Fellow sceptics, do you recognise this list? Central bank digital currencies, climate alarmism, digital IDs, wokeism. That’s right, the list of long-running complaints from us, the sceptical community. But what is digital ID doing on that list? I want to make the case for modern digital ID. In fact, I want to make the case that we should not merely tolerate it but that it should be taken off our list of complaints and added to our list of demands. You know, the one that goes: limited government, lower taxes, rational argument, self-sovereignty. We have all got a list something like that, and I want to see modern digital ID on it.
I appreciate this is a tough sell. Back in February the Daily Sceptic was running stories such as: ‘Frightening Polls Shows Half of Britons Support Tony Blair’s Proposal for National Digital ID Cards‘ and ‘Government consults on digital ID‘ with excoriating comments below the line. Ross Clark in the Spectator reacted similarly with ‘Will Tony Blair ever give up on ID cards?‘ The Daily Sceptic stories made it onto episode 26 of the Weekly Sceptic. Nick Dixon’s summary was: “Leave us alone Tony!” and Will Jones’s was:
We thought this had died, killed 30 years ago, but here it is hot off the heels of vaccine passports and the growth of digital surveillance… The issue isn’t carrying the card, its surveillance and invasion of privacy that it entails and of course none of these things have been addressed… [A YouGov poll found] a chilling 54% supportive, only 27% oppose with 18% don’t knows. It is disturbing that so many of our fellow citizens don’t understand the dangers of putting all of your ID onto a computer database.
More recently, the Daily Sceptic News Round-Up of July 18th included an article ‘CEO of Worldcoin says “Something like World ID will eventually exist… whether you like it or not”‘. As Nick might say: “But it’s not all good news…”
Nick, Will and Ross are in the same camp as commentators such as Peter Hitchens, who does a demolition job on identity cards in his excellent book The Abolition of Liberty. Yet here I am arguing against these gods of scepticism. Am I mad?
Let me start by saying that national identity cards are a terrible idea. If you harbour any sympathy for them, I suggest you read chapter one of the aforementioned Hitchens volume, where the demolition really is comprehensive. Here in the U.K., we have tried them twice, occasioned by World Wars One and Two. They were useless, hated, expensive failures. Of course, that did not deter Governments clinging on to them, despite promising not to, with Lord Justice Goddard having to put an end to them in 1952. They are a simple idea never far from the minds of politicians, a panacea for fighting crime, illegal immigration and benefit fraud. Never mind that they did not, and will not, have much effect on any of those problems.
After 1952 the failed attempts at identity cards continued in the U.K. and abroad, but while all this was going on something rather important happened: the internet. It is not that the rise of the internet suddenly negates Hitchens’s or Goddard’s arguments, but it does highlight and magnify the problem of identifying ourselves to each other. For example, how does the bank know that the person asking to withdraw all the funds from an account really is the account’s rightful owner? This was a problem before the internet but now all of us do something similar dozens of times every day, that is, we have to identify and authenticate ourselves. Even commenting on this site requires you to identify yourself as a donating subscriber.
Here are some related problems: how do I prove that I have a degree in computer science from a particular university which qualifies me to do a job? Can the person checking that degree certificate do so without having to know how to contact the university? Or how do I check that the doctor treating me really is qualified and has not been struck off? Or that person selling me an investment scheme really is money-saving expert Martin Lewis? It is an age-old problem, proving things about ourselves to each other; being certain that others are who and what they claim to be: qualified, a licence-holder, of a certain age, and so on. And, yes, vaccinated or not. This last point highlights that done badly it can become the ideal tool of control by authoritarian regimes. That is why I spent a lot of time and effort petitioning the Government against vaccine passports and getting it raised in public forums such as TalkRadio.
But are vaccine passports not the perfect example of why digital ID is such a bogeyman for sceptics? Prior to the suggestion of vaccine passports, we were all carrying wallets full of IDs, from your bank, credit card company, loyalty schemes, organisation memberships, driving licence, student ID and so on. And there were records that we did not carry such as our medical records, which we trusted to the state healthcare system. As well as these organisations’ ID cards, our phones are full of their apps which hold so much of our data. We accepted all that and the Daily Sceptic was not running articles warning us against it. So, what was different about vaccine passports? The difference was that none of those organisations make the law. They are not the Government. If your insurance company goes nuts and tries to coerce you into weird behaviour, you take your business elsewhere. You cannot do that when it is the Government. When the Government starts coercing people into having medical procedures they do not want or need, they cannot opt out. The Government can pass emergency legislation, change the rules for international travel, issue ‘guidance’ to entire sectors of the economy and badger the police to enforce it. Its app is part of the larger scheme, but it could just as well be a paper card as it was in the past. The point is not to give the Government that monopoly over your personal data. And as we have seen recently with banks or the censorious payment processors or social media platforms, we should not trust them either. In fact, trust nobody but yourself.
Freeing ourselves from all these dependencies, not relying on Google, or a bank or the Government for our identity needs and protecting ourselves from surveillance, is what modern digital ID is all about. Giving up on technology and falling back to waving a paper bank statement or utility bill as Hitchens suggests may have been conceivable once but nowadays it is simply luddite. We complain about the eco-crazies attacking the foundations of the industrial economy (fossil fuels) because they wrongly believe it is harming the environment, but in the next breath we oppose modern digital ID, thereby undermining the foundations of our information economy and all its benefits, because of the damage we wrongly perceive it is doing to our privacy. As with the climate alarmism narrative, we in the West could imagine limping along with windfarms, electric vehicles and brown-outs, but for those in developing nations, being excluded from cheap, plentiful, reliable energy is a much more serious problem. The same goes for identity. We limp along with email as our primary identifier, suffer identity fraud on a mass scale, have everyone complaining about passwords and are alarmed when we hear of people not being able to get a bank account (which is impossible without ID) and as sceptics we weirdly defend this status quo. But for those in developing nations the situation is far more serious. Globally, 12% of people do not have any form of ID. Thirty-eight percent of people live in countries that use badly designed ID systems to subvert their rights. Owning property, getting a bank account, crossing borders or receiving state benefits is a huge problem if you do not have reliable, secure ID. The problem needs to be solved for those folks even if we convince ourselves we can muddle along with our broken systems.
Let’s face it, modern civil societies need sophisticated, privacy-protecting systems of identification. The question is how to do it without creating a doomsday machine for dictators. Fortunately, people who think a lot about this are at long last coming up with solutions. They are not shadowy Government agencies but technology enthusiasts from workaday sectors such as travel, hospitality and charities. People like the Digital Identity Foundation, the OpenID Foundation, the Better Identity Coalition and the Secure Identity Alliance. They work in the open to produce open-source designs and specifications that we can all read and even contribute to. Talk of Government surveillance and control in modern digital ID is either strawmanning or profound ignorance. People working in this area are well aware of the abuses enabled by badly designed identity systems. For example, this from OpenID:
History offers plenty of examples of intentional human rights violations enabled by Identity Systems. This includes the misuse of identity data to spy on citizens, disenfranchise them, displace them, de-nationalise them or commit genocide. Examples from modern history include the use of identity cards to displace and de-nationalise the Rohingya population of Myanmar, the targeted constraints on access to identification that has disenfranchised black and indigenous voters in the United States, the stripping of citizenship for over a million individuals in the province of Assam, India, and the effects of profligate data collection by Germany’s Third Reich and Communist Stasi regimes.
These groups designing modern ID systems know all this and work to correct it. They are influenced by years of experience gained from identity schemes from around the world, from Singapore, Estonia, Spain, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Italy, the U.K., the U.S. and Canada. Some schemes were Government led, others private and commercial, schemes which resulted in both benefits and harms. Serious people thinking very hard about these problems have gradually solved them. And they have been very difficult problems to solve. Giving anyone in the world with only a smart phone and an internet connection the ability to absolutely prove their identity, without having to trust any company, government or third party, forever, with complete privacy and security, is not easy. By the way, if this sounds like cryptocurrencies, you are right. Indeed, the underlying blockchain in Bitcoin can be used in these ID schemes. In the same way that crypto currencies are independent of any bank or Government, so are modern identity schemes because they are based on much the same technology. If you are a crypto fan, why are you not a digital ID fan?
The good news is that privacy-preserving, self-sovereign identity is now within reach. The bad news is that it is still called digital ID, and hence drags along with it all the negative connotations that history keeps reminding us of. Let us not let the name get in the way. We have a solution, let’s use it. Use it to free ourselves from banks, from governments, from technology giants. Use it to get rid of passwords, identity fraud and internet data brokers. I quoted Will Jones at the start of the article saying our fellow citizens do not understand the dangers of putting all of your ID onto a computer database. Actually, we do, so that is why we are not doing it. And the alternative is to start using modern digital ID.
Unfortunately, ignorance of these systems is endemic. To be fair, they are a relatively recent development, technically difficult to understand and many of the problems they address are subtle. Plus the lingering naming problem. Perhaps this is why so much of the debate I see is fighting yesterday’s war. My appeal to sceptics is to try it out (it’s free!) and learn about it before criticising it. Yes, there is a lot of jargon: distributed IDs, issuers, verifiers, relying parties, block chains, resolvers and so on. But shouting down anyone who tries to tell you about it, even if they are Tony Blair, is not scepticism, it is cynicism. My appeal is to keep an open, informed mind on digital ID. You may need it sooner than you think.
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Par for the course from a load of professional arse-sitters, spouters and generalised planet savers, educated in subjects specialising in the latest fashionable drivel.
Incapable of doing a real job, a serious day’s work or understanding the principles of physics.
Keep up the good work, Mr Pile. In the long run, physics will prevail over fallacy and folly. Just a matter of when.
Reading your comment Art, it just occurred to me that Rayner is emblematic of the malaise afflicting our ‘governing’ party. Your three points in order: 1. She isn’t educated at all. 2.She’s never tried a ‘real job’ having been steeped in Trade Union lore prior to local government, then politics. 3.I doubt she could spell physics. ‘Room for improvement.’ as her end of term report might read would be a colossal understatement.
Ms Nobrayner is a bit of an outlier among the spouting classes. Having said that, anecdotally the two working people currently re-roofing our house have worked it all out for themselves. Work doesn’t get much more real, or educational, than being up on a roof at 8.15 in a cold, frosty February sunrise.
Been there, got the tee-shirt. Re-roofed our 8m x 5m barn in Yorkshire 40 years ago. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end. Never again!
I am not convinced it has much to do with understanding of physics. I know little about physics. There are useful idiots who find comfort in the religion of signalling their virtue, and there are others who just want to lord it over everybody and have cottoned on to “climate change” (or “pandemics”) as a good way to do that.
You know more about physics than you give yourself credit for. Less about O- and A-levels, more about grasping reality. Most career politicians don’t get that – witness Miliband (who has a physics A-level…).
Agreed on motivations – in my experience, one half of people revel in telling the other half what to do. The other half just wants both halves to work it out for themselves. Controllers vs responders, chalk and cheese mindsets.
Each to their own, live and let live. You see what you see, I see what I see, best we can do is each say what we’ve seen and discuss from there.
Some people seem to want to be told what to do.
As far as physics goes, I think it’s a case of doublethink or “there’s none so deaf as those that refuse to listen”.
Oh, I expect you’re right for too many of the people too much of the time. Bring up Feynman and Popper and watch eyes glaze over. Cue Dietrich Boenhoeffer on stupidity…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
“…Against stupidity we are defenceless. The stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”
I don’t think using the word “stupidity” in that way is overly useful. I think most people understand “stupid” in the sense of being intellectually challenged, inarticulate, incapable of higher order reasoning. If “stupid” people “go on the attack” then they are malicious. I know malicious stupid people and highly moral ones.
Let’s not get too hung up on a single word. I’m assuming Boenhoeffer used it in good faith in the circumstance of the time he was up against.
I’m sure he was wiser and certainly more courageous than I am.
We’re now fully in the grip of a socialist, central planning regime.
It’s been advancing for 100 years but now all the major and essential elements of our economy are for all intents and purposes centrally planned.
The remaining pockets of free market are in small enterprises. Sandwich shops, bits of the tech industry, basically the scraps.
Indeed. If memory of O-level history serves right, all those canals, railways and Victorian sewers had little to do with the governments of the time, and everything to do with men with spades and civil engineers of genius.
Credit where credit’s due, government did rule the waves, abolish slavery and foster civil engineering on foreign soil (but gets little historic thanks for it from present day arse-sitting and spouting classes).
Basically all the bits that are being forced out of business by the blob/govt.
You could mage an argument that the last 50 years or so of history have all been ‘about oil’. As one philosopher proposed ‘things’ change into their opposites over time… so perhaps the current history being formed is about ‘fake oil’. Oil you don’t extract and use to fuel (pun) the economy and standard of living.
Can we borrow Elon Musk
What happens in America never stays in America.
A large number of exceptionally fat backsides in the climate change/green energy taxpayer rip off business will be emaciated shadows of their former selves by 2015….
Bring it on.
Government Hates Wealth Creation
This one does – but of course they do, because they are socialists.
Socialism leads to denial of reality, poverty, economic collapse, totalitarianism, famine and death. History abounds with examples.
Socialism. Always. Fails.
“Labour’s manifesto promise to “create new high-quality jobs, working with business and trade unions, as we manage the transition””
Do governments create jobs? Don’t “jobs” arise because people want their needs fulfilled? Didn’t people do work thousands of years before we had “governments”?
Government create non-jobs that the private sector won’t because they see no value in them. The secret of the success of Donald and Elon is that they are successful businessmen and understand value for money. Governments can destroy jobs and 100 days on from the worst budget in history from probably our worst Chancellor this one is doing just that. With inflation about to rise again after the brief blip in December, the Bank of England has been forced to gamble in reducing the interest rate to prop up the failing economy. I see far too much optimism in rate reductions for this year. And don’t expect to see your mortgage rate come down as they are driven by 10 year bond rates.
100%
Yesterday is a good illustration of the variability of renewable power. At the start of the day wind was producing 14GW, by the following midnight it had dropped to just 4GW. Try coping for that sort of variation without reliable, dispatchable energy
January is obviously a critcal month in UK. The percentage graph from Gridwatch shows nuclear as grey, gas as dull orange and wind as pale blue.
PS You can see how pathetic solar is by the little flashes of yellow where the sun broke through.
It’s worth mentioning that the chart is %age of power generated. The nuclear power generated does not peak each night – it continues at the same level of power but represents a larger percentage because less is generated/required overnight.
On the other hand, solar…
Right now CCGT (gas turbines) contributing 54.46% towards our 42.91 GW demand today in spite of a glorious clear sunny February day in East Yorkshire (solar 6.43%).
Only slightly on topic, I fell about laughing this morning watching the article about vegan pets on GBNews. The woman from PETA (not British by the way), said that vegan foods for dogs is readily available, nutritious and reduces your dog’s carbon footprint. She then held up a tin consisting mainly of jack fruit. This comes from tropical countries, so massive food miles and carbon footprint and costs about £3.00 per 400g tin. Pedigree chum costs £1.00 per tin. What planet do these idiots come from?
You’re so right. And did you see the item on dog meat ‘made in the lab’ (for the lab??) guaranteed to reduce your dog’s carbon footprint!