Tag Archives: freedom

Flaw?

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The People’s Republic of China government requires everyone attending the Beijing Olympics next month to load a tracking app on their cell phones:

Those who attend the Olympics, including athletes and journalists, are required to download the app and upload their health and vaccination information to track potential outbreaks of COVID-19.

The Citizen Lab, based in the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, has identified what it terms a security flaw.

It turns out that the app, MY2022, fails to validate some SSL certificates. That means it’s a trivial matter for…others…to bypass any security measures, including encryption, that the phone’s owner might have implemented. Those others then can easily intercept and otherwise gain access to the cell phone owner’s sensitive information: all the medical information the PRC government requires to be loaded into the app, ostensibly for Wuhan Virus tracking, along with wholly unrelated information like all traffic in which the phone might be or have been engaged, all passport information, all medical information whether or not related to the Virus, and all other information stored on the cell phone—images and videos, contact lists, other emails, Web sites and bookmarks, and on and on.

The Lab’s key findings are

  • MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.
  • MY2022 is fairly straightforward about the types of data it collects from users in its public-facing documents. However, as the app collects a range of highly sensitive medical information, it is unclear with whom or which organization(s) it shares this information.
  • MY2022 includes features that allow users to report “politically sensitive” content. The app also includes a censorship keyword list, which, while presently inactive, targets a variety of political topics including domestic issues such as Xinjiang and Tibet as well as references to Chinese government agencies.
  • While the vendor did not respond to our security disclosure, we find that the app’s security deficits may not only violate Google’s Unwanted Software Policy and Apple’s App Store guidelines but also China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection, providing potential avenues for future redress.

It’s doubtful, at least to me, that China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection are being violated, though, given the PRC government’s already widespread surveillance of all of its citizens. The PRC’s 2017 national intelligence law, too, requires all entities to cooperate with the government’s intelligence community and provide whatever information that community requires, which means that the app’s spying is no violation of the PRC’s own laws.

And there’s this:

[The] Citizen Lab said it had notified the Chinese organizing committee for the Games in December about the potential issues but had never received a response.

The Beijing Organizing Committee’s refusal to respond is itself instructive.

No, this is no flaw; neither PRC government programmers nor Beijing Organizing Committee programmers, who are the ones who officially built the app, are that amateurish. It’s deliberate, and it’s one more reason to not only skip the Beijing Olympics (including not watching them on NBC), but to skip doing any sort of business with any sort of PRC company.

The Lab’s report can be read here.

No Law

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…but merely convenience. Australia’s immigration ministry makes Australia a nation ruled by men and not by law.

Immigration Minister Alex Hawke made clear in court documents concerning his second revocation of Novak Djokovic’s entry visa that the law counts for nothing.

Hawke didn’t dispute Djokovic’s claim of a medical exemption from rules that travelers to Australia must be vaccinated against Covid-19…. Hawke, who canceled Djokovic’s visa on Friday, said allowing the player to stay could sway some Australians against getting vaccinated.

Additionally,

Hawke didn’t refute Djokovic’s contention that he posed a negligible health risk, documents showed.

In his separate visa cancelation notice, though, Hawke said,

His [Djokovic’s] presence in Australia, given his well-known stance on vaccination, creates a risk of strengthening the antivaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community[.]

Because government convenience is all that matters.

Australia isn’t the US, and Aussies can accept the style of governance they choose—or that gets imposed on them by the men and women in their government. That, though, does not make their decision to be ruled by men—a very hard choice to reverse—rather than by law any less foolish.

UPDATE: Australia’s federal court upheld Hawke’s order to revoke Djokovic’s visa and ordered the tennis star deported. The court’s reasoning was this:

Chief Justice James Allsop said the decision came down to whether Immigration Minister Ethan Hawke’s decision was “irrational or legally unreasonable.”
“It is no part of the function of the court to decide upon the merits or wisdom of the [government’s] decision,” Allsop explained.

That’s appropriate, as far as it goes. Court judges should rule on the legality of the matter, not interpose their own views of societal needs or their own feelz.

It doesn’t, though, detract from Hawke’s decision to act on his feelz and his views of government convenience being more important than law.

Military’s Attack on Religious Freedom

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The US military is flatly refusing even to seriously consider members’ requests for religious accommodation requests regarding excusals from getting vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus. Members who apply are getting boiler plate denials of their requests. Every single one of them; no request has been granted to date.

The Chief of Staff for the USAF, for instance, is insisting that

vaccination is the least restrictive means of furthering the military’s compelling governmental interest.

The business is on appeal through the USAF (and Navy and Army) internal appeals processes; I strongly suspect members will wind up in Federal courts after the DoD appeals processes rubber stamp the service chiefs’ decisions to deny.

In that event, I suggest that all courts hearing such cases should order the Secretary of the Air Force to provide the facts and logic that support the claim of least restrictive means. No Federal court should accept the bald, unsubstantiated statement as in any way dispositive.

There’s another action Federal courts should take: should require the service chiefs to provide the specific reasons for denying the RAR for each case in which an RAR was denied.

One Federal court, since I first wrote this post, has taken some action.

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Navy from enforcing its Must Have Vaccine move. He wrote, in part,

There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.

And

There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.

The judge’s ruling can be read here.

The Senate and the Republic

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Senator Jeff Merkley (D, OR) has said the quiet part aloud (to coin a phrase). His immediate venue is the coming Progressive-Democrat effort to Federalize our nation’s elections, which by our Constitution are set by each State’s own legislatures and only modifiable under narrow circumstances by the Federal Congress.

You can think of January as a moment when two different forces are converging. One is the functionality of the Senate and the other is the functionality of our republic.

No, these are not different “forces” at all. The functionality of our republic depends on our Federal Senate remaining the bipartisan body that it was designed to be. In the present case, that requires the Senate’s filibuster function to remain as it is, which enforces the Senate’s bipartisan nature.

It gets worse, though:

[Progressive-]Democrats have called passing new elections legislation their priority, arguing that minority voters need protections from new state rules.

This is Party being openly, loudly and proudly racist. There are no minority voters or “other” voters or non-minority voters. There are only American voters. As a man said not so long ago,

There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.

Even if that man turned out actually to not believe his words, the concept he pretended to espouse is true, nonetheless.

But, then, this is just another aspect of the Progressive-Democrats’ drive to fundamentally change America. The next year, and the two years after that, are going to be very dangerous times for our Republic.

Child Abuse

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Now the New Orleans government is requiring children as young as five years old to get vaccinated, whether they need it or not, whether their parents want it for their children or not.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell said she is implementing the policy “to keep the omicron variant at bay,” amid surging cases in Orleans Parish.

And

“The vaccine mandate will expand to include children ages 5-11,” she said. “We will require proof of vaccination or negative tests at bars and restaurants and other locations for everyone ages 5 and older.”

(I’m not aware that patrons as young as five years are allowed in New Orleans bars, but that’s another story.)

And, she orders:

Starting in January, you MUST ensure that your children are getting vaccinated!

This too closely approaches child abuse. There is virtually no risk to children—or from them to others—from the Wuhan Virus, especially from the mildest of all the variants, Omicron. It’s also true that the risk of dangerous side effects from the vaccines against the virus seems very small.

However.

We have more than two years of empirical data from a sample size that is the population of children on Earth with which to assess the level of risk to children from a Wuhan Virus infection. We have a much smaller set of data, collected over a much shorter period of time, with which to assess any risk to children of serious side effect from any of the virus vaccines.

Stipulate, though, that the vaccines’ serious side effect risk really is quite small. The comparison of interest is not whether the vaccines have an absolute level of risk in isolation of other factors or risks. The proper comparison is the level of risk to a child from being unvaccinated compared with the risk to the child of serious side effect from the vaccine.

If the two levels of risk are comparable—and they seem to be, even with the so-far assessed optimistic side effect risk—then the risk from the vaccine is not worth the risk to a child from going unvaccinated.

Forcing that second risk onto the child is too risky, to the point of abuse.