Nets Ignore Report CDC Tracked ‘Millions’ of Phones to Ensure COVID-19 Lockdown Order Compliance

ABC, CBS, and NBC’s evening news broadcasts ignored a shocking new report that claimed the U.S. government had tracked the movements of millions of Americans to verify compliance with COVID-19 lockdown orders.

Outlet left-wing Vice Motherboard released a jaw-dropping report May 3 headlined: “CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders.” The subhead said documents obtained by Vice showed that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention “planned to use phone location data to monitor Schools and churches.” The article said the documents were from 2021. In addition, the CDC reportedly “wanted to use the data for many non-COVID-19 purposes too.” ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News NBC Nightly NewsAll of them ignored this story on their May 3 broadcasts, in spite of the disturbing news. [Emphasis added.]

Motherboard Below are some of the data that was reportedly gathered by the CDC:

Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people—but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.

Motherboard According to reports, the CDC used location data from SafeGraph. The company received a $16million capital investment from Turki bin Faisal Al Saud (ex-head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence). The data was reportedly used for “monitoring curfews.” Specifically, the documents reportedly claimed that SafGraph’s data was “‘critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.’”

According to reports, a cybersecurity expert told the story Motherboard that the “CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor to neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’” However, noted Motherboard, “The document doesn’t stop at churches; it mentions ‘places of worship.’”

The Big Three apparently didn’t consider the CDC allegedly behaving like President Joe Biden’s quasi-Stasi newsworthy. 

Conservatives are being attacked. Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192, and hold them to account for ignoring the CDC’s reportedly Orwellian behavior in tracking American citizens.

Kevin Tober, NewsBusters News Analyst, contributed to this report.