Contact Tracing: Your governors, red or blue, are coming after you

Red-state governors threaten their own citizens with arrest if they don’t comply with contact tracing investigators — up to six months in jail in Texas!

It was late morning on Tuesday, May 26, when James Daggett heard a knock on the door of his apartment home in Cedar Park, Texas, about 20 miles north of Austin.

When he answered it, two uniformed officers wearing badges and facemasks stood and stared.

One officer appeared to be a sheriff’s deputy and had a gun holstered on his side. The other wore a white uniform.

They said they had an important document to deliver that required his immediate attention.

The man in the white uniform handed him an envelope containing a letter from the Williamson County health department, demanding that he read it closely and follow its orders. What followed was a barrage of questions about his health, how many others he had living in his home, where he may have traveled recently.

As Daggett, 35, tore open the envelope and started to read the letter, the two men vanished from his doorstep as quickly as they had arrived.

These were just two of the foot soldiers in an army of 4,000 “contact tracers” hired by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, according to the Houston Chronicle, who signed a $295 million contract with Albany, New York-based MTX Group Inc., which partners with Google and SalesForce to data-mine the public and store their data forever in the Google Cloud.

The job of the contact-tracer investigators is to build a web, at the center of which are people like James Daggett, who just happened to test positive for COVID-19.

They reconstruct the spokes that come off the central hub – James’s family members, friends, the guy he may have sat next to on an airplane or at the local diner last night, or in the adjoining cubicle at work.

All it takes is to spend 10 or 15 minutes sitting or standing within six feet of another human being who was infected. These are all potentially infected persons who must be tracked down and sent into quarantine, then interviewed to get a list of their contacts.

In the end, one case such as that of James Daggett can ensnare hundreds of healthy, innocent Americans, and send them into lockdown, simply because they happened to breathe the same air that James breathed, or stood next to someone who did.

Contact tracers are trained to make sure all of these people, healthy or not, get thrown into complete isolation, away from their children, spouses and other family members while they get monitored for at least 14 days. Their release date is at the discretion of the public health authorities. The potential for abuse is great and could lead to continued rolling lockdowns throughout the country for months or even years. It is that very potential that has government watchdogs on alert.

As of this writing, every state has plans to exponentially expand their contact-tracing workforces.

The letter handed to Daggett by the two officers was very clear and written in a threatening tone.

“Pursuant to Section 81.083 of the Texas Health and Safety Code,” the director of the county health authority ordered him to stay locked in his house and isolated from all humans until further notice, stating that the director had obtained information leading her to have “reasonable cause to believe” he had contracted the COVID-19 coronavirus.

He was placed on notice that he must turn over all requested personal health records, as well as the names, addresses and phone numbers of each person he’d been in contact with, along with the places he’d visited, for several days leading up to his infection.

If he refused to comply with the eight directives listed in the letter, he would be subject to criminal charges carrying up to 180 days in jail, a fine of $2,000, or both.

This visit from county officials took place one week after Daggett had voluntarily decided to get tested at a drive-through testing center because he’d felt fatigued, had a low-grade fever and a dry cough. The next day he learned of the positive results for COVID-19. Two days later he said his mild symptoms were gone and by the third day he felt 100 percent back to his normal health.

“They asked how I was feeling, and I said ‘I’m feeling very well and have been for several days.’ I took the letter out of the envelope and as I started reading it they took off,” Daggett told me in a phone interview on Thursday, May 28, two days after his encounter with the government investigators.

Two days before that physical encounter at his front doorstep, on May 24, Daggett was contacted via email by a state epidemiologist, who ordered him not to leave his home for 10 days from the day he was tested.

“The email said I would be notified in writing when my 10 days have been completed. I’m not a child. I don’t need that. I can do the math,” he said.

But the letter that was hand-delivered on May 26 to his apartment and signed by Williamson County Medical Director Lori Palazzo is much more threatening than the earlier email. [See copy of letter below]. It also does not give a firm date or number of days he is to stay in lockdown.

Daggett sent an email to Palazzo, who described herself in her letter as the local health “authority” for Williamson County, Texas.

Daggett said his email response to Palazzo “wasn’t in any way disrespectful but it was strongly worded, basically letting her know I am my own health authority, and I also put the burden of proof on them to prove that I’m still a threat to anyone.”

He said he was upset at the intimidation tactics used to deliver the letter and also that his test results appeared to be sent to county law enforcement officials before they were even delivered to him.

“I found that to be wrong,” said Daggett, who works as a technician in construction services. “All the other information they’re demanding, including medical records, be handed over at their whim. And what protections do they have in place? Apparently none.”

“I am the authority on my health and I will determine when I’m well,” he told me. “And therefore, because of the lack of symptoms, I’m returning to my normal activities and I’m putting it back on them to prove otherwise.”

He said he intends to return to work Monday, which will mark 10 days from his test results. He refused to hand over to the contact-tracer agents the names of any of his personal contacts. Instead, he has checked on them regularly to make sure they are still healthy. “And so far everyone is fine,” he said.

Bye Bye Fourth Amendment

John Whitehead, a constitutional attorney and founder of the Rutherford Institute, said citizens are not generally required to speak to an officer about anything, much less their personal health.

“But if they have reasonable suspicion that you’ve committed a crime, they can hold someone for questioning,” he said. “Just an intimidation tactic.”

Whitehead said privacy rights are gone in today’s America, as the Fourth Amendment has been “shredded over and over and over again” since 9/11. The Fourth Amendment guarantees Americans’ rights against unreasonable searches and seizures of their personal property, papers and effects.

“The point is, who’s behind all of this? It’s Google and these big corporations,” Whitehead said. “They want to make the money on this. The dangerous thing I’m warning people about in all of this is if they get your DNA.”

He said Amazon, which built the intelligence cloud for all 17 intelligence agencies, “is now handing over your biometric information, your DNA, your fingerprints. There’s no privacy now. They can get whatever they want. And if they have it, either by police records, cases, or Ancestry.com, the FBI has access to that. A lot of this will drill down to this testing, where they get your DNA.”

What’s disappearing in today’s America, he said, is the legal principle of “bodily integrity.”

Once the state has your data and has turned it over to corporations, you will be vulnerable to them targeting you for various medical treatments [vaccine anyone?], as well as the possibility of discriminatory action by your employer.

“Here’s the key and people don’t realize this,” Whitehead said. “Access to healthcare data by big corporations will enable them to build a profile on people’s ailments, and target them for marketing campaigns; they will give that information over to employers and you could end up getting discriminated against. Landlords could ask you to leave their building. And they could also give it over to police. Police will have access to most of this information anyway because most of the police chiefs across the country are being trained by the FBI.”

Further arming the surveillance state

Americans must push back, now, or wave goodbye to their civil liberties.

“What this pandemic has done is it’s given over more information to the surveillance state and with thermo-imaging cameras coming in airports, healthcare facilities, these new drones the police are using — they’re made in China by the way — which from 300 feet in the air can read your temperature,” Whitehead said. “We are within a couple of years of going under total control. What’s happened is now everybody is a suspect, and everybody is going to be nervous.”

Governors of both political parties have bought into these contact-tracing plans, which were first put forth by Johns Hopkins University, as previously reported by LeoHohmann.com, and promoted by the National Governors Association. Johns Hopkins has called for an army of 100,000 contact tracers nationwide. Other health experts have predicted this army of medical spies could grow as large as 300,000.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday announced he is putting Obama’s former CDC boss, who openly admired China’s response to the coronavirus, in charge of a regional contact-tracing program for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Another red state goes all in for tracing, threatening arrest

In Georgia, GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has hired 1,000 contact tracers. He has given his contact-tracing program a new Orwellian name, “The Healthy Georgia Collaborative.”

In a report by Fox 5 Atlanta, health reporter Beth Galvin stated that she had received her information on Georgia’s contact tracers from the North Georgia Health District. Here’s how Galvin punctuated her May 28 report:

“If you’re in quarantine and you’re supposed to be checking in every day and you’re not, your health district will check in with you, and if you still don’t comply you could face a misdemeanor.”

Yet, a press release on the Georgia Department of Public Health website, implies that cooperation with contact tracers is “voluntary.”

“All information collected is provided voluntarily, and will be kept confidential according to HIPAA standards,” according to the state’s press release.

In an effort to clarify the state’s position, I called Jennifer King, the public-information officer with North Georgia Health District, who provided the following statement:

“All persons identified as infectious persons are required to comply with the quarantine ordered by the state (please refer to the attached ORDER FOR HOME QUARANTINE). They are required to check in daily while under quarantine in one of three ways: They may choose to have us call them to monitor, they may monitor through the application on their mobile device, or they may call the Georgia Poison Control Center. Information other than this requirement may be provided voluntarily and will be kept confidential according to HIPAA.”

The attached order provided by King states in bold print: “TAKE NOTICE that failure to comply with this Quarantine Order is a misdemeanor offense pursuant to O.C.G.A 31-5-8.”

Governors such as Kemp in Georgia and Jay Inslee in Washington are publicly stating that compliance with their contact-tracing spies will be “voluntary.”

But to say the program is “voluntary” is blatantly dishonest linguistic trickery. Remember how, in the early days of the lockdowns, we were told the draconian rules were just “temporary?”

The politicians and bureaucrats lied about “temporary,” knowing they would later shift to “new normal,” making “social distancing” and “no more handshaking” fixtures in a permanently reordered society.

Voluntary is the new temporary. It’s only voluntary until they say it’s not. It’s only voluntary until you refuse to volunteer. Then it becomes mandatory.

The scenario works something like this: Citizens will be asked to voluntarily quarantine and report daily to the local health authorities. If the citizen fails to submit to quarantine or to check in on a daily basis, the case becomes mandatory.

At that point, your medical privacy rights under the HIPAA law no longer apply.  You have become an enemy of the state.

“The information can be given to a public-health agency if the government says it’s required to prevent an imminent threat to public safety,” Whitehead said. “And guess who gets to determine the definition of an imminent threat? The public official who is sitting somewhere far away in an office with drapes and flowers on his desk that we pay for.”

The new normal: Enslavement to the state

With contact tracing in place as part of the “new normal,” very few governors are likely to return to mass lockdowns like they did in late March and early April. They will simply apply the lockdowns to individual persons through contact tracing.

Watch the disturbing video below from a woman in California who went through that state’s training program for contact tracers.

It will actually be possible for some healthy people to go in and out of multiple 14-day lockdowns, depending on who they happen to come in contact with at work, in restaurants, or other places where people gather.

Imagine a salon worker or barber who comes in close contact with dozens of customers per day. If one of them happens to test positive, that barber will get outed and sent into lockdown.

The only way to escape this endless loop is to accept the vaccine being pushed by Bill Gates in his repeated statements to the media that “we cannot go back to normal until the whole world is widely vaccinated.”

Whitehead said the most terrifying aspect of contact tracing is it turns people into government snitches, using fear to encourage a turn-in-your-neighbor mentality.

That’s the mentality that has existed in all totalitarian societies throughout history, from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia and Communist China. After the state-run media whips up an atmosphere of fear, people are easily led and will turn on each other if they think it will protect themselves or their family.

“Fear builds its own prison walls,” Whitehead said. “Everybody becomes a suspect and this time we are using the word “lockdown;” that’s prison terminology. We are prisoners in our own homes now. We can be reported by a neighbor if you cough, you don’t wear a mask.”

How did people end up in the Nazi camps? Whitehead said he was curious so he studied history to find out.

“Almost 85 percent of people who wound up in the camps were reported by their neighbors,” he said. “That’s where we are going. We’re following that model. Everyone is going to be nervous. You’ll be afraid to speak. First Amendment rights are dwindling. Anybody who speaks the truth today is going to look like a rebel or a radical.”

That’s why the Fourth Amendment was written, he said, to protect Americans against such abuses. But today’s politicians and judges have little respect for it.

“All my research and study shows that we’re headed down a really bad path and I’m afraid that people are going to give in,” Whitehead said. “We are being psychologically re-engineered to accept really tight control over our movements, how we think, and how we relate to other human beings.”

What to do if you are called by a contact tracer?

“If people want to take a Fourth Amendment stand, they don’t have to give over any information, their name or whatever when asked. They’re not required to. One question I would ask is: ‘Am I being charged with a crime? Why would you be contacting me?’ If they show up at the door, you can say the same thing.

“Now, the caution is that you could get arrested, but the only thing that’s going to change things around in this situation is either the people stand up and say ‘I’m not going to take it,’ or they take it. If you take it, it’s going to get really bad. But I’m afraid that, this is what I see generally, most people believe what they see on the mainstream media; they’re going to fall into the game.”

One man who has decided not to “take it” is James Daggett in Texas.

“People need to understand that this is how they’re handling this,” Daggett said. “It’s very heavy-handed…That’s what tyrants depend on. People wilting in the heat of the moment. If I am in any way impeded from carrying out my normal life, then I am going to contact an attorney.”

Americans need to know that the warnings being given about contact tracing are not some vague conspiracy theories.

“It’s reality,” he said. “There were guys with guns at my door.”

As Whitehead says, the only way to tip the scales and turn things away from tyranny is to take a stand and refuse to cooperate with the burgeoning army of health spies.

The time to make that stand is now.

Leo Hohmann is an independent freelance journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion.” If you appreciate the research and reporting of LeoHohmann.com, please consider a donation of any size.