combatting the Chinese Coronavirus, an upcoming book will claim.
Described as an “Orwellian plan” by the forthcoming publication, the apparent idea of the privacy-invading system was to make sure civilians in Ireland were obeying the government’s draconian measures, which at times were considered some of the harshest in the world.
According to a report by the Irish Independent, the plan for the big data surveillance system was drawn up by multinational consultancy firm EY, and would have also monitored people’s takeout habits through banking data as well as information uploaded to social media.
“What emerged was an almost Orwellian plan, bizarrely dubbed 1 Government Centre (1GC),” the publication reports the upcoming book — which is penned by one of the newspaper’s own journalists — as saying.
However, the plan seemingly never saw the light of day, with the Irish government ultimately deciding to reject the plan for reasons which are not given in the paper’s report.
What is said however is that Ireland’s controversial Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tony Holohan, referred to the plan as a “load of horsesh**e” in meetings.
While Ireland appears like it has managed to escape becoming a technological surveillance state for now, other European states appear to be flirting with the idea of increased data gathering within the digital sphere.
For example, only days after the country’s pivotal presidential election which saw the much disliked Emmanuel Macron cling on to power, France announced that it is creating a digital identity app for its citizens.
The app will supposedly use already existing ID cards to generate digital certificates, which the French government appears to be claiming will better protect the privacy of citizens, allowing them “to generate electronic certificates containing only the identity attributes whose transmission [they] considers necessary to third parties of his choice.”
However, while authorities seem to believe that such a measure will allow people to keep their personal information safe, France’s digital implementation of the country’s COVID pass seemed to prove that private info was not always safe in government hands, with both President Macron and Prime Minister Jean Castex having their private information leak to the public thanks to the French state’s “Health Pass” system.
“Time and time again governments say that they are providing a data service to their citizens and claim that it will be protected, but what we see is this information ending up in data profiles available on Google searches,” one cyber-security specialist previously told Breitbart London.
“The systems we have are too complicated and once that data gets digitised and out there and replicated in the country’s database that you are travelling to, with its own set of privacy protocols, you are looking at an expanding universe [of data],” he continued.
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