The technocracy repeatedly poses privacy risks, so why do we continue down this path?

The Canadian Press / Jeff McIntosh

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The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) admitted that they were soliciting Canadians' data to evaluate the effectiveness of the public health measures being imposed on them. The plan was halted by the House of Commons Ethics Committee, which had “significant concerns [around] what security protocols and measures were put in place to protect privacy when they secretly collected the mobility data of 22 million Canadians.”

The committee was referring to a situation that dates back as early as April 2020 where the PHAC paid $200,000 to Telus (a telecommunications company) to secretly use the location data of over 30 million Canadian cellular devices to “evaluate public health measures and other aspects related to public health response, programming, planning and preparedness.”

This overreach comes in spite of the fact that PHAC appears to lack the ability, or perhaps desire, to collect COVID data for air travel.

The government does, however, have air travel data collection projects ongoing.

According to Blacklock's Reporter, there was a pilot project run through Toronto Pearson Airport last year that posed “privacy risks” identified by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). The program, called the “Chain of Trust,” is a biometric scheme that onboarded 121 Air Canada crew members to use computer chip embedded passports. The users have to download a federal app to forward their photos, names, birth dates, passport numbers and travel itineraries 72 hours prior to their departure time.

It was intended to make customs clearance more convenient and efficient by experimenting with touchless document submission and processing, as part of the modernization efforts of the CBSA.

Unsurprisingly, Toronto Pearson Airport, the Government of Canada and Air Canada are all pilot partners with the World Economic Forum’s KTDI project — the Known Traveller Digital Identity. As per one of their reports, travellers can build their “status” by “requesting attestations, e.g. certificates from university, bank statement or vaccination etc.”

Will Canadians be trading privacy and freedom for convenience, under the guise of security?

In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”