Government To Track Illness Using Searched Terms


SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS

Tue Nov 11 2008 15:34:50 ET


GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness".

"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!

GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: "GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week."

Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others.

Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used... as early warning signal for flu activity."

Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning."

Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence."

Developing...


Source: http://drudgereport.com/flashgof.htm


My Comments

Some time ago, I read the testimony of a woman who worked for the government. According to her testimony, she was required to visit hospitals and collect demographic information related to the number of and types of illnesses that occurred daily. This information was then reported to her superiors in the government. She said this information was intended to track and monitor the health effects of chemtrail spraying.

If this testimony is true, is it possible that the story above is simply another information collection mechanism for this same purpose, but with a much wider scope?

People who have studied government corruption know about the long history of chemical and biological testing on non-consenting people. Throughout this history, there has always been a mechanism to provide feedback to those doing the testing. Monitoring and recording search terms mapped to geographical location would be a very effective way to collect this information.

Collecting information this way would also involve the smallest number of people in the process. Keeping this number small is important because as the number of people involved increases, so does the chance that someone with a conscience will be involved, and a person with a conscience is a huge risk to any criminal conspiracy.