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This is a bizarre comment. What does the efficacy of Canada's improvised mixed vaccination "plan" have to do with implementing a dictatorship? And have you noti

This is a bizarre comment. What does the efficacy of Canada's improvised mixed vaccination "plan" have to do with implementing a dictatorship? And have you noticed how big and poorly connected rural Canada is? It's pretty easy to get out of range of cell towers and effectively not be trackable. How is the Canadian government going to cover the country with enough infrastructure to monitor where every citizen is in a realistic time frame?

roenxi 5y ago
1. They aren't implementing a dictatorship - Canada is a parliamentary democracy, they have regular elections. 2. The justification for the tracking system will be that the vaccine isn't good enough to protect people without mandatory vaccinations. 3. Why would there need to be tracking in remote parts of rural Canada? There is basically nobody there. It is rural. How many people do you even know who live outside the range of cell phone towers?
chroem- 5y ago
I'm not clear on what GP's connection to vaccinations is, but for what it's worth, Australia has recently implemented some very authoritarian covid policies despite it being sparsely populated. People are only allowed to leave their homes for two hours a day and everyone is required to take pictures of themselves inside their homes at regular intervals to prove their location to the police. Violators are being shot with rubber bullets, and yet despite the severity of these measures, the total number of deaths in each state can be counted on your fingers.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  everyone is required to take pictures of themselves inside their homes at regular intervals That is... bizarre. Very bizarre. Do you have a link to read more?
  - chroem- 5y ago
    An overview: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-australia-still-liberal-democracy/619940/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a... Allowing people to leave their house for up to an hour of exercise: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58277503 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58277503 Firing on protesters: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victoria-covid-update-rubber-bullets-fired-on-second-day-of-construction-protests-which-block-freeway https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo...
    - BigJono 5y ago
      "violators" aren't being shot with rubber bullets. Nazi fuckwits are being shot with rubber bullets after being given hours to leave their violent protests of their own free will before attacking police with projectiles and charging at them. I watched the entire thing live, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The Guardian also did an expose on the instigators of those protests are accessed a group chat where the organisers were discussing how to slowly introduce the "Jewish question" to the crowd they'd managed to rile up.
      - chroem- 5y ago
        They're trade unionists. Not exactly the type of people I would put at the top of my suspected "nazi fuckwits" list.
        SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
        Well, perhaps they need to move up your list now. The "anti-lockdown protests" have consistently attracted some very unpleasant kooks, cranks and opportunists, from the "5g mind control" lot to the "international banker conspiracy" lot. It's omni-nutty. Piers Corbyn is a regular at the UK ones. In the US, I am sure that all roads lead to QAnon and their anti-Semitic totalising conspiracy theory. The intensity and nature of crankery is shifting.
        5y ago
  - angelzen 5y ago
    https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australias-two-largest-states-trial-facial-recognition-software-police-pandemic-2021-09-16/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australias-two-la... From what I can garner, there are such systems on trial, though as of Sept 16 the trials were on a voluntary basis.
    - tinus_hn 5y ago
      Why would you run trials of this Big Brother system if you weren’t considering making it mandatory?
      - angelzen 5y ago
        There are facts and there is my personal opinion. Personally I find this technology extremely worrisome and there is a good chance they will make it mandatory before long.
- jwilliams 5y ago
  There are some half-truths in there, but otherwise what you're saying is misleading. For example, there is a (quite small) trial of facial recognition for home quarantine of international travelers. Now that's a topic worthy of discussion - But it's an extraordinary leap to say everyone is taking pictures of themselves (i.e that's just not true at all). It's similar for most of your assertions. There have been quite a number of strict rules in different parts of Australia at different times. Most are now being wound back in line with vaccination rates.
  - chroem- 5y ago
    It looks like you are correct that the surveillance app is limited to anyone who has crossed state or national borders in the last two weeks. That being said, the Australian government has not relinquished its emergency powers, and is instead pushing for additional powers such as mandatory internet ID.
ipaddr 5y ago
The tracking is through vaccine checkins via vaccine passports. Boarding any travel method in Canada now requires a vaccine checkin. These passports will remain a long time.
- coronqueue 5y ago
  Vaccine passports in Canada are implemented using the https://smarthealth.cards/ https://smarthealth.cards/ standard. The QR codes are verifiable offline using digital signatures. The app used in BC is open source and available on Github: https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-iOS https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-iOS https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-Android https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-Android It works just fine with the device in airplane mode, and does not maintain a record of the QR codes it has verified.
  - twofornone 5y ago
    Yet? Why are you people so trusting when you know that these sorts of apps are one library and one function call away from mass surveillance mandated by some misleadingly titled bill? Surely Canada has a spiritual equivalent to the Patriot Act, no?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Let's look at the details a little closer. You download a QR code from the government. You are identified at this point and linked to your test results given your QR code. Those open source clients are for BC only. Assuming the app store version matches those clients that ensures you are not being track in private businesses during a vaccine check. This doesn't ensure the federal system is using the same clients or other provinces. This doesn't ensure a vaccine passport check before boarding a train by a government official doesn't link your travel/location. The only thing we are sure is this will protect tracking at the private level in BC if the business has airplane mode on and both have downloaded and built the client themselves.
    - coronqueue 5y ago
      In BC, secretly engaging in tracking would be both illegal and contrary to public policy. The system was reviewed by https://www.oipc.bc.ca/ https://www.oipc.bc.ca/ as part of the rollout, and it's privacy-preserving properties were an essential part of the system being deemed acceptable. There are multiple independent open source implementations of the SMART Health Card QR standard. It's really just some JSON + compression/encoding/digital signature. The approach I have described is being used across Canada, and based on what has been indicated so far, this is in fact the intended direction of the federal government. Vaccine passport checks are not conducted by government officials. They are conducted by the private businesses where the checks take place. iOS 15 includes "app privacy report" functionality, and if the government were secretly submitting a different version to the app store than they claim they are (with secret reporting of scan data back to the mothership included in the app store builds), they would be trivially caught by anybody using this feature. It would show up in the network traffic logs that are available for anybody to inspect. Mobile applications are also not that difficult to decompile to identify hidden functionality. We can both be pretty sure that no tracking is taking place, and that it would be unrealistic for this system to be used for tracking purposes without that becoming a matter of public knowledge rather quickly.
_3u10 5y ago
I live in a town of 10,000. I have fiber optic internet from my ISP. Less than 500m from my house is a city run fiber network. I checked the places I've lived for the last 10 years in Vancouver, none of them are eligible for fiber optic. Rural Canada is much better connected than major cities. It's not easy to not be trackable in Canada, every highway of any significance has a highway cam. If you really want to live off grid in a tent I suppose you could evade tracking. For 99% of people, they are easily tracked. Tracking isn't about 100% compliance its about 99% compliance.
bregma 5y ago
Why do you think the vaccines contain so many 5G microchips? The hurry to get everyone double-vaxxed even caused a global silicon chip shortage.

roenxi 5y ago

1. They aren't implementing a dictatorship - Canada is a parliamentary democracy, they have regular elections. 2. The justification for the tracking system will be that the vaccine isn't good enough to protect people without mandatory vaccinations. 3. Why would there need to be tracking in remote parts of rural Canada? There is basically nobody there. It is rural. How many people do you even know who live outside the range of cell phone towers?

chroem- 5y ago

I'm not clear on what GP's connection to vaccinations is, but for what it's worth, Australia has recently implemented some very authoritarian covid policies despite it being sparsely populated. People are only allowed to leave their homes for two hours a day and everyone is required to take pictures of themselves inside their homes at regular intervals to prove their location to the police. Violators are being shot with rubber bullets, and yet despite the severity of these measures, the total number of deaths in each state can be counted on your fingers.

nitrogen 5y ago
everyone is required to take pictures of themselves inside their homes at regular intervals That is... bizarre. Very bizarre. Do you have a link to read more?
- chroem- 5y ago
  An overview: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-australia-still-liberal-democracy/619940/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a... Allowing people to leave their house for up to an hour of exercise: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58277503 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58277503 Firing on protesters: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victoria-covid-update-rubber-bullets-fired-on-second-day-of-construction-protests-which-block-freeway https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo...
  - BigJono 5y ago
    "violators" aren't being shot with rubber bullets. Nazi fuckwits are being shot with rubber bullets after being given hours to leave their violent protests of their own free will before attacking police with projectiles and charging at them. I watched the entire thing live, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The Guardian also did an expose on the instigators of those protests are accessed a group chat where the organisers were discussing how to slowly introduce the "Jewish question" to the crowd they'd managed to rile up.
    - chroem- 5y ago
      They're trade unionists. Not exactly the type of people I would put at the top of my suspected "nazi fuckwits" list.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
        Well, perhaps they need to move up your list now. The "anti-lockdown protests" have consistently attracted some very unpleasant kooks, cranks and opportunists, from the "5g mind control" lot to the "international banker conspiracy" lot. It's omni-nutty. Piers Corbyn is a regular at the UK ones. In the US, I am sure that all roads lead to QAnon and their anti-Semitic totalising conspiracy theory. The intensity and nature of crankery is shifting.
        5y ago
- angelzen 5y ago
  https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australias-two-largest-states-trial-facial-recognition-software-police-pandemic-2021-09-16/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australias-two-la... From what I can garner, there are such systems on trial, though as of Sept 16 the trials were on a voluntary basis.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    Why would you run trials of this Big Brother system if you weren’t considering making it mandatory?
    - angelzen 5y ago
      There are facts and there is my personal opinion. Personally I find this technology extremely worrisome and there is a good chance they will make it mandatory before long.
jwilliams 5y ago
There are some half-truths in there, but otherwise what you're saying is misleading. For example, there is a (quite small) trial of facial recognition for home quarantine of international travelers. Now that's a topic worthy of discussion - But it's an extraordinary leap to say everyone is taking pictures of themselves (i.e that's just not true at all). It's similar for most of your assertions. There have been quite a number of strict rules in different parts of Australia at different times. Most are now being wound back in line with vaccination rates.
- chroem- 5y ago
  It looks like you are correct that the surveillance app is limited to anyone who has crossed state or national borders in the last two weeks. That being said, the Australian government has not relinquished its emergency powers, and is instead pushing for additional powers such as mandatory internet ID.

ipaddr 5y ago

The tracking is through vaccine checkins via vaccine passports. Boarding any travel method in Canada now requires a vaccine checkin. These passports will remain a long time.

coronqueue 5y ago
Vaccine passports in Canada are implemented using the https://smarthealth.cards/ https://smarthealth.cards/ standard. The QR codes are verifiable offline using digital signatures. The app used in BC is open source and available on Github: https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-iOS https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-iOS https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-Android https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-Android It works just fine with the device in airplane mode, and does not maintain a record of the QR codes it has verified.
- twofornone 5y ago
  Yet? Why are you people so trusting when you know that these sorts of apps are one library and one function call away from mass surveillance mandated by some misleadingly titled bill? Surely Canada has a spiritual equivalent to the Patriot Act, no?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Let's look at the details a little closer. You download a QR code from the government. You are identified at this point and linked to your test results given your QR code. Those open source clients are for BC only. Assuming the app store version matches those clients that ensures you are not being track in private businesses during a vaccine check. This doesn't ensure the federal system is using the same clients or other provinces. This doesn't ensure a vaccine passport check before boarding a train by a government official doesn't link your travel/location. The only thing we are sure is this will protect tracking at the private level in BC if the business has airplane mode on and both have downloaded and built the client themselves.
  - coronqueue 5y ago
    In BC, secretly engaging in tracking would be both illegal and contrary to public policy. The system was reviewed by https://www.oipc.bc.ca/ https://www.oipc.bc.ca/ as part of the rollout, and it's privacy-preserving properties were an essential part of the system being deemed acceptable. There are multiple independent open source implementations of the SMART Health Card QR standard. It's really just some JSON + compression/encoding/digital signature. The approach I have described is being used across Canada, and based on what has been indicated so far, this is in fact the intended direction of the federal government. Vaccine passport checks are not conducted by government officials. They are conducted by the private businesses where the checks take place. iOS 15 includes "app privacy report" functionality, and if the government were secretly submitting a different version to the app store than they claim they are (with secret reporting of scan data back to the mothership included in the app store builds), they would be trivially caught by anybody using this feature. It would show up in the network traffic logs that are available for anybody to inspect. Mobile applications are also not that difficult to decompile to identify hidden functionality. We can both be pretty sure that no tracking is taking place, and that it would be unrealistic for this system to be used for tracking purposes without that becoming a matter of public knowledge rather quickly.

_3u10 5y ago

I live in a town of 10,000. I have fiber optic internet from my ISP. Less than 500m from my house is a city run fiber network. I checked the places I've lived for the last 10 years in Vancouver, none of them are eligible for fiber optic. Rural Canada is much better connected than major cities. It's not easy to not be trackable in Canada, every highway of any significance has a highway cam. If you really want to live off grid in a tent I suppose you could evade tracking. For 99% of people, they are easily tracked. Tracking isn't about 100% compliance its about 99% compliance.

bregma 5y ago

Why do you think the vaccines contain so many 5G microchips? The hurry to get everyone double-vaxxed even caused a global silicon chip shortage.