It's unfortunate that we've had successive governments (both sides) attacking privacy and security. From a casual glance, it looks to be done out of incompetence, when you see such headlines. But boy is that a long streak of coincidences.

Sadly, it seems to be power for the sake of power. I've been involved with a few govt green papers over the last 20 years, and most of the proposals are about bureaucrats extending their reach. It's why I vote Green now, as both Labor and Liberal have become so focused on preserving their power that they ignore the Rest Of The World and The Science.

For non-Australians, our Liberals are your Republicans, with all their faults, and our Labor is your Democrats, with all their faults.

Our Greens seem to have broadened their platform to include social justice and true libertarianism, so they're no _as_ powerhungry.

Not sure if you're aware, but the Aussie covid vaccination "certificate" from the government App uses a "digital hologram" to prevent forgery.

It's essentially an animated gif.

Unfortunately the governments implementing these measures seem absolutely determined to treat Orwell's 1984 as a training or howto manual. As we descend further into authoritarianism, tracking and other privacy busting measures will become even more normalised and entrenched. You'll soon need to show identity and other papers to get into a shop to buy a hammer.

On a note entirely unrelated to the above comment, I find it somewhere between humorous and worrying that people who seem to have never actually read 1984 seem insistent on invoking it for things that are entirely unrelated to the book and have occurred for decades in most countries (showing documents for travel, having to get vaccinated for certain jobs) and ignore all the other things happening that were actually in the book. Like, for example, historical revisionism by party-controlled media.

These vaccination cards are totally unprecedented[1] and authoritarian. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

[1] https://www.kxan.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/2021/04/yel...

Plenty of parallels but you won't get exact matches... yet a few things stand out.

I'd point at the war-on-terror as a good example of a permanent or equivalent always-at-war situation. Its not a stretch to suggest that a lot of the privacy and surveillance is based around anti-terrorism initiatives and plenty of security theater is now in place because of that. The war-on-drugs was another version of that. The war-on-... rhetoric in general is almost cliché now. This is not to say its not serious but consider the 1970s had quite a lot of terrorism going on. eg The UK had regular bombings from the IRA.

Political correctness tends to adjust definitions in ways very reminiscent of Double-speak. It seems to be a rich source of new words and terms. Like a conveyor belt.

The surveillance aspect is obvious.

How did you get there? Vaccination requirements have been a thing for decades in many countries. Showing proof of vaccination to go to the mall or cinema isn't tracking anyone ( with the EU implementation at least, can't talk about all of them) about anything - it's just an app reading a QR code and deciding if it's valid locally, no internet required. Heck, in France the government explicitly stated nobody has the right to ask for an ID to verify you're the actual owner of the vaccine certificate ( bar age-restricted places like bars that have had that right anyways).

Why do people always have to jump to the slippery slope fallacy when anything happens? It's good to be cautious, but you're taking it to paranoia level.

Ironically I got told that you can be required to show immunisation certification to enter a hardware store. My thought-to-be-silly-to-make-a-point example about the hammer is reality right now.