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TikTok’s Trump problem is now TikTok’s Biden problem

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/VTuRlUUnu0OiFMC7F9j-AESoz_o=/0x0:2500x1309/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648490/1233355277.jpg" /></div>
It’s official: Biden has reversed Trump’s executive order banning TikTok in the United States, bringing to a close a period of uncertainty over the immediate fate of the wildly popular social media app. But TikTok’s problems with the US government are far from over.
On Wednesday morning, Biden <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/06/09/executive-order-on-protecting-americans-sensitive-data-from-foreign-adversaries/">issued an executive order</a> that revoked <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/31/21350072/trump-tiktok-executive-order-ban-microsoft-sale-bytedance-china-security-concerns">Trump’s prior executive order</a> banning TikTok over national security concerns. (Trump’s order never actually went into effect because <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-makes-its-case-for-last-minute-reprieve-from-u-s-download-ban-11601225594?mod=article_inline">US courts struck it down</a>.) Biden’s executive order also called for a broader US government review of all apps with ties to “a foreign adversary,” like China. This means that TikTok and other Chinese-affiliated companies could potentially face more restrictions in the future if they’re found to prove a risk to the United States’ economy or national security.
Biden’s approach to TikTok is notably different from Trump’s, which was to try to ban the app first and <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/13/21564320/tiktok-ban-trump-extension-court-china-national-security-threat-oracle-walmart">deal with the details later</a>. But it’s still in line with Trump’s general policy of using sanctions to restrict the increasing power of Chinese technology firms in the US economy. So although TikTok has been spared the looming threat of being kicked off the US internet in the short term, its business — along with other popular Chinese consumer apps like WeChat — is still under scrutiny in the long term.
“This order shows that on a bipartisan basis, everyone from Trump to Biden agrees that this aspect of our infrastructure is in danger of foreign influence, and that we should use our sanction powers when appropriate to do something about it,” Bobby Chesney, a professor at the University of Texas who specializes in national security law, told Recode.
A spokesperson for TikTok declined to comment.
In practical terms, Biden’s order means TikTok can keep operating in the US without the immediate threat of being shut down overnight, as Trump tried to do.
More broadly, though, Biden has called for the US Commerce Department to review any apps developed or owned by people or companies “subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary, including the People’s Republic of China,” and to evaluate potential threats to national security and US residents’ personal data. “The Federal Government should evaluate these threats through rigorous, evidence-based analysis,” the executive order states; the Commerce Department has 120 days to provide its first report on the matter.
The order also calls for the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland security to assess the “threat” and “vulnerability” Chinese technology companies present.
Several <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/25/tech/tiktok-national-security/index.html">US politicians other than Trump have worried</a> that TikTok <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/7/23/21334871/tiktok-ban-us-trump-china">poses a national security threat to the US</a> because it could share user data with the Chinese government. TikTok disputes this. So far, there has been no public evidence supporting such claims about data sharing. The executive order is effectively calling for more investigation on the matter.
Although Biden is taking a more measured approach than Trump toward TikTok, he’s made it clear that he intends to crack down on the Chinese technology sector in the US — which may prove to be a challenge for TikTok.
Just last week, Biden expanded <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-expands-blacklist-of-chinese-companies-banned-from-u-s-investment-11622741711?mod=article_inline">a Trump administration blacklist on Chinese companies</a> that US individuals or firms are barred from investing in. And aside from the now-reversed Trump-era ban, the US government is still pursuing a separate review of TikTok by a powerful government agency that reviews foreign acquisitions of US companies, called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS).
CFIUS has called for TikTok to divest from its Chinese owner, ByteDance. This would mean the company could still be forced to sell or outsource a part of its business — specifically, how it stores user data — to a US-based company.
Meanwhile, TikTok is more popular than ever in the US, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/24/tiktok-reveals-us-global-user-growth-numbers-for-first-time.html">with over 100 million monthly active users</a>. For now, those users can continue to enjoy TikTok without worrying about the app shutting down. But that doesn’t mean Chinese-affiliated social media companies will be able to avoid more issues with the US government in the future.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22526247/tiktok-trump-biden-ban-executive-order-reversed">https://www.vox.com/recode/22526247/tiktok-trump-biden-ban-executive-order-reversed</a>

vox TikTok’s Trump problem is now TikTok’s Biden problem

It’s official: Biden has reversed Trump’s executive order banning TikTok in the United States, bringing to a close a period of uncertainty ...

MoviePass was even shadier than we thought

Remember MoviePass? Remember that brief, glorious period during which 3 million of us paid about 10 bucks a month to see whatever movies we wanted to in theaters? Remember how the service sounded like it had to be too good to be true from the start, and in the end it was? Remember how we felt like it simply had to be some kind of scam?
Well, we were right. There’s no doubt the MoviePass era — which peaked in early 2018 — was, in retrospect, a halcyon period for habitual cinemagoers. Apparently, it was also a period defined by scammy behavior and possible fraud: The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/business/moviepass-settlement-ftc.html">reported</a> on June 8 that, according to recent accusations the Federal Trade Commission made against MoviePass, there was a whole lot of questionable business going on. And some of it seems pretty illegal.
If you went to see only one or two movies a month using MoviePass (or, of course, if you never subscribed at all), you may not have been aware of any weirdness before the service <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/23/20874031/moviepass-shut-down-explained">finally shut down in 2019</a>. But for people who used their subscription in a perfectly reasonable manner — seeing up to one movie in a theater per day, as explicitly permitted by the service’s own terms and conditions, at least until it started <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/19/18273160/moviepass-new-plan-uncapped-unlimited-march-2019">changing</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/27/17622092/moviepass-no-funding-briefly-stopped-service">things</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/17/17698968/moviepass-lawsuit-earnings-restrictions-six-unlimited">without</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/12/6/18129250/moviepass-new-pricing-structure-lowe-variety">warning</a> — MoviePass started to get glitchy long before the end.
Tickets for certain movies wouldn’t be available, or they’d be <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/6/17655872/moviepass-new-plan-three-movies-ten-dollars-unlimited">subject to a “premium” fee</a>. Your password might be mysteriously reset, thanks to some kind of “unauthorized activity” on your account. Perhaps you were told you’d been randomly selected to upload a photo of your ticket stub via the app for “verification,” but then the app wouldn’t work, and your account would be shut down. Or you’d try to <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/14/17687732/moviepass-cant-cancel-opt-in-email-app">cancel your subscription</a>, only to find it had been reactivated without your permission.
MoviePass subscribers who started to feel gaslit by the service’s signature red debit card weren’t alone — and now we know their instincts weren’t wrong, either.
The FTC has since discovered that many of MoviePass’s hassles and hoops were intentional. As reported by the New York Times, MoviePass on June 7 agreed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/business/moviepass-settlement-ftc.html">to settle with the FTC</a> over accusations that the company knowingly deceived its most active customers in order to cut its own costs.
A brief reminder of how MoviePass worked: At its peak, you’d “buy” a movie ticket at a regular kiosk in a theater lobby, using the specially branded MoviePass debit card to “pay” for it. The machine would spit out a ticket (theoretically, anyhow), and you’d go see your film. Meanwhile, MoviePass would reimburse the theater for the ticket’s full cost, which — depending on where you were in the US and the time of day — started at $9 or so, and could go up to $17 in a market like New York City. Every month, MoviePass charged you a subscription fee of about $10. In essence, MoviePass was selling deeply discounted tickets to its customers.
<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/3/17643798/moviepass-outage-subscription-blockbuster-peak-pricing">As I detailed at the time</a>, this was an obviously unsustainable business model, but MoviePass’s presumed endgame was to rapidly grow its customer base by dramatically dropping its subscription price to less than that of a single movie ticket in nearly all markets — the service had cost as much as $50 per month in previous years — and then throw its weight around with potential advertisers and partners. The price drop came after data analytics company Helios and Matheson bought MoviePass, and the company <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/7/17087048/moviepass-big-data-collection-tracking">did raise eyebrows</a> for hinting at plans to mine and even sell its subscribers’ data.
It was also likely, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/3/17643798/moviepass-outage-subscription-blockbuster-peak-pricing">as I wrote</a>, that MoviePass was banking on the age-old glossy magazine strategy of selling steeply discounted subscriptions in order to attract lucrative advertisers who want to reach a large subscriber base. In MoviePass’s case, it seemed the service hoped to approach movie studios and theater chains with proposals for partnerships, business relationships, and profit-sharing agreements, as well as to leverage its huge user base in making those deals. Indeed, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/19/18273160/moviepass-new-plan-uncapped-unlimited-march-2019">some of its business moves</a> confirmed this.
However, MoviePass’s success always depended on cementing those big moneymaking relationships before it exhausted its own pool of money, since the company was effectively taking a loss on every customer who signed up. And when it came to subscribers who used the service a few times a month (or a few times a week, as some people did), MoviePass was losing a lot of money.
So it tried to slow down its power users, which <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/192_3000_-_moviepass_complaint.pdf">the FTC’s complaint</a> suggests it did in three different ways.
First, beginning in April 2018, MoviePass invalidated the passwords of about 75,000 power users, claiming that it “detected suspicious activity or potential fraud.” That was a lie. And when a customer tried to reset their password — a very reasonable thing to do — they’d run into technical problems. Either they’d be sent to an invalid link to perform the reset or they wouldn’t receive a reset email at all, or the reset link wouldn’t accept their email address as valid. Coincidentally, MoviePass’s famously bad customer service would then be unresponsive or unavailable.
According to the FTC, only about half the users were able to reset their password within a week. And both MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe and Chairman Ted Farnsworth knew all about it, per a jaw-dropping set of bullet points in the <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/192_3000_-_moviepass_complaint.pdf">commission’s official complaint</a>, which quotes from company communication:
<blockquote>
a. When Lowe and Farnsworth presented the disruption program to other executives of Respondent MoviePass, one executive warned that the password disruption program “would be targeting all of our heavy users” and that “there is a high risk this would catch the FTC’s attention (and State AG’s attention) and could reinvigorate their questioning of MoviePass, this time from a Consumer Protection standpoint.” (Emphasis in original).
b. Another executive agreed, warning of “FTC Fears: All [the other MoviePass executive’s] notes about FTC and PR [public relations] fire are my main concerns as I think the PR backlash will flame the FTC stuff.” (Emphasis in original).
c. In response to these concerns, Lowe responded, “Ok I get it. So let[’]s try this with a small group. Let[’]s say 2% of our highest volume users.”
</blockquote>
The second way MoviePass scammed customers in April 2018 was by requiring about 20 percent of its most active users — around 450,000 people — to upload photos of their ticket stubs for approval. (I had to do this at least once.) Those users were told they’d been “randomly selected” to submit to this tedious “verification,” but according to the FTC, Lowe personally determined how many people would be part of the initiative. “Lowe was aware that the ticket verification program was deceptive and understood its negative effect on consumers,” the complaint notes.
That’s because the trouble came when you actually tried to do what MoviePass asked. The process didn’t work on many smartphone operating systems, and the service’s own verification software often failed. Once again, MoviePass’s famously bad customer service was slow to reply to complaints, which meant customers weren’t able to use the service they were paying for and had to buy a ticket through some other means. Finally, if verification failed for some reason, the subscriber’s account would be canceled.
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1623292710_1686_14149" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22648156,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FweNRBHC1z2xHuiIDaWHvZJymDA=/0x0:4500x2999/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/-v3fD78e56-WHBJ4oujBqRCWoDk=/0x0:4500x2999/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WZfoUbO70UXRPfA8LuK6x7bc3Ew=/0x0:4500x2999/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CH_o_klSuq2sTyJC6lLMxmsrhEA=/0x0:4500x2999/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/EL1DqS5SNnfjXt7B_Xt7QqwVYCY=/0x0:4500x2999/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WJPOzOgOp8Cj3bG3x3Im2D5ODV8=/0x0:4500x2999/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/OHJm9IiJLjW9cchYRAYKI7tEmts=/0x0:4500x2999/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/f_djyP3AC2i5cfga69QRQxR18LI=/0x0:4500x2999/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0UlKkCX1jKAj9634oCuR3DMSG20=/0x0:4500x2999/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="An image of the MoviePass app on a phone screen." data-upload-width="4500" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/AL6rDr9jY92veO42mZ4CDhjtUVI=/0x0:4500x2999/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mmXA14SAXb0bsbUfL4Jsk0h0ATk=/0x0:4500x2999/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RhTM1mRAKFCzH35TJJbDUAMXPVs=/0x0:4500x2999/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YyqhHZBWUYEbNREwOniPLqB5ry0=/0x0:4500x2999/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JkLoRk0AozLyqOZx-IG7_ReRQLc=/0x0:4500x2999/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/nj5Ru_zgZLNrnNqlIZcMVn7De-k=/0x0:4500x2999/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/EXyMK0PyKbSIltZt14Pfst3I1Pc=/0x0:4500x2999/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/uZTTMgyO8Wydr_JkUYgznUziU6k=/0x0:4500x2999/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UvhtcZwr1IqFAHMBomAnlf0TKG8=/0x0:4500x2999/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gyBx6vikujXCO6bPyoGG-T6MTiI=/0x0:4500x2999/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:4500x2999):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22648156/1018277696.jpg 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>MoviePass was great — when it worked.</figcaption>
<cite>Getty Images</cite></figure>
The third shady strategy was deploying a “trip wire,” which restricted some users to seeing a certain number of movies per month and then cut off their service once they reached the maximum. This limit was not announced or advertised, and didn’t appear in the account terms of use. Subscribers would be grouped by how often they used MoviePass, and once they exceeded their secret allotment, they wouldn’t be able to use their subscription again until the following month, for reasons that were never made clear.
According to the FTC, the “trip wire” was usually activated for users who went to more than three movies a month, with Lowe setting the three-movie benchmark.
The FTC complaint also includes allegations that some subscribers’ credit card numbers were ultimately exposed in a data breach, which feels almost like a coda to the whole ridiculous saga. Still, for MoviePass users, the details in the complaint are unlikely to feel surprising. By the time <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/23/20874031/moviepass-shut-down-explained">the service finally shut down</a> in September 2019, it had lost the confidence of most subscribers (many of whom had previously — and unsuccessfully — attempted to cancel their memberships) and become for many the symbol of a mishandled, Icarus-like business idea that flew way, way too close to the sun.
At the same time, the rise and fall of MoviePass <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/5/7/17302706/moviepass-explained-subscription-survive-theater-make-money-unlimited-cancel-amc">paved the way</a> for more measured and reasonable movie ticket subscription programs such as AMC Stubs, which — at least pre-Covid — seemed like they might bring some stability to the movie theater industry. (We’ll see what happens next as the pandemic wanes.) For now, though, the FTC’s complaints and MoviePass’s decision to settle, at minimum, helps validate the feelings of many of its most loyal customers: The deal was clearly too good to be true, but it was wonderful while it lasted.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22526008/moviepass-ftc-complaint-password-block-scam">https://www.vox.com/22526008/moviepass-ftc-complaint-password-block-scam</a>

vox MoviePass was even shadier than we thought

Remember MoviePass? Remember that brief, glorious period during which 3 million of us paid about 10 bucks a month to see whatever movies we ...

Digital driver’s licenses are coming

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Driver’s licenses stored on our phones are not too far off down the road.
Apple announced earlier this week that, by this fall, its Wallet App will be <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522864/apple-wallet-iphone-airport-ids-hotel-key-card-ios-15-wwdc">expanded to include digital IDs from participating states</a>. Meanwhile, New York State is working with IBM on the possibility of expanding its Excelsior Pass vaccine passport system to include driver’s licenses, according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/nyregion/excelsior-pass-vaccine-passport.html">a New York Times report</a>. The federal government is also on board with the concept. In April, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/04/19/2021-07957/minimum-standards-for-drivers-licenses-and-identification-cards-acceptable-by-federal-agencies-for">looking for input</a> on upcoming rules for mobile digital driver’s licenses.
But are digital IDs a good thing? Maybe not, but they also seem to be inevitable.
The pandemic has helped some people get more comfortable with storing personal information on their phones, which might explain why states and tech companies are forging ahead with the idea of digital driver’s licenses. These efforts are flanked by an ongoing and highly polarizing debate over <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22384340/vaccine-passport-vaccine-record-covid-19-clear-commonpass-excelsior-pass">digital vaccine passports</a>, which provide people with an easy way to prove they’ve been inoculated so that they can do things like <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22384340/vaccine-passport-vaccine-record-covid-19-clear-commonpass-excelsior-pass">board a plane or go to a concert</a>. Several states, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/these-states-are-attempting-ban-or-curtail-use-vaccine-passports-n1264665">including Florida and Texas</a>, have banned or restricted vaccine passports, which suggests that some Americans still are not comfortable storing certain highly personal information on their phones.
Though the technology that powers them is similar in many ways, digital driver’s licenses are not the same thing as vaccine passports, as their health records aren’t necessarily involved. Many of the plans and proposals being considered simply call for a secure, verifiable way to store all the information that’s currently on your physical driver’s license on your phone. Proponents of these digital state identification systems say that this tech will make it more convenient to show your ID, and will give people more control over their information. Privacy and civil liberties advocates warn that normalizing carrying identification cards on our phones could have very bad consequences, including endangering our digital privacy.
Despite apparent support on the state and federal level, some have sounded the alarm on potential problems with digital IDs. Just last month, the American Civil Liberties Union released a <a href="https://www.aclu.org/report/identity-crisis-what-digital-drivers-licenses-could-mean-privacy-equity-and-freedom">detailed report</a> raising issues about a digital state ID system, including concerns about police access to users’ phones, privacy, and surveillance risks, and the possibility that people will one day be coerced into downloading government apps. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project also obtained a contract revealing that the state of New York has bigger plans for its Excelsior Pass than it initially disclosed, which could reveal the risks of similar digital ID programs.
“It’s hard to trust the claim from officials that these apps are only going to do X or Y,” warns Albert Fox Cahn, an attorney at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, pointing to the potential expansion of Excelsior Pass. “We see this clear pattern of them being installed for one purpose and then expanded for another.”
The arrival of digital IDs shows how tech companies increasingly want to be involved in all the things you do with your physical wallet. Both iPhone and Android users can already store credit cards, plane tickets, and event tickets in digital wallets. Now, with the impending introduction of digital driver’s licenses, Apple is getting closer to making your physical wallet completely obsolete.
“To be fully free of your physical ID, there’s one more thing we need to bring to iPhone, and that’s your ID. So we’re bringing identity cards to Apple Wallet,” said Apple Vice President Jennifer Bailey at the company’s developer conference <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAywkPxRjTw&t=151s">on June 7</a>. “It’s that easy! Your ID information is now in Wallet.”
The federal government appears to support the idea. While the DHS is establishing new standards for the technology that powers digital IDs, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is already working with Apple to accept a version of an iPhone-based digital ID that can be used in airports. Several states are also laying the groundwork and rolling out digital driver’s licenses that could work with Apple Wallet (states are generally responsible for issuing ID cards in the US).
Apple isn’t the first or only major tech company trying to bring digital IDs to smartphones. Google has also been working on a system for a <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/you-could-store-a-digital-drivers-license-on-your-phone-soon-heres-how-it-works/">digital driver’s license</a>, and last fall, the company detailed new privacy and security standards for developers to <a href="https://security.googleblog.com/2020/10/privacy-preserving-features-in-mobile.html">handle identity documents</a> on mobile devices. IBM has also been researching digital driver’s licenses and expressed enthusiasm for how they <a href="https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2016/05/secure-verifiable-anywhere-anytime-digital-drivers-licenses/">might rely on blockchain technology</a>.
A French security company called Idemia has already launched digital IDs in partnership with several US states, including <a href="https://statescoop.com/arizona-digital-drivers-license-idemia/">Arizona</a> and <a href="https://www.idemia.com/press-release/idemia-unveils-next-generation-mobile-id-oklahoma-2021-01-19">Oklahoma</a>. The company argues that digital IDs make it easier to quickly authenticate someone’s identity, while also allowing a person to share less of their personal information. With an app, for instance, users can opt to just share their age with someone verifying that someone is old enough to buy alcohol without also sharing their address, Idemia <a href="https://www.idemia.com/mobile-id">explains on its website</a>.
The technology behind digital IDs is inevitably not dissimilar to the tech behind vaccine passports. Opponents to vaccine passports, however, have argued that requiring detailed health information to enter businesses and other public areas hurts people’s privacy and liberty. Nevertheless, some states that have banned vaccine passports are charging ahead with digital driver’s licenses.
In Florida, <a href="https://www.flgov.com/2021/05/03/governor-ron-desantis-signs-landmark-legislation-to-ban-vaccine-passports-and-stem-government-overreach/">where Gov. Ron DeSantis has banned vaccine passports</a>, the DMV is <a href="https://www.secureidnews.com/news-item/florida-mobile-drivers-licenses-ready-to-launch/">expected</a> to launch its mobile state ID system soon, and in Texas, <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/07/texas-vaccine-passports-covid-19/">whose state legislature has restricted the use of vaccine passports</a>, lawmakers <a href="https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/texas/texas-drivers-license-digital-bill-hb-273/269-7eeea031-4532-485a-91e5-2811df157722">are considering a pilot program</a> for digital driver’s licenses. Iowa, <a href="https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/20/iowa-gov-kim-reynolds-vaccine-passports-law-limiting-use-prove-covid-vaccination/5074442001/">which has also limited the use of vaccine passports</a>, also plans to launch a mobile ID system <a href="https://www.kcrg.com/2021/05/11/iowa-expected-to-launch-digital-drivers-license-by-end-of-year/">later this year</a>. In Nevada, where vaccine passports <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/citing-current-efforts-rosen-opposes-vaccine-passports-2346770/">remain a contentious issue</a>, Gov. Steve Sisolak last month formally signed off on digital licenses, and the DMV says they could arrive <a href="https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/i-team-digital-drivers-licenses-could-come-to-nevada-within-years/">within just a few years</a>.
In any case, it’s clear that residents of several states will soon be able to store their driver’s license on their phone. What remains unclear is whether we’re headed for a country where there are 50 different digital driver’s licenses and 50 different opportunities for issues and problems.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22526184/digital-drivers-license-apple-ibm-idemia-id-tsa-phones">https://www.vox.com/recode/22526184/digital-drivers-license-apple-ibm-idemia-id-tsa-phones</a>

vox Digital driver’s licenses are coming

Driver’s licenses stored on our phones are not too far off down the road. Apple announced earlier this week that, by this fall, its Wallet...

Barack Obama sounds the alarm about America’s democratic erosion

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As purple and red states <a href="https://www.vox.com/22463490/voting-rights-democracy-texas-georgia-suppression-jim-crow-supreme-court-sb7">pass voter suppression laws</a>, Republicans <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts">grow more hostile</a> to free and fair elections, and Congress remains <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/6/8/22521563/manchin-hr1-s1-for-the-people-act">unable to pass voting rights legislation</a>, former President Barack Obama is sounding the alarm about the erosion of American democracy.
“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” Obama told Anderson Cooper during an interview that aired on CNN on Monday evening.
Asked by Cooper if the January 6 insurrection and Republicans’ effort to delegitimize elections has led him to believe that our democracy is in crisis, Obama said he’s concerned.
“I think we have to worry when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago,” he said.
In an exchange with Cooper, Obama pointed out that democracy has fallen at the ballot box in other countries.
<blockquote>
COOPER: Democracy does not always die in a military coup.
OBAMA: Yes.
COOPER: Democracy dies at the ballot box.
OBAMA: That’s exactly right.
And Vladimir Putin gets elected with a majority of Russian voters, but none of us would claim that that’s the kind of democracy that we want.
</blockquote>
These comments, coming from a former president, should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thought Donald Trump’s departure from the White House in January ended the existential threat to American democracy that crested with the January 6 insurrection.
Those threats remain: The 44th president is right that there are good reasons to worry, given that Republicans responded to Trump’s defeat and the insurrection not with introspection, but by pushing an antidemocratic agenda aimed at making it even harder for them to lose elections in the future.
<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Fmr Pres. Obama to <a href="https://twitter.com/andersoncooper?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AndersonCooper</a> on the GOP: “I thought that there were enough guardrails institutionally that even after Trump was elected that you would have the so-called Republican establishment [step in]…we did not see that Republican establishment say hold on, time out” <a href="https://t.co/o9ZYGOoa0J">pic.twitter.com/o9ZYGOoa0J</a>
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) <a href="https://twitter.com/AC360/status/1402065712819093512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 8, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>
Obama’s concerns come about a month after a <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-republicans-still-wont-accept-that-biden-won/">FiveThirtyEight analysis</a> of recent polling indicated that the GOP’s big lies about the 2020 election — namely, that a combination of election fraud and illegal changes to state voting laws resulted in Trump having the presidency stolen from him — are having a corrosive impact, with 70 percent of Republicans wrongly believing President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump was illegitimate.
And things aren’t likely to get better soon, as Trump is now back on the speech and cable news circuit <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1401893067435696128">pushing these lies</a> at every opportunity.
<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Here's Trump lying during his Saturday speech in North Carolina that the Biden administration is illegitimate. Very dangerous stuff. <a href="https://t.co/8LQLgOuLFt">pic.twitter.com/8LQLgOuLFt</a>
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1401723425551491081?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 7, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>
And as Obama noted during his sit down with Cooper, state-level Republicans are responding to the big lie by writing legislation that warps the voting process, as <a href="https://www.vox.com/22463490/voting-rights-democracy-texas-georgia-suppression-jim-crow-supreme-court-sb7">Vox’s Ian Millhiser</a> recently explained:
<blockquote>
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of voter suppression laws. Many provisions currently being pushed by Republican state lawmakers make it harder to cast a ballot in a certain way — such as by mailing in the ballot or placing it in a drop box. Or they place unnecessary procedural obstacles in the way of voters. These provisions often serve no purpose other than to make it more difficult to vote, but they also are <a href="https://www.vox.com/22307937/voting-rights-georgia-arizona-voting-by-mail-republican-absentee-donald-trump">not insurmountable obstacles</a>.
Other provisions are more virulent. They might disqualify voters for no valid reason. Or allow partisan officials to refuse to certify an election, even if there are no legitimate questions about who won. Or make it so difficult for some voters, who are likely to vote for the party that is out of power, to cast their ballot that it’s nigh impossible for the incumbent party to lose.
</blockquote>
It’s that second type that appeared to worry Obama during his interview with Cooper.
“When you look at some of the laws that are being passed at the state legislative level, where legislators are basically saying, we’re going to take away the certification of election processes from civil servants, you know, secretaries of state, people who are just counting ballots, and we’re going to put it in the hands of partisan legislatures, who may or may not decide that a state’s electoral votes should go to one person or another, and when that’s all done against the backdrop of large numbers of Republicans having been convinced, wrongly, that there was something fishy about the last election, we’ve got a problem,” he said.
In short, Obama is concerned that state-level Republicans are viewing election results as recommendations to be considered, not mandates from the people. And they’re using spurious claims of fraud and new laws to give themselves the ability to reject the will of the people next time it doesn’t suit them.
Cooper mentioned Sarah Palin’s rise as a proto-Trump figure during the 2008 presidential campaign and asked Obama if he anticipated that “spirits that have long been lurking on the edges of the Republican Party” would ever “get this dark.”
Obama said he did not, then ticked through a brief history of how elected Republicans accommodated Trump at every turn — and continue to do so even after he made a desperate attempt to overturn the result of an election he lost fair and square.
<blockquote>
I thought that there were enough guardrails institutionally that even after Trump was elected that you would have the so-called Republican establishment who would say, “Okay, you know, it’s a problem if the White House doesn’t seem to be concerned about Russian meddling, or it’s a problem if we have a president who is saying that, you know, neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, there are good people on both sides. You know, that’s a little bit beyond the pale.”
... We did not see that Republican establishment say, “Hold on, time out, that’s not acceptable, that’s not who we are,” but rather be cowed into accepting it, and then finally culminating in January 6th, where what originally was, “Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t going anywhere, we’re just letting Trump and others vent,” and then suddenly you now have large portions of an elected Congress going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election.
</blockquote>
One could argue Obama’s surprise at how “dark” the GOP has gotten is naive, especially considering Trump’s rise within the party in 2011 and ’12 was in large part the result of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/13/21366668/trump-campaign-birtherism-kamala-harris-born-in-oakland">racist conspiracy theories</a> he pushed about Obama’s citizenship. And it’s long been the case that Republicans have used <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/24/18186741/voter-suppression-gerrymandering-carol-anderson">voter suppression laws for partisan advantage</a> by making it harder for Democratic-leaning populations to vote.
But Obama suggested the difference these days is that very few elected Republicans have the courage to stand up to a Republican base poisoned by misinformation from right-wing media, and are more concerned about staying in office than they are standing up for democracy.
“Suddenly, everybody was back in-line,” Obama said, alluding to how some prominent Republicans <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/2/27/22304757/kevin-mccarthy-cpac-trump">such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy</a> initially responded to the insurrection by speaking out against Trump before quickly circling the wagons around him. “The reason for that is because the base believed [Trump’s lies]. And the base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch.”
While there may be no silver bullet solution to the corrosive polarization Obama described, he argued, as he often has, that trying to personally engage with people we disagree with can help reestablish a sense of shared national purpose.
“It probably is not going to be done at the federal level. It’s probably going to involve communities finding ways to rebuild that sense of neighborliness, working together, conversations,” he said.
How does one build a sense of community with someone so deluded by right-wing propaganda that they buy evidence-free conspiracy theories about massive election fraud? It’s a difficult question to deal with, but an urgent one — especially given new <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/6/8/22521563/manchin-hr1-s1-for-the-people-act">federal voting rights legislation looks unlikely to pass</a> before next year’s midterm elections.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/6/9/22524580/barack-obama-democratic-erosion-cnn-anderson-cooper">https://www.vox.com/2021/6/9/22524580/barack-obama-democratic-erosion-cnn-anderson-cooper</a>

vox Barack Obama sounds the alarm about America’s democratic erosion

As purple and red states pass voter suppression laws , Republicans grow more hostile to free and fair elections, and Congress remains unab...

Numerous Reports Show That Covid Came From A Lab

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THE MAINSTREAM NARRATIVE AND GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH
The mainstream narrative regarding the origin of covid is that the virus came from nature and somehow got into humans. But, if the out-of-nature explanation is so substantiated, then how come the director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, concluded himself: “We have not yet found the source of the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do.”
In February of 2020, a group of virologists signed a statement affirming: “this coronavirus originated in wildlife”. But the statement had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York, which funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the virus leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then it would not look good for Daszak to organize an entire statement for virologists to sign that says that covid never came out of a lab. On December 9th, 2019, Daszak boasted in an interview of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had developed a coronavirus that acted like the SARS virus and could infect humans:
“And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS … Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger.”
He also said: “coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily.”
It thus makes sense that Daszak would come up with this statement declaring that covid did not come from a lab. He was covering for himself and his dangerous work. Emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, revealed how this was an attempt at a cover up. In one email Daszak wrote to two scientists one of whom was Ralph Baric, an expert on coronaviruses who collaborated with the major researcher on covid in China, Shi Zhengli (both of whom were involved in making coronavirus more dangerous): “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” He added: “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” Baric concurred:  “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.” Jamie Metzl explained why Daszak did not want to sign the statement: “if the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”
For twenty years, scientists like Daszak have been involved in a very dangerous thing called  “gain-of-function”, which (to put it simply) is the engineering of viruses more dangerous than what is found in nature. These scientists argue that this is completely safe and that its important because it will help prepare virologists for when a real outbreak — in which viruses from animals infect humans — happens. In April of 2020 <a href="https://shoebat.com/">shoebat.com</a> published an article on how scientists  Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka — conducting a “gain of function” project — engineered an extremely dangerous strand of H5N1 that has a 60% death rate. The research to develop such a virus was prohibited in 2014 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, but the prohibition was later lifted in 2017 once the White House developed an oversight board to superintend such projects (this oversight was called the HHS P3CO Framework, for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight). One of those involved in removing the moratorium on of gain-of-function was Christopher Park, the very person who, in December of 2020 in a conference on covid, would tell State Department investigators not to say anything about the US’s role in such dangerous research
In 2019 the government approved of the H5N1 research. If such a virus ever leaked out, it would kill a billion people and make covid look minuscule in comparison. This is exactly why a group of scientists in 2014 called the Cambridge Working Group warned against gain of function work:
“Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns …Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control.”
Ending the ban on gain-of-function experiments was due to a loophole that was exploited by the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci and the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins. The loophole was that the ban on such research may be lifted “if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.” As Richard H. Ebright <a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/an-interview-with-richard-ebright-anthony-fauci-francis-collins-systematically-thwarted/">explained</a>:
“The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have systematically thwarted efforts by the White House, the Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists to regulate GoF research of concern and even to require risk-benefit review for projects involving GoF research of concern.”
The gain-of-function research apparatus wields a lot of political leverage. David Asher, who led the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins investigation, stated that that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.
The danger of viruses leaking out of labs is a reality, and if it turns out that covid came out of a lab it “would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” to use the words of Antonio Regalado, an MIT Technology Review editor. There was another letter declaring the out-of-nature narrative which came out in March of 2020; it was authored by a  group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute, and it affirmed that: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. Yet in January of the same year Andersen wrote an email to Anthony Fauci in which he specified that there were “unusual features” in the virus and that “one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” Andersen also told Fauci that his team “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” What this means is that the virus does not show signs that it adapted naturally.
COVID’S RELATIVE
However, there is a wild coronavirus that is the closest relative to covid and it definitely can infect and kill people. In 2012 a team of miners in the Mojiang county in southern Yunnan province were given the job of shoveling bat feces from the floor of a mine shaft. After weeks of doing this grueling task, the miners became sick and were sent to the First Affiliated Hospital at the Kunnming Medical University. They had the symptoms of covid: their breathing was heavily hindered, they had cough and fever. Zong Nanshan, who was a leading figure in the battle against SARS (and who would later lead a panel of experts for China’s National Health Commission on covid) was called by the hospital. Zhong asked what kind of bats were in the mine, and it was the rufous horseshoe bat, the same species that carried SARS. Within months, three of the six miners died, the oldest being sixty-three years old. Blood samples of the miners were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology which concluded that they were positive for SARS antibodies.
In 2014 and 2016, Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli and her team of researchers studied samples of bat viruses taken from the mine shaft. They found many viruses, but there was only one that resembled SARS. They called it RaBtCoV/4991.
On February 3rd of 2020, Shi Zhengli and some of her colleagues published a research paper stating that covid was almost 80% identical to SARS, which caused the 2002 outbreak. But, they also stated that covid was 96.2% identical to a coronavirus sequence that these scientists had called RaTG13 which was priorly found in Yunnan province where wild coronaviruses are found in nature. The Chinese scientists then concluded that RaTG13 was the closest relative to covid. But they later affirmed that RaTG13 appeared identical to RaBtCoV/4991, the very virus that infected the miners.  But, story does not prove the out-of-nature narrative. The infection of the miners was in Yunnan, which is 1500 kilometers away from Wuhan. How did the outbreak begin in Wuhan? How could the virus travel from Yunnan to Wuhan? The outbreak began just miles away from the Wuhan lab, and the bats that contain these coronaviruses are not in Wuhan. This leaves the lab, which held this dangerous coronavirus, in suspicion.   
COVID DISCOVERED
On January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, got a phone call from his Chinese counterpart Dr. George Fu Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Gao told Redfield of a mysterious new pneumonia, seemingly limited to people exposed at a market in Wuhan. Redfield right away offered to send a team of specialists to help with the investigation.
Redfield began to doubt the wet market narrative. Had numerous families been infected from the same animal? Redfield recounted how Gao affirmed to him that there was no human-to-human transmission. But Redfield exhorted Gao to test more people in the community. Gao called him back, and with sadness told Redfield of how the contagion, which was now rapidly spreading, had no connection to the wet market which at the time so many people were blaming on the covid outbreak. The virus was spreading from one person to the next. Redfield began to wonder if the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved. The reason for his suspicion was the heavy involvement that the Institute had with gain-of-function research, or the process of making viruses dangerous. Even under the 2014 moratorium, the gain-of-function project on coronavirus was being bankrolled by the US government. As we read in <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins">Vanity Fair</a>:
“In May 2014, five months before the moratorium on gain-of-function research was announced, EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans. The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO framework. … Shi Zhengli herself listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae: $665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID. At least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance.”
On April 17th of 2020, a journalist for Newsmax asked Trump about the $3.7 million grant. “Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?” the reporter asked. Trump replied: “We will end that grant very quickly … Who was president then, I wonder.” One week later, an NIH official informed Daszak that his grant had been terminated. According to Fauci, testifying before a congressional committee, the order had come from the White House. The decision was responded with outrage. Eighty-one Nobel Laureates in science condemned the decision in an open letter to Trump’s health officials. But the NIH backtracked on its cancelation, reinstating the grant, but suspended its research until it fulfilled certain demands, such as giving info on the “apparent disappearance” of a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher, who was rumored on social media to be patient zero.  Here is a clip of the cancelation letter to EcoHealth:
IMAGE
Daszak’s model of research was under scrutiny, and rightfully so, since (according to Vanity Fair) it entailed “bringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulent”. This research was described by Richard Ebright as “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”
SHI ZHENGLI AND RALPH BARIC
In 2015, Chinese scientst Shi Zhengli and American coronavirus researcher Ralph S. Baric, wrote out their report on making wild coronaviruses dangerous to humans. In their report it speaks of giving these viruses the ability to infect humans so as to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].” To do this, these scientists (in November of 2015) took the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replaced its protein spike with one from a coronavirus from a bat (known as SHC014). This new virus was able to attack human cells when tested in a lab. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Shi and Baric both knew the dangers, writing that scientific review panels “may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.”
They justified their project by writing that “the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.” They didn’t actually use human cells; they used mice that were genetically engineered to contain the human version of a protein called ACE2 that reinforces the surface of cells that line the airways. It was Baric — the American scientist — who taught Shi this method of engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. While we put all the blame on China for covid, its important that we mention the fact that Shi’s covid research was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). One former federal health official described the situation as an institute “funded by American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then there is a virus” in the same city (Wuhan) as that lab.
The grant proposal made it clear that the research was for the purpose of making coronaviruses infectious to humans:
“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
WHEN THE AMERICANS SHOULD HAVE HELPED
In 2020 the Washington Post put out a report about how the US embassy in Beijing, back in 2018, sent a cable to Washington warning about how “the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.” The Chinese scientists, led by Shi Zhengli, were researching coronavirus supposedly for the purpose of preventing the next SARS-like pandemic. But this did not mean that their research was not a safety hazard. According to Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley:
“The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected”
The researchers in Wuhan were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese were asking for additional help from the US. This help was not given even though it was asked for by the US embassy in its cables to Washington. The cables warned of the safety risks from the research on coronavirus. “The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”
COERCION NOT TO MENTION AMERICA’S INVOLVEMENT IN GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH
<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins">According to</a> Vanity Affair, there was one State Department meeting in which officials seeking to demand accountability from the Chinese government say they were firmly told by colleagues not to inquire into the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would attract unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of such research. This hesitancy by the US government to inquire deeply sparks suspicion. David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau, expressed this suspicion: “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.”
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, explained that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”
FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE CDC ADMITS COVID CAME FROM A LAB
The former director for the Centers for Disease Control Robert Redfield concluded that covid leaked out of a lab: “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.”
Redfield later told Vanity Affair that he  got death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had come from a lab: “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis … I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
Whether or not the coronavirus that has killed millions came directly from Shi’s lab has yet to be confirmed (since her records have been sealed), but it would not be surprising if that was the case. According to Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety: “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice … depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.”
When Ebright, the board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, looked at the very first reports on the outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Other than Wuhan, there are only two other labs in the world where such research is done: Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s not a dozen cities,” said Ebright. “It’s three places.” The fact that the outbreak occurred in Wuhan sparks suspicion that it came from one of the three places on earth where such research is done.
THE OUT-OF-NATURE NARRATIVE IS SHAKY
If the coronavirus strictly came from bats to humans, then it would make sense that the first cases of covid infection would have been found in Yunnan and not Wuhan. The initial narrative was that the first cases of covid were found in a wet market just nine miles from the Wuhan lab. This, unto itself, is a cause to suspect that the virus leaked out of the lab. But later discoveries on the first cases makes the out-of-lab theory even more probable: the first cases were not in a wet market just nine miles from the lab, but in the Wuhan lab itself, and not in 2020 but in 2019. Three scientists in the Wuhan lab were involved in gain-of-function research for coronavirus and they got infected. As we read in a report from <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/wuhan-lab-staff-sought-hospital-care-before-covid-19-outbreak-disclosed-wsj-2021-05-23/">Reuters</a>:
“Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sought hospital care in November 2019, a month before China reported the first cases of COVID-19, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing a U.S. intelligence report.
The newspaper said the previously undisclosed report – which provides fresh details on the number of researchers affected, the timing of their illnesses, and their hospital visits – may add weight to calls for a broader investigation into whether the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from the laboratory.”
On December 9th of 2020, around twelve employees of the State Department got together in a meeting at a conference room in Foggy Bottom. In the meeting the question was asked: what does the US do regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology? The three researchers of the Wuhan lab getting infected with covid became a point of focus. Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, advised the officials not to bring attention to anything about the US government’s role in gain-of-function research. According to an official who is familiar with the meeting, some of the State Department employees were “absolutely floored” and that someone in the U.S. government could “make an argument that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe, was…shocking and disturbing.” As the group began to investigate the possibility that covid could have leaked out of a lab, they were told not to open a “Pandora’s box,” recounted four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The order “smelled like a cover-up,” said Thomas DiNanno, “and I wasn’t going to be part of it.”
Another Pandora’s box was that on January 15th, the State Department issued a fact sheet stating that the three scientists who got infected in the Wuhan lab were involved in secret projects with China’s military and “engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
The two viruses that are closest to covid were found in bats in the caves of Yunnan which is 1,500 kilometers away from Wuhan. If covid was from the wild and not engineered, then it would be not surprising if the first cases happened nearby these caves, and not in Wuhan where it so happens that dangerous coronaviruses were being engineered. The initial story that was spreading around the internet was that covid infections were the results of people going to a wet market where bats were sold as food. Well, it turned out that bats were not sold in this particular market. These wild coronaviruses infect the horseshoe bat which has a range of 50 kilometers, so there is no way that these bats could have travelled from Yunnan to Wuhan. Also, how could people start getting infected in winter when bats are in hibernation at this time and are over a thousand kilometers away from the city where the first covid cases were recorded? These questions were asked by two Chinese scientists, Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao (who come from two separate universities in Wuhan) in a research paper on the origins of covid.
In this paper the two Xiaos wrote and concluded:  “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus. … the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan…. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as this paper appeared on the internet, it vanished. But US officials were quick enough to get their hands on it.
Moreover, if covid infected bats before it got into humans, then it would still be able to infect bats. But, covid has been found to be not that infectious in bats. As one group of researchers <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0">put it</a>: “Tested bat species are poorly infected by SARS-CoV-2 and they are therefore unlikely to be the direct source for human infection”.
<a href="https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/">Another thing</a> that makes Covid suspicious is that there are no signs of prior adaptation. For example, before SARS first appeared as a deadly virus, it first infected bats and then began entering civets before going through six further changes in its spike protein and then being able to infect people. But when covid (SARS-CoV-2) was first discovered, it already had the ability to infect human cells. According to researchers led by Alina Chan of the Broad Institute:  “By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV”.  Ralph S. Baris noted that “early strains identified in Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source.” Its possible that covid incubated in a human population before adapting to the point of becoming dangerous. But this population has yet to be found. According to a WHO report there is “no evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months preceding the outbreak in December was observed.”
So lets summarize what we have learned here: Chinese scientists and Western collaborators like Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak were involved in making wild coronaviruses more dangerous and such research was getting American funding. Dangerous coronaviruses are found in the wild, but in the bat caves of Yunnan, over a thousand miles away from Wuhan where the outbreak began, leaving us with the question of how did this virus end up in this city so far away from where these pathogens are found in nature? The fact that the WHO affirms that we still don’t know where this virus came from means that the official narrative can indeed be questioned. And also the fact that the former director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, affirms that covid leaked out of a lab, gives major leverage to the belief that this pandemic spawned out of a laboratory. If it was done on purpose or by accident has yet to be revealed. What we must focus on is not just the origins of covid but the political and economic ramifications of the pandemic. The acceleration towards automation, the elevation of technocracy and <a href="https://shoebat.com/2021/06/02/covid-and-the-rise-of-scientism/">the rise of scientism</a> are the results of the pandemic. We must also keep in mind that the government printing of money to give handouts due to people not working during the pandemic has been a cause of major inflation. An economic bomb could set off and it will be the result of the pandemic. The rapidly growing trend of automation and the rising power of technocracy means that there will be many people left without work; unemployment due to economic diminishment will also be a reality, and a popularity for more radical ideologies, such as socialism, will grow. Protectionism has also been on the rise since the pandemic, and this trend will mark the transition of the new zeitgeist, where radical ideologies which were once considered fringe, will become popular.       
 
 
source <a href="https://shoebat.com/2021/06/09/numerous-reports-show-that-covid-came-from-a-lab/">https://shoebat.com/2021/06/09/numerous-reports-show-that-covid-came-from-a-lab/</a>