Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in\u00a0mainstream<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0health-care\u2013focused media<\/a>\u00a0for his call to create a \u201cnew biomedical research agency\u201d modeled after the US military\u2019s \u201chigh-risk, high-reward\u201d Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop \u201cinnovative\u201d and \u201cbreakthrough\u201d treatments for cancer, Alzheimer\u2019s disease, and diabetes, with a call to \u201cend cancer as we know it.\u201d<\/p>\n Far from \u201cending cancer\u201d in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge \u201cnational security\u201d with \u201chealth security\u201d in such as way as to use both physical and mental health \u201cwarning signs\u201d to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur. Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic \u201cpre-crime\u201d organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as \u201cwrongthink.\u201d<\/p>\n The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden\u2019s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley\u2013dominated Broad Institute,\u00a0has been controversial<\/a>\u00a0for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new \u201chealth DARPA.\u201d<\/p>\n This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds\u00a0would not be peer reviewed<\/a>\u00a0prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants.<\/p>\n ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the \u201cbreakthroughs\u201d that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer\/BioNTech vaccine,\u00a0stated just last month<\/a>\u00a0that \u201ccancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech\u201d post-COVID. BioNTech\u00a0has been developing<\/a>\u00a0mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.<\/p>\n Other \u201cinnovative\u201d technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.<\/p>\n ARPA-H is not a new and exclusive Biden administration idea; there was a previous attempt to create a \u201chealth DARPA\u201d during the Trump administration in late 2019. Biden began to promote the idea during his presidential campaign as early as June 2019, albeit using a very different justification for the agency than what had been pitched by its advocates to Trump. In 2019, the same foundation and individuals currently backing Biden\u2019s ARPA-H had urged then president Trump to create \u201cHARPA,\u201d not for the main purpose of researching treatments for cancer and Alzheimer\u2019s, but to stop mass shootings before they happen through the monitoring of Americans for \u201cneuropsychiatric\u201d warning signs.<\/p>\n For the last few years, one man has been\u00a0the driving force<\/a>\u00a0behind HARPA\u2014former vice chair of General Electric and former president of NBCUniversal, Robert Wright. Through the Suzanne Wright Foundation (named for his late wife), Wright\u00a0has spent years<\/a>\u00a0lobbying for an agency that \u201cwould develop biomedical capabilities\u2014detection tools, treatments, medical devices, cures, etc.\u2014for the millions of Americans who are not benefitting from the current system.\u201d While he, like Biden, has cloaked the agency\u2019s actual purpose by claiming it will be mainly focused on treating cancer, Wright\u2019s 2019 proposal to his personal friend Donald Trump revealed its underlying ambitions.<\/p>\n As first proposed by Wright in 2019, the flagship program of HARPA would be\u00a0SAFE HOME<\/a>, short for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes. SAFE HOME would suck up masses of private data from \u201cApple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo, and Google Home\u201d and other consumer electronic devices, as well as information from health-care providers to determine if an individual might be likely to commit a crime. The data would be analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms \u201cfor early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence.\u201d<\/p>\n The Department of Justice\u2019s\u00a0pre-crime approach known as DEEP<\/a>\u00a0was activated just months before Trump left office; it was also justified as a way to \u201cstop mass shootings before they happen.\u201d Soon after Biden\u2019s inauguration, the new administration began using information from social media to\u00a0make pre-crime arrests<\/a>\u00a0as part of its approach toward combatting \u201cdomestic terror.\u201d Given the history of Silicon Valley companies collaborating with the government on\u00a0matters of warrantless surveillance<\/a>, it appears that aspects of SAFE HOME may already be covertly active under Biden, only waiting for the formalization of ARPA-H\/HARPA to be legitimized as public policy.<\/p>\n The national-security applications of Robert Wright\u2019s HARPA are also illustrated by the man who was its lead scientific adviser\u2014former head of DARPA\u2019s Biological Technologies Office Geoffrey Ling. Not only is Ling the main scientific adviser of HARPA, but\u00a0the original proposal<\/a>\u00a0by Wright would have Ling both personally design HARPA and lead it once it was established. Ling\u2019s work at DARPA can be summarized by BTO\u2019s stated mission, which is to work toward merging \u201cbiology, engineering, and computer science to harness the power of natural systems for national security.\u201d BTO-favored technologies are also poised to be the mainstays of HARPA, which\u00a0plans to specifically use<\/a>\u00a0\u201cadvancements in biotechnology, supercomputing, big data, and artificial intelligence\u201d to accomplish its goals.<\/p>\n The direct DARPA connection to HARPA underscores that the agenda behind this coming agency dates back to the failed Bio-Surveillance project of DARPA\u2019s Total Information Awareness program, which was launched after the events of September 11, 2001. TIA\u2019s\u00a0Bio-Surveillance project<\/a>\u00a0sought to develop the \u201cnecessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches,\u201d accomplishing this \u201cby monitoring non-traditional data sources\u201d including \u201cpre-diagnostic medical data\u201d and \u201cbehavioral indicators.\u201d<\/p>\n While nominally focused on \u201cbioterrorist attacks,\u201d TIA\u2019s Bio-Surveillance project also sought to acquire early detection capabilities for \u201cnormal\u201d disease outbreaks. Bio-Surveillance and related DARPA projects at the time, such as LifeLog, sought to harvest data through the mass use of some sort of wearable or handheld technology. These DARPA programs were ultimately shut down due to the controversy over claims they would be used to profile domestic dissidents and eliminate privacy for all Americans in the US.<\/p>\n That DARPA\u2019s past total surveillance dragnet is coming back to life under a supposedly separate health-focused agency, and one that emulates its organizational model no less, confirms that many TIA-related programs were merely distanced from the Department of Defense when officially shut down. By separating the military from the public image of such technologies and programs, it made them more palatable to the masses, despite the military remaining heavily involved behind the scenes. As\u00a0Unlimited Hangout<\/a><\/em>\u00a0has recently reported, major aspects of TIA were merely privatized, giving rise to companies such as Facebook and Palantir, which resulted in such DARPA projects being widely used and accepted. Now, under the guise of the proposed ARPA-H, DARPA\u2019s original TIA would essentially be making a comeback for all intents and purposes as its own spin-off.<\/p>\n This most recent effort to create ARPA-H\/HARPA combines well with the coordinated push of Silicon Valley companies into the field of health care, specifically Silicon Valley companies that double as contractors to US intelligence and\/or the military (e.g., Microsoft, Google, and Amazon). During the COVID-19 crisis, this trend toward Silicon Valley dominance of the health-care sector has accelerated considerably due to a top-down push toward digitalization with telemedicine, remote monitoring, and the like.<\/p>\n One interesting example is Amazon, which launched a wearable last year\u00a0that purports<\/a>\u00a0to not only use biometrics to monitor people\u2019s physical health and fitness but to track their emotional state as well. The previous year,\u00a0Amazon acquired<\/a>\u00a0the online pharmacy PillPack, and it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which data from Amazon\u2019s Halo wellness band is used to offer treatment recommendations that are then supplied by Amazon-owned PillPack.<\/p>\n Companies such as Amazon, Palantir, and Google are set to be intimately involved in ARPA-H\u2019s activities. In particular, Google, which launched\u00a0numerous health-tech initiatives in 2020<\/a>, is set to have a major role in this new agency due to its long-standing ties to the Obama administration when Biden was vice president and to President Biden\u2019s top science adviser, Eric Lander.<\/p>\n As mentioned, Lander is poised to play a major role in ARPA-H\/HARPA if and when it materializes. Before becoming the top scientist in the country, Lander was president and founding director of the Broad Institute. While advertised as a partnership between MIT and Harvard, the Broad Institute is\u00a0heavily influenced by Silicon Valley<\/a>, with two former Google executives on its board, a partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock Partners, and the former CEO of IBM, as well as some of its\u00a0top endowments<\/a>\u00a0coming from prominent tech executives.<\/p>\n Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was\u00a0intimately involved with Obama\u2019s 2012 reelection campaign<\/a>\u00a0and who is close to the Democratic Party in general, chairs the Broad Institute as of this April. In March, Schmidt\u00a0gave the institute $150 million<\/a>\u00a0to \u201cconnect biology and machine learning for understanding programs of life.\u201d During his time on the Broad Institute board, Schmidt\u00a0also chaired<\/a>\u00a0the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a group of mostly Silicon Valley, intelligence, and military operatives who\u00a0have now charted the direction<\/a>\u00a0of the US government\u2019s policies on emerging tech and AI. Schmidt\u00a0was also pitched<\/a>\u00a0as potential head of a tech-industry task force by the Biden administration.<\/p>\n Earlier, in January, the Broad Institute\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that its health-research platform, Terra, which was built with Google subsidiary Verily, would partner with Microsoft. As a result, Terra now allows Google and Microsoft\u00a0to access<\/a>\u00a0a vast trove of genomic data that is poured into the platform by academics and research institutions from around the world.<\/p>\n In addition, last September, Google teamed up with the Department of Defense as part of a new AI-driven \u201cpredictive health\u201d program that also has links to the US intelligence community. While initially focused on predicting cancer cases, this initiative clearly plans to expand to predicting the onset of other diseases before symptoms appear, including COVID-19.\u00a0As noted by\u00a0Unlimited Hangout<\/em><\/a>\u00a0at the time, one of the ulterior motives for the program, from Google\u2019s perspective, was for Google to gain access to \u201cthe largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world,\u201d which is held by the Defense Health Agency. Having exclusive access to this data is a huge boon for Google in its effort to develop and expand its growing suite of AI health-care products.<\/p>\n The military is currently being used to pilot COVID-19\u2013related biometric wearables for \u201creturning to work safely.\u201d Last December, it was\u00a0announced that<\/a>\u00a0Hill Air Force Base in Utah would make biometric wearables a mandatory part of the uniform for some squadrons. For example, the airmen of the Air Force\u2019s 649th Munitions Squadron must now wear a smart watch made by Garmin and a smart ring made by Oura as part of their uniform.<\/p>\n According to\u00a0the Air Force<\/a>, these devices detect biometric indicators that are then analyzed for 165 different biomarkers by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency\/Philips Healthcare AI algorithm that \u201cattempts to recognize an infection or virus around 48 hours before the onset of symptoms.\u201d The development of that algorithm began\u00a0well before the COVID-19 crisis<\/a>\u00a0and is a recent iteration of a series of military research projects that appear to have begun\u00a0under the 2007 DARPA Predicting Health and Disease (PHD) project<\/a>.<\/p>\n While of interest to the military, these wearables are primarily intended for mass use\u2014a big step toward the infrastructure needed for the resurrection of a bio-surveillance program to be run by the national-security state. Starting first with the military makes sense from the national-security apparatus\u2019s perspective, as the ability to monitor biometric data, including emotions, has obvious appeal for those managing the recently expanded \u201cinsider threat\u201d programs in\u00a0the military<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Department of Homeland Security<\/a>.<\/p>\n One indicator of the push for mass use is that the same Oura smart ring being used by the Air Force was also recently\u00a0utilized by the NBA<\/a>\u00a0to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks among basketball players. Prior to COVID-19, it was promoted for consumer use by\u00a0members of the British Royal family<\/a>\u00a0and Twitter CEO\u00a0Jack Dorsey<\/a>\u00a0for improving sleep. As recently as last Monday, Oura\u2019s CEO, Harpeet Rai, said that the entire future of wearable health tech will soon be \u201cproactive rather than reactive<\/a>\u201d because it will focus on predicting disease based on biometric data obtained from wearables in real time.<\/p>\n Another wearable tied to the military that is creeping into mass use is the BioButton and its predecessor the BioSticker. Produced by the company\u00a0BioIntelliSense<\/a>, the sleek new BioButton is advertised as a wearable system that is \u201ca scalable and cost-effective solution for COVID-19 symptom monitoring at school, home and work.\u201d BioIntelliSense\u00a0received $2.8 million<\/a>\u00a0from the Pentagon last December to develop the BioButton and BioSticker wearables for COVID-19.<\/p>\n BioIntelliSense,\u00a0cofounded and led by<\/a>\u00a0former Microsoft HealthVault developer James Mault, now has its wearable sensors being rolled out for widespread use on some college campuses and at some US hospitals. In some of those instances, the company\u2019s wearables are being used to\u00a0specifically monitor<\/a>\u00a0the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine as opposed to symptoms of COVID-19 itself. BioIntelliSense is currently running a study, partnered with Philips Healthcare and the University of Colorado, on the use of its wearables for early COVID-19 detection, which is entirely\u00a0funded by the US military<\/a>.<\/p>\n While the use of these wearables is currently \u201cencouraged but optional\u201d at these pilot locations, could there come a time when they are mandated in a workplace or by a government? It would not be unheard of, as\u00a0several countries<\/a>\u00a0have already required foreign arrivals to be monitored through use of a wearable during a mandatory quarantine period. Saint Lucia is\u00a0currently using BioButton<\/a>\u00a0for this purpose. Singapore, which seeks to be among the first \u201csmart nations<\/a>\u201d in the world,\u00a0has given every single one of its residents<\/a>\u00a0a wearable called a \u201cTraceTogether token\u201d for its contact-tracing program. Either the wearable token or the TraceTogether smartphone app is mandatory for all workplaces, shopping malls, hotels, schools, health-care facilities, grocery stores, and hair salons. Those without access to a smartphone are expected to use the \u201cfree\u201d government-issued wearable token.<\/p>\n Making mandatory wearables the new normal not just for COVID-19 prevention but for monitoring health in general would institutionalize quarantining people who have no symptoms of an illness but only an opaque algorithm\u2019s determination that vital signs indicate \u201cabnormal\u201d activity.<\/p>\n Given that no AI is 100 percent accurate and that AI is only as good as the data it is trained on, such a system would be guaranteed to make regular errors: the question is how many. One AI algorithm being used to \u201cpredict COVID-19 outbreaks\u201d in Israel and some US states is marketed by Diagnostic Robotics; the (likely inflated) accuracy rate the company provides for its product is\u00a0only 73<\/a>\u00a0percent. That means, by the company\u2019s own admission, their AI is wrong 27 percent of the time. Probably, it is even less accurate, as the 73 percent figure has never been independently verified.<\/p>\n Adoption of these technologies has benefitted from the COVID-19 crisis, as supporters are seizing the opportunity to accelerate their introduction. As a result, their use will soon become ubiquitous if this advancing agenda continues unimpeded.<\/p>\n Though this push for wearables is obvious now, signs of this agenda were visible several years ago. In 2018, for instance, insurer John Hancock\u00a0announced that<\/a>\u00a0it would replace its life insurance offerings with \u201cinteractive policies\u201d that involve individuals having their health monitored by commercial health wearables. Prior to that announcement, John Hancock and other insurers such as Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare\u00a0offered various rewards for policyholders<\/a>\u00a0who wore a fitness wearable and shared that data with their insurance company.<\/p>\n In another pre-COVID example, the\u00a0Journal of the American Medical Association<\/em>\u00a0published an article<\/a>\u00a0in August 2019 that claimed that wearables \u201cencourage healthy behaviors and empower individuals to participate in their health.\u201d The authors of the article, who are affiliated with Harvard, further claimed that \u201cincentivizing use of these devices [wearables] by integrating them in insurance policies\u201d may be an \u201cattractive\u201d policy approach. The use of wearables for policyholders has since been heavily promoted\u00a0by the insurance industry<\/a>, both prior to and after COVID-19, and some speculate that health insurers could soon mandate their use in certain cases or as a broader policy.<\/p>\n These biometric \u201cfitness\u201d devices\u2014such as Amazon\u2019s Halo\u2014can monitor more than your physical vital signs, however, as they can also monitor your emotional state. ARPA-H\/HARPA\u2019s flagship SAFE HOME program reveals that the ability to monitor thoughts and feelings is an already existing goal of those seeking to establish this new agency.<\/p>\n According to World Economic Forum luminary and historian Yuval Noah Harari, the transition to \u201cdigital dictatorships\u201d will have a\u00a0\u201cbig watershed\u201d moment<\/a>\u00a0once governments \u201cstart monitoring and surveying what is happening inside your body and inside your brain.\u201d He says that the mass adoption of such technology would make human beings \u201chackable animals<\/a>,\u201d while those who abstain from having this technology on or in their bodies would become part of a new \u201cuseless\u201d class. Harari has also asserted that biometric wearables will someday be used by governments to target individuals who have the \u201cwrong\u201d emotional reactions to government leaders.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, one of Harari\u2019s biggest fans, Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, has recently led his company into the development of a\u00a0comprehensive biometric and \u201cneural\u201d wearable<\/a>\u00a0based on technology from a \u201cneural interface\u201d start-up that Facebook acquired in 2019. Per Facebook, the wearable \u201cwill integrate with AR [augmented reality], VR [virtual reality], and human neural signals\u201d and is set to become commercially available soon. Facebook also notably owns the VR company Oculus Rift, whose founder, Palmer Luckey, now runs the US military AI contractor Anduril.<\/p>\n As\u00a0recently reported<\/a>, Facebook was shaped in its early days to be a private-sector replacement for DARPA\u2019s controversial LifeLog program, which sought to both \u201chumanize\u201d AI and build profiles on domestic dissidents and terror suspects. LifeLog was also promoted by DARPA as \u201csupporting medical research and the early detection of an emerging pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n It appears that current trends and events show that DARPA\u2019s decades-long effort to merge \u201chealth security\u201d and \u201cnational security\u201d have now advanced further than ever before. This may partially be because Bill Gates, who has wielded significant influence over health policy globally in the last year, is a long-time advocate of fusing health security and national security to thwart both pandemics and \u201cbioterrorists\u201d before they can strike, as can be heard in\u00a0his 2017 speech<\/a>\u00a0delivered at that year\u2019s Munich Security Conference. That same year, Gates\u00a0also publicly urged<\/a>\u00a0the US military to \u201cfocus more training on preparing to fight a global pandemic or bioterror attack.\u201d<\/p>\n In the merging of \u201cnational security\u201d and \u201chealth security,\u201d any decision or mandate promulgated as a public health measure could be justified as necessary for \u201cnational security,\u201d much in the same way that the mass abuses and war crimes that occurred during the post-9\/11 \u201cwar on terror\u201d were similarly justified by \u201cnational security\u201d with little to no oversight. Yet, in this case, instead of only losing our civil liberties and control over our external lives, we stand to lose sovereignty over our individual bodies.<\/p>\n The NIH, which would house this new ARPA-H\/HARPA,\u00a0has spent hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a>\u00a0experimenting with the use of wearables since 2015, not only for detecting disease symptoms but also for monitoring individuals\u2019 diets and illegal drug consumption. Biden played a key part in that project, known as\u00a0the Precision Medicine initiative<\/a>, and\u00a0separately highlighted<\/a>\u00a0the use of wearables in cancer patients as part of the Obama administration\u2019s related\u00a0Cancer Moonshot<\/a>\u00a0program. The third Obama-era health-research project was the NIH\u2019s\u00a0BRAIN initiative<\/a>, which was launched, among other things, to \u201cdevelop tools to record, mark, and manipulate precisely defined neurons in the living brain\u201d that are determined to be linked to an \u201cabnormal\u201d function or a neurological disease. These initiatives took place at a time when Eric Lander\u00a0was the cochair<\/a>\u00a0of Obama\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology while still leading the Broad Institute. It is hardly a coincidence that Eric Lander is now Biden\u2019s top science adviser, elevated to a new cabinet-level position and set to guide the course of ARPA-H\/HARPA.<\/p>\n Thus, Biden\u2019s newly announced agency, if approved by Congress, would integrate those past Obama-era initiatives with Orwellian applications under one roof, but with even less oversight than before. It would also seek to expand and mainstream the uses of these technologies and potentially move toward developing policies that would mandate their use.<\/p>\n If ARPA-H\/HARPA is approved by Congress and ultimately established, it will be used to resurrect dangerous and long-standing agendas of the national-security state and its Silicon Valley contractors, creating a \u201cdigital dictatorship\u201d that threatens human freedom, human society, and potentially the very definition of what it means to be human.<\/p>\n Featured image \u2013 Oura Ring biometric tracker. Source: https:\/\/ouraring.com\/<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n ___ This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a \u201cDigital Dictatorship\u201d A \u201cnew\u201d proposal by the Biden administration to create a health-focused federal agency modeled after DARPA is not what it appears to be. Promoted as a way to \u201cend cancer,\u201d … Continue reading The Long Road to ARPA-H<\/h2>\n
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Silicon Valley, the Military and the Wearable \u201cRevolution\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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The Era of Digital Dictatorships Is Nearly Here<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nhttps:\/\/unlimitedhangout.com\/2021\/05\/investigative-reports\/this-biden-proposal-could-make-the-us-a-digital-dictatorship\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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