The U.S. government has been printing money like mad to finance, first, people staying home during the pandemic and now, the war in Ukraine. This will destroy the economy sooner or later, and when it does, it will usher in a centralized bank digital currency, ending financial privacy.

Many governments tried introducing health passes in response to the Covid pandemic, which would have ended health privacy. These developments seem overly intrusive to many people, but they are just responses to emergencies, right? "Desperate times call for desperate measures." Maybe that's all it is?

I don't think so.

These technologies are complicated and could not have been created overnight. They involve massive data ecosystems with large amounts of computing power. They both would ultimately require digital identification, a digital counterpart for each of our own physical bodies.

Think about your relationship with your phone.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I carry my phone everywhere, bank electronically, and talk with friends on the phone all the time. I wish I didn’t need to, but let’s face it, most of us have to live that way. I want to be able to communicate with my teenagers, so yes, we have phones. Without regularly checking bank accounts, theft goes unnoticed. I learned this the hard way in my early 20s. And I wish my loved ones and I were all in some sort of pod-village, but we’re scattered all over the globe, so yes, I say things over the phone all the time.

And, of course, people like Edward Snowden have been warning us for years about the massive amount of data harvesting being done via smartphones. Some people think Snowden is a villain. Most just ignore him. But he was proven right when Colorado Gov. Jared Polis admitted to using phone data to determine whether or not people were complying with lockdown orders. Snowden was proven right, again, when we found out that the CDC had been buying cell phone data to determine lockdown compliance.

We could leave our phones at home if we needed to break quarantine rules. We can turn the phones off, put them in a faraday cage, and move them to another room if we want to have a sensitive conversation. We can conduct business transactions in cash if we don’t feel like