Why we must resist digital ID, Part 1
DR SCOTT MCLACHLAN
OVER the last few days we have seen headlines proclaiming that the implementation of digital biometric ID in Vietnam led to 86million bank accounts being closed (see here and here) because the owners of those accounts had not established and verified their digital biometric ID.
In Part 1 of this article, I reflect on the flawed global push for digital ID and how what happened in Vietnam may be by intention. In Part 2 tomorrow, I use myself as a guinea pig to test the current state of digital identification currently being implemented in Australia.
The Flawed Push for Digital ID
The state-sponsored shift towards digital ID and digital driving licences is flawed because of the three fallacies of security. First, the fallacy that a device, software application or smart technology can ever be totally secure. Second, the fallacy that governments and law enforcement will act in our best interests and maintain our right to digital privacy and security. And third, the fallacy that digital integration is always net beneficial and safe.
Legislation in the UK, New Zealand, Australia and other countries has been manipulated to allow warrantless searches and make specious or vaguely plausible excuses to compel owners of digital devices to disclose passwords and encryption keys. When courts in the United States ruled against compelling passwords and passcodes on grounds of self-incrimination, but started allowing police to force suspects to provide biometric identifiers like fingerprints or facial images to unlock devices, I predicted that biometrics would become the go-to method globalists and governments would use for identification and social control.
We now have laptop computers, smart device operating systems, and banking and social media apps with nag screens pushing you towards using your face or finger instead of passwords because, they say, it’s incredibly quick and easy and significantly harder to replicate or steal. However, companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google leave the most important fact unsaid – that biometrics are not a foolproof solution and anyone intent on hacking your device or digital identity will still get in. At the simple end of the spectrum there are examples all over the internet of children using their own fingerprints to unlock a parent’s fingerprint-secured device (see here, here, here and here). Others got around the more recent government requirements for age verification using biometric facial scans in the UK and Australia by holding devices up to scan images of characters from computer games and freeze frame images of US President Donald Trump (here and here). And while we are told that digital wallets are safe and effective (that sounds familiar), their use has simply socially engineered a lot of people into keeping all their eggs (credit cards, user accounts, digital identification and even digital car keys) in one digital smartphone basket. This has resulted in a new type of fraud known as digital wallet fraud which can expose all your account, card and payment details in seconds.
I also predicted that the ubiquitously voluntary digital IDs (here, here, here and here) would quietly become mandatory for accessing social welfare payments and other government or public services. While they have denied it for years, we are already starting to see politicians and public services acknowledge their intention towards or requirement for mandatory digital ID (here and here) – and this is where we return to the rollout in Vietnam.
I believe implementing digital ID is a pro-business move that creates two classes – those who can afford to keep moving with technology, and users of older smartphones or non-smartphone devices which get intentionally left behind in the rollout of this digital ID infrastructure. I suspect this might explain many of Vietnam’s 86million closed bank accounts: that some large percentage of these accounts belong to farmers or other non-tech savvy citizens. Many of them may be nothing more than collateral damage in the globalist push to make us all digital, trackable, predictable and controllable.
Consider: if, on average, each closed Vietnamese account held the equivalent of only £1 (₫35,500 Viet Dong), that’s £86million that effectively just disappeared from the Vietnamese economy. Who gets to keep the money? Does it simply disappear? Get absorbed by the banks? Or is there other legislation at play that renders it the property of the State? My bet is on the latter. And this may have been by intention for several reasons. First, it gets a lot of poor and country people out of the country’s economy; without Vietnam’s electronic identity, the VNeID, these people can no longer access government services to receive low-income benefits and age-related pensions, apply for drivers’ and other forms of licences, sign rental agreements, pay their taxes, educate their children at university, get a passport or participate in much of Vietnam’s cashless digital economy. Second, it reduces the burden for the State Bank of Vietnam which, prior to the VNeID, were operating around 200million personal bank accounts for the 101million strong population. Third, it potentially allows politicians, on behalf of the state and under the colour of right, to seize the funds in those accounts.
However, aside from a couple of preprints on arXiv and Researchgate (for example here and here), you won’t find my research on these issues in the ‘accepted’ academic literature. I was rebuked several times by the university where I was working; a university with many senior academics who were members of or funded by organisations pushing digital ID such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), Turing Institute, United Nations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). I was also unequivocally reproached by the editors of several academic journals, many of whom have similar financial conflicts of interest. I was ostracised because I dared to point out the potential pitfalls of adopting these globalist-promoted WEF, Gates and Blairite unsafe control measures. You see, the adoption of digital ID has little to do with their claims about protecting you from hackers or identity theft (here, here and here), and even less to do with protecting our borders from illegal boat people who are known to toss identity documents and devices overboard. Digital ID is about governments, police and globalists being able to track your every movement, your every word, your every purchase, your every click on the internet, your every phone call and your every association (here and here). Digital ID is about creating a complex and complete picture of you in order to implement other even more draconian technologies like Chinese-style social credit systems. These technocrats openly admit their intention to use all the data they collect from your use of digital ID to create a blended reality where your real interactions and transactions are used to compute a digital twin of you, aka your ‘social credit score’, that incorporates your present and future economic, social and environmental sustainability.
I do wonder what they will do with the vast numbers of us deemed to be unsustainable.
I also wonder, if one of them decides they don’t like the inference they draw from your most recent social media post or unguarded comment in the pub last week, whether they will capriciously deplete even an otherwise respectable person’s social credit score.
Only time will tell.
Assuming you all continue to let them go ahead with this draconian Orwellian nightmare.
Tomorrow: I prove how easy it is to set up a fake ID
This article (Why we must resist digital ID, Part 1) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Dr Scott McLachlan
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