There’s Something Starmer Isn’t Telling Us About His Digital ID Scheme

And it all centres around a little-known system called One Login.

JJ STARKEY 

From the level of outcry, it’s safe to say that many are now aware of Starmer’s scheme to impose mandatory digital ID, dubbed BritCard, on every working person in the UK—citizen and foreigner alike.

Addressing the Global Progressive Action Conference in London on Friday—attended by the likes of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Starmer said, “this government will make a free of charge digital ID mandatory for the right to work”.

BritCard was initially advanced by Labour Together, the think tank Morgan McSweeney ran before becoming Starmer’s chief of staff. The same man that co-founded anti-free speech pressure group, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in 2020, that listed “kill(ing) Musk’s Twitter” as a top strategic goal.

Now, Starmer posits BritCard will help tackle illegal migration, and to be fair, it might—a little. The specific mechanisms by which it will remain murky and dependent upon implementation.

But this is coming from a man who promised to stop illegal immigration last July, and since then, we’ve only seen record highs.

What seems to have been entirely forgotten in all the noise, however, is that the government already has a digital ID service in place. And it would be an understatement to say there have been a few issues.

In May, journalist Andrew Orlowski reported that a government whistleblower had come forward with concerns about a system called One Login.

This is the digital identity service system created by the Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2021 that will help deliver BritCard.

It was designed to give citizens streamlined access to hundreds of government services and, through the GOV.UK Wallet, store key digital documents such as driving licences.

The service currently processes the personal and biometric data of some three million citizens and has chewed through over £300 million in public funds.

In fact, the total cost of our digital ID escapade so far totals upwards of £700 million when you include the Conservative’s digital ID programme, Verify, which the Sunak government abandoned in 2023.

When the whistleblower, who worked as a senior civil servant, arrived on the One Login project to set up an information-assurance team in 2022, he encountered issues he did not expect.

The system was being accessed thousands of times a month by users holding unrestricted “do anything” system-administrator privileges. Many did not have the security-clearance required to work with such sensitive data.

So we’re talking about hundreds of government employees having access to an unprecedented amount of very private information.

To the average observer, it reeks of negligence—especially when considered alongside past cases of data misuse and clear signs of institutional political bias.

Just this June, former GCHQ intern, Hasaan Arshad, pleaded guilty to an offence under the Computer Misuse Act after he transferred top secret data to his home computer.

A 25-year-old intern duped the UK’s top intelligence, cyber, and security agency responsible for providing signals intelligence and information assurance to protect its citizenry from terrorism and cyber-attacks.

Worse still, Orlowski’s whistleblower alleged that GDS did not require locked-down workstations for either its remote-working staff or the hundreds of external contractors involved in developing One Login.

In other words, the system’s open access made it ripe for cyber attacks.

But it got worse yet.

The whistleblower then discovered that part of the One Login system was being developed in Romania—a country Oxford University researchers recently identified as one of the world’s leading “cybercrime hotspots”.

Around three hours north of the capital, Bucharest, lies the city of Râmnicu Vâlcea. Many now refer to it as “Hackerville”. In 2017 alone, there were an estimated 140 million alerts about systems under attack from the country.

Next come the conflicts.

According to the whistleblower, the same contractor responsible for developing One Login is the same one responsible for managing its risks.

Something that naturally begs the question: can a company objectively assess the risks of a system they themselves helped build? Theoretically, yes, it could but in reality, probably not.

Then came the most haunting revelation.

As the whistleblower told Orlowski, “third-line assurance—that is, security and risk evaluation carried out by an external, independent team—is not being performed at all”.

In short, the department responsible for the service is marking its own homework. Such neglect would immediately disqualify it for use in other sectors.

Perhaps one can guess what happened when all of this was raised with the GDS hierarchy.

Rather than investigate, senior figures reportedly reassigned staff from the assurance team to menial tasks. A formal HR complaint was then lodged against the whistleblower, and new officials were swiftly brought in to replace his team.

As one digital-identity expert remarked to Orlowski on the scheme’s potential dangers: “Imagine if [what happened to M&S] happened to Companies House or the Land Registry”

The M&S hack compromised the personal data of thousands of customers, including names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and online order histories. Entire departments were shut down for weeks, and £300 million in operating profit was wiped out in a blink.

Put simply, internal sources say the UK’s digital ID service is already plagued by serious security lapses, not just technical failures, but institutional ones, driven by a civil service more focused on concealment than correction.

Starmer’s (Blair’s) mandatory digital ID scheme, now being fast-tracked for national rollout, will likely only amplify such lapses. But it won’t be him who pays the price. It’ll be us.

---

This article (There’s Something Starmer Isn’t Telling Us About His Digital ID Scheme) was created and published by JJ Starkey and is republished here under “Fair Use”

BritCard – latest instalment in a litany of IT fiascos

ALEXANDER MCKIBBIN

FRIDAY’S long-trailed announcement that Sir Keir Starmer wants to press ahead with a digital identity card – supposedly called a BritCard – alarmed many people. Data theft, cyber hacking, mission creep and various governments’ contemptible record on IT projects are, one would imagine, among many legitimate concerns.

Fortunately, on Friday morning’s BBC1’s Breakfast Time a government spokesperson was on hand to discuss what this announcement means and reassure anxious viewers.
Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, loftily swatted aside these genuine worries, informing us that government staff had already been to Estonia and seen first-hand how ID cards like the one proposed will be impregnable to cyber-attack.

Forgive me for a sharp intake of breath, but studying politics at Newcastle and obtaining a master’s in public policy from Birkbeck as Nandy did does not, in my mind anyway, make you a credible spokesperson on IT security, not unless you are the sort of person who would seek advice on DIY from Frank Spencer.

The more you are told that this will be a panacea for all that troubles us, the more we should start counting the spoons. Starmer et al might like to think that the public have a short memory when it comes to appallingly run large projects, but thankfully we don’t.
While HS2 rumbles on years late and now so stratospherically over budget that it will at some point find itself in the annals on business mismanagement alongside all the other costly digital shambles that have been inflicted on us, here are a few others.

The £10billion NHS IT fiasco, instigated by the current BritCard proselytiser for Tony Blair, and labelled by the Public Accounts Committee as one of ‘the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos’ in public-sector history.

The cost of a project to computerise magistrates courts involving ICL (Fujitsu) and a predecessor of the Ministry of Justice nearly trebled from £146million to £447million and did not work properly years after the roll-out.

A £475million IT system for a purpose-built air traffic control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire, was due to go live in 1996 but was delayed by six years while costs increased by £180million.

Costs almost trebled on a prisons IT system (National Offender Management Information System) known as C-NOMIS from £234million to £690million, and even then the National Audit Office described the system as ‘ultimately unsuccessful’.

A £9.3billion communications system for police, ambulance and fire services, the Emergency Services Network, ran seven years late, and in 2022 was £3.1billion over budget (49 per cent) and may never work as originally intended.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Post Office debacle. Yes, I know, if only we had gone to Estonia, it would all have been so different.

What was really galling about the Nandy interview was how airily she dismissed cyber-security fears. When you think that not only banks and many other businesses have been hacked – even the Pentagon in the US, an institution that you imagine takes security seriously – why should we believe anything this patently unqualified MP says about safeguarding our data?

Maybe she should have taken a moment to read what the National Audit Office has to say about governmental IT security: ‘It identified that the government’s new cyber assurance scheme, GovAssure, which independently assessed 58 critical departmental IT systems by August 2024, found significant gaps in cyber resilience with multiple fundamental system controls at low levels of maturity across departments. At least 228 “legacy” IT systems were in use by departments as of March 2024, and the government does not know how vulnerable these systems are to a cyber-attack.’

Well, that’s all very reassuring – and that’s before the new Chinese Embassy is built!

But of course, despite assurances that BritCard is being introduced to report potholes, verify your ID, and if worn with the obverse side to your chest ward will off covid, the population are wising up to governmental overreach into our everyday lives. The hostility to the Labour administration is palpable in pubs (those that remain), factories, shops and anywhere people congregate.

Perhaps that is where the real reason for this introduction lies. Those in authority are increasingly concerned that the multitude who fund the whole edifice are finally waking up to seeing what is being done, not in their name, but to their detriment.

The BritCard, as everyone knows, will not stop one solitary migrant, regular or ‘irregular’. It will not stop those seeking employment in the black economy from obtaining it. Artful fraudsters will quickly find a ‘back door’ in the system. It will not stop those wishing to game the system from doing so. What it will do is make life increasingly intolerable for the law-abiding majority as it inevitably morphs from a benign tool to something far more corrosive, sinister and controlling.

You do not need to be a habitual customer of milliners specialising in aluminium foil headwear to raise doubts as to where this initiative will end. For those who naïvely espouse the ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear’ mantra, I would caution: you have been warned.

---

This article (BritCard – latest instalment in a litany of IT fiascos) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Alexander McKibbin

••••

The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)

••••

Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.

••••

Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

••••

Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.