What Doesn’t Get Mentioned?
There are so many gaping gaps in the UK media’s no-warts-at-all discussion of digital identity that it’s hard to know where to begin. The FT, to its credit, concedes that “Britain has a dismal record in public sector IT — think of the Post Office Horizon scandal.” What it leaves out is the fact that this disastrous government IT program, which ruined the lives of thousands of Post Office submasters, was the brainchild of Tony Blair, the man whom the media are now treating as an authority on all matters technological.
Nor does the FT article mention that Blair was warned that the Horizon IT system could be flawed before it was rolled out, but chose to proceed nonetheless. When the anticipated problems began surfacing, his government did everything it could to cover them up. Yet somehow Tony Blair and his foundation are still a voice of authority on issues of digital governance.
The Post Office Horizon scandal is just one of a laundry list of IT disasters that successive UK governments have overseen, as our regular UK-based commenter Paul Greenwood recently reminded us:
This is brought to you from the same regime that cannot:
a) get e-Gates at major airports to function,
b) has repeatedly postponed eVisas because they cannot get them to work;
c) has repeatedly postponed Phytosanitary checks on agricultural imports at borders because ……..cannot get it to work…
(That’s not to mention) the Great NHS Computer Disaster…….the largest IT Project in Europe… [that cost more than £1 billion and never launched].
The NHS computer disaster, now used as a case study for how large government IT projects can go spectacularly wrong, costing billions of dollars in squandered public funds, was also launched by Anthony Charles Linton Blair. It involved the participation of IT consulting giants like Accenture and Fujitsu, which was the lead company behind the Post Office Horizon system and has been selected to lead the digital ID scheme, despite a pledge earlier this year to refrain from participating in UK government procurement.
Of the four articles on digital ID, not a single one has offered more than a token paragraph on the potential risks and downsides of digital identity. As the leading industry publication Biometric Update
gleefully reported on December 16, the UK press has been “won over” on digital identity, and is now setting about “explaining why” to the British public.
Other issues that are completely ignored or glossed over include:
Privacy. All four of the articles pay lip service to the threat digital identity poses to privacy. The FT argues that “privacy arguments have less force when most adults happily carry smartphones stuffed with apps that can track everything from how many steps they do to what colour socks they buy.” However, as some FT readers pointed out in the comments thread, those apps can be turned off at any time. And whose to say that everyone’s mobile phone is “stuffed with apps”? Mine, for instance, has just two on it (Spotify and WhatsApp).
One thing a near-mandatory digital identity system will ensure is that we will never be without our trusted mobile phones. This sort of “digital coercion” — a term I learnt from the German financial journalist and digital rights activist, Norbert Häring — is on the rise just about everywhere. As Häring reported in September, this should hardly come as a surprise given that one of the main organisations pushing for the rapid rollout of digital public infrastructure (digital ID, digital health passes, instant payment systems, central bank digital currency…) is the
corporate-controlled, WEF-partnered United Nations.
Security. Another major issue with digital ID is security, though it is totally glossed over in the MSM articles. While the FT mentions “dangers with hacking and cyber attacks”, it also claims that digital ID could help to combat “identity fraud.” Yet Norway and Sweden are suffering an epidemic of identity theft and cyber crime despite having rolled out digital ID systems years ago that are now thoroughly integrated into people’s daily lives? In Sweden, many cyber crimes
involve BankID, the ubiquitous digital authorization system used by nearly all Swedish adults.
India, which is home to the world’s largest biometric-based digital ID system, Aadhaar, has suffered huge security problems, from identity theft to innumerable data breaches, including two in which the data of roughly a billion people were compromised. Much of it ended up for sale on the net. Said data included each person’s biometric identifiers (i.e. their iris and fingerprint scans). If this data is hacked, there is no way of undoing the damage. You cannot change or cancel your iris or fingerprint like you can change a password or cancel a credit card.
In South East Asia, cyber criminals have been
targeting iOS users with malware that purloins face scans from the users of Apple devices to break into and pilfer money from bank accounts – thought to be a world first. Likewise, in India there have been
reports of bank accounts being emptied using compromised Aadhaar numbers and biometric identifiers.
As we shift into a world where digital public infrastructure (DPI) increasingly dominate our lives, the security of our data, including our biometric identifiers, seems to be increasingly at risk. Of all the UK articles on digital identity in the UK, not a single one mentions the word “biometric” once, perhaps because that might actually scare off some readers.
Exclusion. While often touted as a tool for social and financial inclusion, the reality is that digital identity systems are inherently exclusionary. As the World Economic Forum admits, while verifiable identities “create new markets and business lines” for companies, especially those in the tech industry that will help to operate the systems while hoovering up all the data, they also (emphasis my own) “open up (or close off) the digital world for individuals.”
It is not just the digital world that could end up being closed off; so, too, could much of the analogue world. As the now-ubiquitous WEF infographic suggests, a full-fledged digital identity system, as currently conceived, could end up touching just about every aspect of our lives, from our health (including the vaccines we are supposed to receive) to our money, to our business activities, our private and public communications, the information we are able to access, our dealings with government, the food we eat and the goods we buy.
It could also offer governments and the companies they partner with unprecedented levels of surveillance and control powers.
off-guardian.org
www.zerohedge.com
ca.yahoo.com
DOGE WILL TAKE THESE MORONS SOCIAL SECURITY AWAY MAKE IT TAX FREE IN PROCESS.
