Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) introduced H.R.6666: COVID19 Testing, Reaching, Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act
on May 1st, 2020.
The TRACE act is nothing but an explicit authorization for the ‘surveillance state’. Like the PATRIOT Act, this act is a totalitarian attack on every American’s rights of freedom, security, and privacy, except it, is, heinously, much higher in magnitude. The dangerous act sets the hideous structure of unprecedented control on ‘We the People’. This act, also, violates the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution as well as the First, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. It legalizes harassing and forcing the people to receive medical intervention.
Particularly, this bill:
- Allows the government to surveil the people in unprecedented level: it allows for the constant tracking of the movement, the location, the contacts, and its duration, the meetings and the activities of the people with no regard, whatsoever, for their privacy.
- It encourages local communities, hospitals, schools, colleges, worship centers, and other organizations to participate in tracking, reporting, tracking people, recommend testing, and support quarantining them.
- Psychologically, it conditions the public to accept the state of surveillance when the government deemed it necessary to do so. Also, it creates and conditions a new class of people to participate in spying on each other for the government. This is destructive!
- It is a waste of taxpayers’ money since the disputable rationale behind it is to eradicate the spread of the virus in its beginning, and we now know for sure that tens of millions of Americans have been already exposed. It lacks any scientific and logical justification at this point.
I strongly condemn and reject this bill, and call on the people to reject it and stand for their rights against this Orwellian attempt.
It is unimaginable to me that someday I would need to write and explain my position on such a straight-forward ‘spying’ bill.
Ibra Taher
Green for US Senate
Oregon, May 15, 2020