IAIN DAVIS
In my previous article I wrote about the fact that, from the perspective of political science, the evidence shows that the so-called “economic elite” dominate a “biased pluralist” system of governance. We live in nation states that operate as functional oligarchies.
Hiding behind the anonymity afforded to them by the major investment houses and their think tanks—using the Chatham House rule—oligarchs govern largely unseen. They assert their claimed authority by seeding policy agendas, often at the global governance level. The agendas then cascade down to governments and local governments, where they are implemented as policy, regulation, and law.
I wrote:
It is primarily through their controlling interest in multinational corporations (MNCs) that oligarchs rule today. Via the global public-private partnership and so-called “policy coordination,” set within their Deep State, oligarchs can exert their power and influence over both domestic and foreign policy.
Governments are not in charge. They serve as front organisations for the transnational capitalist oligarchy—the parasite class. Governments and all the pointless party political shenanigans exist to maintain our misplaced faith in alleged “representative democracy”, which is the antithesis of democracy. Thus, we waste our time and energy on futile political debates and campaigns while the oligarchy gets on with business without any scrutiny.
But it does not have to be this way. We have a choice.
Oligarchy in Operation.
The United Nations (UN) is an oligarch-led global governance project. In 2016 the UN launched SDG16.9 as a policy agenda to “provide legal identity for all.” This “goal” was immediately reframed by the ID2020 alliance—tasked by the UN to implement SDG16.9—as “enabling access to digital identity for every person on the planet.” SDG16.9 is a global oligarchy policy agenda to force digital identity on everyone.
Governments did not set the policy. The government’s only job is to convert the oligarch’s agenda into binding regulations and law. This process is clearly discernible in the UK.
The UK government’s move to “implement technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children” is the paper-thin propaganda it is using to force UK citizens to accept and use digital identities—which is the policy enforcement of UN SDG16.9.
Announcing this image-blocking policy initiative as if it were its own, the UK government added that it has a “moral duty” to protect children and that “[o]nline harms must be confronted with the same urgency as offline abuse.” Noting that the “Online Safety Act [OSA] was a landmark step forward in holding companies to account” and that “the technology industry is central to this mission,” the government said that its demands for “Big Tech” to activate operating system spyware on the devices they manufacture were essential because “more must be done.”
Nearly everything the UK government wrote in its policy announcement was misleading. Not only is the enforcement of SGD16.9 a demand from a global oligarch-led institution, but the Online Safety Act (OSA) was designed by a private sector network, involving the “Big Tech” corporations that are behind the ID2020 initiative to coerce “every person on the planet” to use “digital identity.” Worse still, the policy initiative will increase the risk to children just as the OSA already has.
The OSA was largely designed by a public-private partnership, created in 2020, between UK intelligence agencies, permanent civil service departments, and the private sector. That public-private partnership formed the Online Safety Tech Industry Association (OSTIA). For the past six years, OSTIA has been “inform[ing] policymakers” by “working constructively with governments and other regulators” to “[p]ersuade governments to take a leadership role in developing and deploying safety technologies.” Evidently its efforts bore fruit because the OSA was enacted in 2023.
The UK government said it worked with OSTIA on the OSA because it represented “a collective voice for the safety tech sector, which will help to increase visibility of new innovations, new technology, and best practices for online safety.” In August 2020, the government published its “Directory of UK Safety Tech Providers.” These are the service providers for the digital identity and age verification that the government now seeks to impose by stealth, claiming it has something to do with child safeguarding.
AgeChecked, Arwen, Checkstep, Cyacomb, Image Analyzer, lsland23, Logically, Moonshot CVE, Opendium, R;pple, SafeToNet, Securium, Securus Software, SuperAwesome, TrustElevate, Unitary AI, VerifyMyAge, and Yoti are all OSTIA members. Apparently, according to the government, these private companies are at the “forefront of online safety technology.” This supposedly explains why they are listed as official “Safety Tech Providers” for UK online safety.
So-called “age verification” can only work if everyone, not just children, verifies their identities online. The UK government, clearly in keeping with OSTIA’s wishes, has already prepared its age verification systems as part of its Digital ID scheme. OSTIA member and government digital identity partner Yoti explained how the system is supposed to work.
Yoti was discussing the implementation of digital identity age verification for accessing adult-only websites. With the government’s recent announcement, however, the same digital verification structure is now being integrated into operating systems.
Yoti wrote:
The Online Safety Act [. . .] was passed into law in 2023 and requires stricter age verification and enforcement mechanisms. [. . .] The Government named Ofcom as the regulator to oversee and enforce the Online Safety Act. [. . .] Some of the age verification solutions which Ofcom deem to be highly effective [. . .] include:
- Photo ID documents.
- Credit card or open banking.
- Facial age estimation.
- Digital ID wallets. Digital IDs, such as the Yoti app, let users anonymously share an ‘over 18’ proof of age credential.
OSTIA itself is a “Provider Organisation” for UK Online Safety. The government says it provides networking opportunities for innovative companies that specialise in developing technology for the “[f]lagging of content with false, misleading and/or harmful narratives, through the provision of fact-checking and disruption of disinformation.” Though the government insists deploying spyware on the UK population’s smartphones is to “keep children safe”.
OSTIA formed in partnership with Cyan Forensics and PUBLIC. Cyan Forensics is now Cyacomb, whose business partners include the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF has a strategic partnership with the UN to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”—obviously, including SDG16.9.
As the OSA was being formed by OSTIA and other partners, the WEF acknowledged some of the civil liberties concerns the OSA ignores completely and set up its Global Coalition for Digital Safety (GCDS) to reassure sceptics that by “fostering best practices in online safety”—with WEF support—the OSA should be able to coordinate action against online harms. This, concluded the WEF, would “accelerate progress and build a brighter digital future for all”.
GCDS members included Dame Melainie Dawes, Chief Executive of Ofcom. OSTIA was represented by its chairman Ian Stevenson, who was also the founder of Cyacomb.
PUBLIC is an organisation that focuses on the digital transformation of the public sector. In particular, PUBLIC works to digitally transform the defence and security sector. In 2021, OSTIA, PUBLIC and another organisation called Faculty, established the Online Safety Data Initiative (OSDI).
The purpose of the OSDI was to “build tools to identify and remove harmful content online”. The OSDI was set up as a mass public data surveillance project. PUBLIC reported:
During the Government’s consultation on the Online Harms White Paper, stakeholders [OSTIA, PUBLIC, and Faculty] within the UK safety tech sector identified access to the required data as the single biggest barrier to developing innovative solutions to address online harms. [. . .] [The OSDI] will test methodologies for improving access to datasets that can be used for training Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to remove harmful and illegal content and networks.
Faculty’s enthusiasm for the OSDI data mining and AI training project is understandable given that Faculty is an AI development and consultancy firm which, it is fair to say, has a somewhat checkered history. Formerly called Advanced Skills, Faculty reportedly worked very closely with Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data mining firm that was incolved in numerours scandals including the theft of personal data from millions of Facebok users.
Marc Warner co-founded Faculty in 2014 and remains its CEO. Faculty was purchased by the American tech giant Accenture where, as a result, Warner is now the Global Chief Technology Officer and sits on Accenture’s Global Management Committee.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has bought a partnership with the UK government and Accenture is working with AWS to digitally transform government in order to “accelerate data sharing” and to “enable faster benefit determinations, predictive analytics for frontline services and modernised digital infrastructure” across the UK public sector. Recently Accenture’s former chief commercial office, Shaheen Sayed, was appointed to a new role—seemingly specifically created for her—becoming the UK government’s AI Champion.
Accenture is a founding partner of the ID2020 alliance focused upon manipulating every person on the planet” into using “digital identity.”
A global policy agenda, designed by oligarchs and implemented through stakeholder capitalists public-private partnerships, has wound its way down from the authoritarian centre of global governance to now be presented to the British public as a child safety measure. Accenture, AWS, OSTIA, and the WEF have coordinated a network of private sector multinational corporations and tech stratup firms to shape so-called UK online safety.
The primary objective is to get all of us to use digital identity products and agree to be subjected to online digital identity checks. Protecting children has absolutely nothing to do with it. Quite the opposite.
The Online Harming of Children.
Although the OSA was purportedlydesigned to “protect children,” its nearly immediate effect was to restrict the public’s accessto potentially vital public-interest information. This is because most of the technology firms behind it were developing systems for mass data surveillance, the policing and censorship of information, and flagging alleged disinformation to state officials—spying on the public. Protecting children was never even a vague consideration. It was just a propaganda cover story.
Suddenly, thanks to the OSA, accessing parliamentary debates about investigations into child-grooming gangs was restricted, as was video footage of families in Gaza searching in the rubble for their murdered children. Footage reporting on the Ukranian war was also restricted.
So, no, the OSA does not protect children at all. By restricting public awareness of the dangers faced by children, both in the UK and internationally, the OSA effectively increases the risks to children.
But it gets worse.
At the operating system level, age-verification digital identity checks are being forced on children. Young smartphone users, who perhaps need to reach out tochild support services because they are being abused, will not be able to inquire anonymously. Having to verify their identities will deter them, which will reduce their “safety,” thereby benefitting paedophilesand other abusers. In addition, the requirement for online verification increases the risks to whistleblowers and journalists who are exposing wrongdoing, such as those investigating organized child grooming gangs and paedophile rings.
We are being deceived into surrendering our privacy and civil liberties to multinational public-private partnerships in the forlorn hope it will protect children. In fact, in doing so, we’ll only place children at greater risk.
But it does not have to be this way. We have a choice.
Our Choice.
Oligarchs, by definition, are few in number, whereas we, the people, are many. Consequently, our innate free will poses a perennial problem to oligarchs, who have wrestled for millennia to control us.
Today, as oligarchs continue to try to maximise their authority, our obedience is still required. Human beings generally don’t respond well to simple threats or demands, so our belief systems have to be carefully managed and coercion consistently applied in order to elicit from us the required behavioural compliance. Hence, the child protection lie.
If we neglect our responsibility to think for ourselves and fail to defend our unalienable rights; if we accept the fabricated narratives designed to manipulate us; if we use the technology we’re being given in the way we’re instructed; and if we do not resist but instead meekly comply with every oligarch diktat, then, in the near future, we, the human species, are likely to find ourselves in deep trouble.
Specifically, once we start using programmable digital currencies tied to our digital identities and are convinced to rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make decisions for us, it will be difficult to extricate ourselves from the oligarchs’ noose. We will have put ourselves in the position of being led into permanent slavery, wherein we own nothing—not even our own bodies and our own thoughts—and are increasingly incapable, as a society, of making our own decisions about anything.
Convincing us to accept digital control, nudging us to welcome new governance structures, and persuading us to value imposed restrictions are key propaganda objectives. Nothing would make the oligarchs happier than if we were to freely consent to our digital servitude. Simply from a practical perspective, it is easier to control any populace who believes their own subjugation is necessary and even desirable.
Armed with this knowledge, we have a choice. Just as modern technology offers oligarchs the opportunity to establish global dictatorship, so technology, applied differently, offers us the opportunity to reject their Machiavellian schemes. We could exit and build something better.
If we don’t use their devices and carefully choose different, more secure open source operating systems, or don’t use their smartphones at all, there’s not much they can do about it. If we use alternative operating systems on our computers, the oligarchs are rather stuck, for the time being. Their schemes won’t proceed as planned.
We don’t have to adopt any oligarch-serving behavioural control systems if we don’t want to. We could get on with the business of building societies and governance structures that work in our favour and that completely disempower oligarchs. We could reject their devices, ignore their stories and refuse their conveniences. We could say “No!”
It can be this way. We have a choice.
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This article (We Have a Choice.) was created and published by Iain Davis and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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