Shadowy military-intel outfit at center of push for globalized digital health passport system

Globalist elites cloak their agenda in flowery language. They talk of transformational changes that will usher in a more just society based on inclusivity, diversity, sustainability, empowerment, equality, security, privacy, safety and convenience.

They’re being inclusive at the same time they fire you for not accepting an injection of a foreign substance into your body.

They’re protecting your privacy at the same time they steal and sell your personal data.

They’re committed to diversity when only those obeying their new rules are allowed to work, run a business, buy and sell.

They’re empowering you as they rob you of your God-given individual sovereignty and bodily integrity.

They’re making us safe even as they’re injecting poison into our bodies and the bodies of our children.

Truth is, these elites are obliterating all Western norms of individual freedom and responsibility, replacing them with a collectivist, digital society in which people are seen as nothing more than human capital, the equivalent of livestock to be tagged, tracked, assessed for their value to the global system and discarded after they’ve been used up by their corporate owners. We defeat these global predators every time we refuse to comply with their rules or use their products, whether it be masks, shots, their new digital money, their social-media networks, their SMART Health Cards, their electric cars, their public schools or their make-believe metaverse.

The below article demonstrates that the global injection mandates and their accompanying digital passports did not spring up organically in the face of a pandemic. They have been long planned as a necessary step toward an all-inclusive digital surveillance state. But this beast system has no power over us unless we submit to its “new normal.”

By Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal

Described as “the most important organization you’ve never heard of,” MITRE rakes in massive security state contracts to pioneer invasive spy tech. Now it’s at the heart of a campaign to implement digital vaccine passports.

While vaccine passports have been marketed as a boon to public health, promising safety, privacy, and convenience for those who have been vaccinated against Covid-19, the pivotal role a shadowy military-intelligence organization is playing in the push to implement the system in digital form has raised serious civil liberties concerns.

Known as MITRE, the organization is a non-profit corporation led almost entirely by military-intelligence professionals and sustained by sizable contracts with the Department of Defense, FBI, and national security sector.

The effort “to expand QR code vaccine passports beyond states like California and New York” now revolves around a public-private partnership known as the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI). And the VCI has reserved an instrumental role in its coalition for MITRE.

Described by Forbes as a “cloak and dagger [research and development] shop” that is “the most important organization you’ve never heard of,” MITRE has developed some of the most invasive surveillance technology in use by US spy agencies today. Among its most novel products is a system built for the FBI which captures individuals’ fingerprints from images posted on social media sites.

MITRE’s own COVID-19 umbrella coalition includes In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Palantir, a scandal-stained private spying firm.

Elizabeth Renieris, the founding director of Notre Dame and IBM’s technology ethics lab, has warned that “as dominant technology and surveillance companies” like MITRE “pursue new revenue streams in healthcare and financial services…privately owned and operated ID systems with profit-maximizing business models threaten the privacy, security, and other fundamental rights of individuals and communities.”  

Indeed, the involvement of the military-intelligence apparatus in the development of a digital vaccine passport system is yet another indication that behind the guise of public health concerns, the U.S. surveillance state could be due to enhance its control over an increasingly restive population.

The Vaccine Credential Initiative, a neoliberal vehicle advised by military-intelligence professional

As detailed in the first installment of this series, tech oligarchs like Bill Gates and global capitalist policy hubs such as the World Economic Forum have advanced digital ID and electronic currency systems across the Global South in order to harvest data and profits from populations that were previously out of reach. 

The advent of vaccine passports providing access to employment and public life has become the key vector for accelerating their agenda in the West. As the financial consulting firm, Aite-Novarica, declared this September, digital COVID-19 vaccine passports “expand the case for digital IDs beyond COVID-19 vaccination only, and potentially serve as a digital ID as a more comprehensive, universal source of identity information…”

As vaccine passports exclude millions across the West, sparking furious protests and wildcat strikes, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is working with its partners to implement them in digital form.

Italy's Green Pass in action: an old woman is turned away from medical exams at a hospital because she can't produce her mandatory "health" passport. These systems inherently discriminate against members of vulnerable groups and encourage private security overreach, as seen here. https://t.co/Y9Tr12A9jq

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 19, 2021

Led by German economist Klaus Schwab, who says he is leading a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” that is changing the way people “live, work, and relate to one another,” the WEF is an international network of some of the wealthiest and most politically powerful people on the planet. Based in Davos, Switzerland, the WEF positions itself as the thought leader of global capitalism.

In January 2021, several WEF partners, including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and other mega-corporations announced a coalition to launch the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI), which aims to institute QR code-based vaccine passports across the U.S. 

The stated goal of the VCI is to implement a single “SMART Health Card” that could be recognized “across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.”

In the U.S., some states are already deploying digital SMART Health Cards developed by the VCI. These SMART Health Cards have laid the basis for a de-facto national standard for vaccine credentials.

A nonprofit established by the Rockefeller Foundation and called The Commons Project is leading the lobbying push for digital SMART cards through the VCI it co-founded. And Commons Project CEO Paul Meyer happens to have been cultivated by the WEF as a “young leader.”

As one of the public faces of the VCI, Meyer markets the campaign’s agenda in the language of progressive inclusion, hammering consistently on themes like “empowerment” in public communications.

“The goal of the Vaccination Credential Initiative is to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination records so they can use tools like CommonPass to safely return to travel, work, school, and life, while protecting their data privacy,” claimed Meyer. 

In a press release announcing the formation of the VCI, MITRE echoed Meyer’s woke language, declaring that it had joined the partnership “to ensure that underserved populations have access to this [digital vaccine] verification.” 

But what is MITRE, and why might an organization known for mass surveillance and military technology be at the center of an initiative that offers the possibility of unprecedented monitoring of the global population? The organization did not respond to emailed questions from The Grayzone about its participation in the VCI, however, its documented history makes for unsettling reading.

Assisting wars on Vietnam and marijuana, developing “extraordinarily chilling” spy tech

Based in Northern Virginia, MITRE is a military-intelligence think tank funded to the tune of $2 billion a year by US agencies including the US Department of Defense. It is led almost entirely by former Pentagon officials and ex-intelligence operatives. 

MITRE was founded in 1958 as a joint project of the US Air Force and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop ‘command and control’ systems for nuclear and conventional warfare, as the journal Science and Revolution noted.

In 1963, MITRE tapped a brilliant young linguist from MIT named Noam Chomsky, to assist the “development of a program to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control.” After a few years of work on projects like these, Chomsky said, “I couldn’t look myself in the mirror any more,” and thrust himself into antiwar activism.

By the late 1960s, MITRE said it was “devoting almost one-quarter of its total resources to the command, control, and communications systems necessary to the conduct of [the Vietnam] conflict.”

Also in the late 1960’s, the US State Department contracted MITRE to guide a campaign of aerial cannabis eradication in Mexico. MITRE advised US agents to spray wide swaths of the Mexican countryside with a toxic herbicide called paraquat, which it described as safe based on a questionable reading of animal testing. When the State Department pursued MITRE’s strategy, food crops became contaminated and the health of local peasant communities was placed in danger.

Meanwhile, marijuana began arriving on US streets doused in paraquat, triggering a lawsuit against the State Department by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws which claimed the herbicide had caused respiratory disease among smokers. When the State Department lost the case, it granted MITRE a $255,211 contract to produce an impact study on paraquat spraying which ultimately advised smokers to mitigate the herbicide’s effects by consuming marijuana with water pipes or in brownies. 

In recent years, MITRE has designed surveillance technology for the FBI which collects human fingerprints from social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It has also helped the FBI establish the Next Generation Identification system, reportedly the world’s largest database of biometric information, as well as the bureau’s Modernized Intelligence Database (MIDB) project.

According to the FBI’s former Assistant Director William Bayse, the MIDB enabled police programmers to link activists to their political causes, associates, employers, criminal records, mugshots and fingerprints, spending habits, and even tax information. 

Through hundreds of FOIA requests and interviews with current and former MITRE officials, Forbes learned that MITRE has designed “a prototype tool that can hack into smartwatches, fitness trackers and home thermometers for the purposes of homeland security… and a study to determine whether someone’s body odor can show they’re lying.”

MITRE is also home to the ATT&CK Program, an cybersecurity module which the corporation describes as “a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and [intelligence] techniques based on real-world observations.” Adam Pennington, the lead architect for MITRE’s ATT&CK, “has spent over a decade with MITRE studying and preaching the use of deception for intelligence gathering.”

ACLU staff attorney Nate Wessler has called MITRE’s surveillance projects “extraordinarily chilling,” and warned that they “raise serious privacy concerns.”

For its part, the military contractor’s promotional material seems to boast about its legacy of surveillance innovation: “You may not know it, but Mitre touches your life almost every day.” 

Months after a novel coronavirus pandemic was declared in March 2020, MITRE leveraged its expertise in monitoring populations to produce the Sara Alert contact tracing system. A video advertisement by MITRE explains how the system enables public health authorities to track users:

“People who are sick with the disease will be placed in isolation at home… For people who are exposed to the disease but do not show symptoms, Sara Alert follows them while they are in quarantine for 14 days.”

MITRE’s Sara Alert went into use in a handful of states, with limited enrollment. Had it been implemented on a national level, it might have forced a substantial slice of the US population to self-quarantine on a continuous basis, even if individuals presented no symptoms.

As the Brookings Institute noted in a paper questioning the utility of apps like Sara Alert, “A person may put up with this once or twice, but after a few false alarms and the ensuing inconvenience of protracted self-isolation, we expect many will start to disregard the warnings.”

MITRE has also worked to suppress narratives that could undermine the agenda of government agencies that fund it. The contractor’s SQUINT browser plugin app, for example, “enables rapid social media situational awareness of COVID-19-related misinformation for public health officials through crowd-sourced reporting,” according to promotional material.

Now, MITRE is working to implement digital vaccine passports in the U.S., and beyond.

Private spies and CIA firm among MITRE’s COVID-19 coalition 

As a member of VCI’s governing steering group, MITRE runs its own “COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition” while describing itself as “a longstanding, trusted partner to the defense and intelligence communities.”

Among the members of MITRE’s own COVID-19 coalition is Palantir, a private intelligence firm founded in 2003 by Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel. Palantir has established itself as a leader in predictive policing programs and raked in lucrative contracts with the CIA. The firm once participated in a proposed smear campaign against anti-corporate activists and journalistic critics including Glenn Greenwald. 

Avril Haines, the current Director of National Intelligence and CIA’s former Deputy Director was paid $180,000 to consult for Palantir – a gig she scrubbed from her bio. 

Haines was also a lead participant in the Gates, WEF, and John Hopkins Center for Health and Security-sponsored Event 201 pandemic simulation in October 2019. During this exercise, public health professionals, intelligence officials, and business leaders gamed out a hypothetical coronavirus epidemic that killed 65 million people worldwide. 

Haines emphasized to fellow panelists the need to counter criticism of the official pandemic response by “flood[ing] the zone with trusted sources” of media and cultural influencers “in order to try to amplify the message that’s coming through.”

  Read the rest of the article at TheGrayZone.com

LeoHohmann.com is 100 percent reader supported and is not beholden to any corporate ads or sponsorships. You may send donations c/o Leo Hohmann, PO Box 291, Newnan, GA 30264, or via credit card below.