A military-intelligence outfit at center of US digital vaccine passport drive

The organization is a non-profit corporation run by military-intelligence professionals contracted by the Department of Defense, FBI, and national security sector, reported The Grayzone.

MITRE’s effort “to expand QR code vaccine passports beyond states like California and New York” is a public-private partnership known as the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI) described by Forbes as a “cloak and dagger [research and development] shop” that is “the most important organization you’ve never heard of”.

Elizabeth Renieris, the founding director of Notre Dame and IBM’s technology ethics lab, worries that MITRE would “pursue new revenue streams in healthcare and financial services…privately owned and operated ID systems with profit-maximizing business models threaten the privacy, security, and other fundamental rights of individuals and communities”.

In January 2021, several WEF partners, including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and other mega-corporations announced the launch of the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI) in order to roll out QR code-based vaccine passports across the US.

“A non-profit established by the Rockefeller Foundation and called The Commons Project is leading the lobbying push for digital SMART cards through the VCI it co-founded. And Commons Project CEO Paul Meyer happens to have been cultivated by the WEF as a ‘young leader’,” according to The Grayzone.

Based in Northern Virginia, the military-intelligence think tank MITRE receives $2 billion a year from US agencies including the US Department of Defense and is run by mostly former Pentagon officials and ex-intelligence operatives. It was founded in 1958 as a joint project of the US Air Force and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop “command and control” systems for nuclear and conventional warfare.

Noam Chomsky was incidentally one of their early appointments for the “development of a program to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control”.

Thus MITRE’s SQUINT browser plugin app, for example, “enables rapid social media situational awareness of COVID-19-related misinformation for public health officials through crowd-sourced reporting,” according to promotional material.

The CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, is also listed among MITRE’s Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition. In-Q-Tel’s VP Dan Hanfling told the Washington Post in September that unvaccinated people should be denied healthcare: “That group of individuals who have willingly chosen not to vaccinate, for illegitimate reasons, it would be fair to place them at the back of the line.”

The Washington Post omitted the mention of Hanfling’s affiliation with the CIA and instead it described him as an “emergency physician”.

The Chairman of MITRE’s Board of Trustees, Donald Kerr, served as the deputy director for science and technology at the CIA, where he received the CIA Distinguished Intelligence Medal.