The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used data from SafeGraph, a business that collects location data from cell phones, to ascertain compliance with pandemic lockdown orders and vaccinations. This is according to documents obtained by Vice, an internet journal, under the Freedom of Information Act. According to the documents, the CDC was especially interested in tracking peoples’ visits to schools and churches as well as visits to pharmacies offering the COVID vaccine. The location information mostly follows trends of groups of people, but civil rights proponents are concerned that the information can be “de-anonymized” in order to obtain information on where a particular individual has been.

This is troubling, to say the least. Take into consideration the recent pushback Dr. Anthony Fauci offered to a court overturning a CDC mandate on wearing masks on public transportation, and it seems to me you have the makings of some people wanting to turn their little corner of the government into Big Brother. The CDC has purchased the power to surveil Americans, and Dr. Fauci wants the CDC to be independent of the courts, to essentially have no oversite. What’s going on here?

This is not supposed to happen in America. The CDC is supposed to offer recommendations to public policy for the greater health and wellbeing of American citizens. It is not supposed to be a government entity with the power to tell you how to live your life, and then watch you so you do what they say. That the CDC was surveilling millions of Americans, even as groups, in order to make sure their mandates were being following is chilling. This is the stuff the Chinese Communist Party pulls. Americans don’t think of their government as being the kind that passes laws or mandates, then surreptitiously collects data to see if people are following those laws and mandates. We already live in a world where there are cameras everywhere. We don’t need a country where the government is following where we go via our cell phones. Anybody who thinks this will innocently end with the pandemic is a fool.

Now, on top of all of this, we have the Department of Homeland Security creating a “Governance Disinformation Board” to “protect” us from “fake news.” This is getting to be too much. There were lots of people warning that the government was and would use the pandemic to increase its control over people’s lives. Well, here we are! Never letting a crisis go to waste, the ever-expanding role of government in the personal lives of people did not dissipate when the pandemic did. One of the areas of governance Nina Jankowicz, newly named head of the newly formed Disinformation Board, cited in her bizarre Mary Poppins-inspired ditty on TikTok was “disinformation” about COVID.

Privacy is fundamental to liberty. The ability to live our lives away from the prying eyes of big government is essential to our living as free, independent, citizens. If the government, or any part of the government, has the power to watch where you go, with no oversite (as Fauci would prefer), and to control what you’re allowed to say or hear, then liberty is gone. In the 1990s, then-President Bill Clinton announced that the days of big government were over. He was wrong. There are plenty of people in government who are all too willing to expand the size and scope of government over the details of people’s lives. It is for the people to stop it from happening. The question is: Do we have the will to stop it? I hope so.

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.