JEREMY LOFFREDO AND MAX BLUMENTHAL·OCTOBER 26, 2021
The effort “to expand QR code vaccine passports beyond states like California and New York” now revolves around a public-private partnership known as the
Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI). And the VCI has reserved an instrumental role in its coalition for MITRE.
Described by Forbes as a “cloak and dagger [research and development] shop” that is “the most important organization you’ve never heard of,” MITRE has developed some of the most invasive surveillance technology in use by US spy agencies today...
MITRE’s own COVID-19 umbrella coalition includes In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Palantir, a scandal-stained private spying firm...
Indeed, the involvement of the military-intelligence apparatus in the development of a digital vaccine passport system is yet another indication that behind the guise of public health concerns, the US surveillance state could be due to enhance its control over an increasingly restive population...
This September, the Vice President of In-Q-Tel’s technical staff, Dan Hanfling, was
quoted in the Washington Post arguing that unvaccinated people should be denied healthcare in the name of triage: “that group of individuals who have willingly chosen not to vaccinate, for illegitimate reasons, it would be fair to place them at the back of the line,” Hanfling proclaimed...
The
Chairman of MITRE’s Board of Trustees, Donald Kerr, is the former principal deputy director of national intelligence. Prior to that role, Kerr served as the deputy director for science and technology at the CIA, where he received the CIA Distinguished Intelligence Medal.
MITRE’s Vice Chairman of the Board,
Mike Rogers, is the former Republican chairman of the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Before serving in Congress, Mr. Rogers was an officer in the U.S. Army and an FBI special agent...
On March 17, 2020, practically hours after a global pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction division contracted MITRE to “engage, inform and guide” mayors, governors and emergency response officials on the COVID-19 response. According to
Forbes, the Center for Disease Control also inked a $16.3 million contract to establish “an enduring national capability to contain Covid-19.”
One day after signing its contract with the DHS’s WMD division, MITRE pumped out a
white paper outlining the projected impact on COVID-19 on the US population, and issuing recommendations for local and federal officials on an emergency response...
With its now-discredited modeling as justification, MITRE demanded that authorities reduce social contact between members of the US population by 90 percent, impose harsh lockdowns, shut down virtually all businesses, seal borders, and “quarantine returning citizens in hotels or other facilities, one to a room, with skeleton staff.”
Many US states followed some version of this extreme model, triggering a social and economic catastrophe from which the population may never fully recover.
Now that the lockdowns appear to be over, MITRE is at the center of the push for digital vaccine passports through the Vaccine Credential Initiative. Yet the influential military-intelligence organization remains behind “cloak and dagger,” mostly unknown to a US public whose lives could be radically altered by one of its most consequential projects.