By Joe Hoft
Even a broken clock is right two times a day. The Atlantic reported on the absurd liberty killer being tested in the state of South Australia where facial recognition and geolocation technology will track Aussies every move in the name of COVID.
The far-left Atlantic even hits the target sometimes. In a recent article, the Atlantic even admits that Australians have traded away too much liberty in the age of COVID. The Atlantic reports:
Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. Returning travelers quarantining at home will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”
In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.
By Joe Hoft
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