INDEX	November 29, 2021
MI5: biggest threat to our lives and pockets
Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of MI5 (though hopefully not quite as badly run and incompetent as our own spooks), is putting its phone tracking systems at the disposal of the country's health system, in a bid to slow the spread of Covid 19. This is something I said Britain should be doing as long ago as April 2020 (see blog http://www.brind.uk/20200401.html). Meanwhile the Test and Trace system set up in the UK had a price tag of £13.5 billion in the first year and is scheduled to notch up unimaginable costs of £37 billion over two years of operation. (see link ). To put that in perspective the Mars rover is said (by NASA) to have cost about £2 billion. Israel is an apartheid state currently committing slow genocide in the Gaza strip, but if you are Jewish, it is quite a liberal, open society, despite a succession of ultra right wing coalition governments. Towards the end of April 2020 the Israeli High Court banned Shin Bet from using its technology to track and trace Covid (see BBC report). But thanks to the new Omicron variety Shin Bet is back in the tracking business this week (see Times of Israel). The issue in Israel is civil liberties (though it could just as well be the ineffectiveness of a system which finds it hard to tell difference between two phones that are close together on different floors or in the same room). In the UK, of course, phones are routinely monitored (according to Edward Snowden) yet no-one seems to be concerned about it at all. Hopefully, the horrendous price tag of the failed trace and test system will make people think again.
INDEX
November 29, 2021 Jonathan Brind