Jean Marat is angry, or indignant. Possibly both. The Government asked the people about digital ID and they responded, in the negative, with only single digit support for some of their questions. But why so angry Jean, when it is going so very well for your side of the argument? Like you, the public do not have the feintest clue what modern digital ID is about, they just know they’re against it. Job done.
Jean is indignant that the Government is puzzled by the responses. Apparently, only 2% of the public agree that public services for individuals and households should be improved or that any new objective put in place by the Government should provide a benefit. That is rather odd. Why would so many people disagree with that, the Government’s first question? It gets worse. Team Jean is opposed to improving privacy, reducing identity fraud and making access to public services easier. Those are odd things to oppose, en masse. Could it be that people don’t get past the words ‘digital’ and ‘government’ before they put their critical faculties on stand-by and tick the box saying ‘oppose’ next to everything? Indeed, when asked about digital ID, one fifth of people did not even respond about digital ID, they started banging on about not being able to use cash, the introduction of social credit systems and digital currencies. Does it really need explaining that a pound and a passport are different things? If you are asked about passports, it does not help your credibility if you then complain about pounds.
It is not surprising then that the Government surmises, as Jean puts it, “opponents have no agency but have been misled by vague, unnamed forces”, or “anti-digital commentaries” a term that Jean is also not happy about, even though the opposing force is, err, unnamed. The responses prove it is all going your way, Jean. One mention of ‘digital’ and ‘government’ in the same sentence and the majority of the public are triggered into the Team Jean mantra: No to digital ID! No to CBDCs! I even heard our sainted founder, Toby Young, falling for it on the Weekly Sceptic. You have won Jean. You have your very own ‘Just say No!’ movement.
I follow this debate closely and I can confidently say almost nobody knows what they’re talking about. It’s a dialog of the deaf and dumb, some very dumb indeed. When you try to explain, as I did on this site recently, a typical response is “crawl back under whatever rock you came from”. Nice. The Government, which is starting to understand, is also trying to explain – for example, with plain English FAQs telling us what it is intending to do. Jean describes that as “an increasingly desperate set of ‘fact checks’ on made up claims from the imagined ‘anti-digital’ lobby”. It is not imagined, it is you Jean, and you are the one making up the false claims. You do it in your article. It is supposed to be about digital ID but you cannot help yourself and are immediately asking “where is all this leading” and, bingo, CBDCs.
In the U.K., proof of identity is a mess. Everyone hates having to use dozens of constantly changing passwords and most organisations that have to keep their clients separate and secure resort to identification by some hopelessly insecure combination of factors such as date of birth and mother’s maiden name. If it were not so serious it would be laughable. Half the population broadcast their date of birth on Facebook annually when they share their birthday pics and your mother’s maiden name is just your uncle’s surname, also publicly available on Facebook. Fraudsters are having a field day and anyone trying to keep anything secure or private is pulling their hair out. It does not have to be this way, but given the prevalence of Team Jean, people do not even want to talk about solutions. Better hang on to those utility bills as proof of address for another year.
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Ho, just f off Jean!
He’s an idiot posing as someone clever.
His argument to defend a solution which the public is suspicious of is to… restate the problem and tell us it’s a really big problem. No honestly, really big. Huge, in fact.
And that, somehow, is supposed to serve as an explanation for why we shouldn’t worry. As if the size of the problem has some bearing on the quality of the solution.
Seriously, what a total idiot.
It should possibly be taken with a pinch of salt..
Or not at all…..I don’t listen or take things that are toxic, jabs, people’s advise or you get where I’m going with this
Exactly, anyone promoting something has an agenda of their own ends. Not yours, you are a means to those ends. And governments never promote anything without it being in their vested interests to do so.
Have you noticed, the more absurd the proposals and thoughts are from the self important, the more likely their fantasies and dreams become our nightmares.
Do you mean Jean? Don’t you mean “Anonymous IT Reporter”??
‘The Government, which is starting to understand, is also trying to explain…..’
Decreasing numbers across the country have any confidence in anything this government, or any other government, have to say.
Delusional. Ridiculous. The plans are in full view and CBDC, Social Credit – both linked to a Digital ID, are key platforms of the NWO. No stab, bad SC score, no digital bank account.
I will assume this authour is stabbinated, believes that Rona was real, prays to Saint Thunturd to save him from the boiling, and considers bird choppers to be ‘green energy’.
‘Stabinated’ love it, a new one on me
Digital ID of itself, is not the problem. Most adults carry a driving licence, which is the nearest thing that we have to an ID card today with a photo on it. The problem is once the Digital ID is available, what else are they going to link it to and why.? The problem is that we don’t trust the government, and why would we.?
Absolutely. When the government tells you its doing something for your own good, it’s always best to keep your hand on your wallet.
Someone coined a word for the movement, popular amongst vapid self-described futurists, contemporary philosophers and tech moguls, that has blind cheerleading for the establishment of a utopian technocracy at its core. The websites of supranational organisations like the WEF and Bergruenn Institute are full of it. I can’t even be bothered to remember what the word was.
Like most self-defined intellectuals they’re so enamoured of their own cleverness that they fail to see any flaws in their thinking whatsoever. Unfortunately we have a political class, especially the top echelons of the government and civil service, who are in thrall to these clowns, with opportunities for wealth and control they represent. No doubt they’re also seduced by possibilities for consultancy positions and seats on future boards at IT companies looking to win the fat contracts for all this stuff.
You’re absolutely right, we can’t trust the government as far as we can throw them. I’ve scanned the comments, and as far as I can tell, nobody’s mentioned the hacking of the UK electoral register, done in 2021 but owned up to a few days ago. Someone now has your full name associated with your postal address, national insurance number, age and nationality. Individually these pieces of information are unlikely to be very useful to a fraudster, but in one place, they vastly increase opportunities for identity theft.
Along with stolen laptops, memory sticks on trains and so on, if any private company had a track record on IT security lapses as bad as the UK government’s, they’d have gone bust decades ago, probably with its directors in prison.
Digital ID proponents will probably condescendingly point out that a shiny new central ID system will reduce the possibility of this sort of failure. It won’t. The more data you centralise about an individual, the more of it will need to be updated and changed on a continual basis from multiple points of access. The more this is done, the more points of potential failure it has, and the less secure it becomes.
As you indicate, the problem isn’t so much with identity cards (or their digital equivalent) themselves, but where and how the information they unlock is pooled and stored, and who has access to it. We rarely hear details about hacks, but many are enabled by insiders in organisations, either through clumsiness or corruption. Around 1 in 25 people is a psychopath or sociopath, and quite capable of serious crime if the incentives are there and they think they can get away with it. A far greater number are plain incompetent, and with a civil service recruited now for political persuasion and immutable characteristics over aptitude, this number is likely to be growing.
A bit of convenience is always a nice thing, but it’s likely the case that the factors making life inconvenient for us in terms of managing our important information are the same ones that make it inconvenient for criminals (including the institutional ones) to exploit us.
I have never, ever carried a Driving Licence. I don’t know anybody who does.
I do, and I suspect the only time I’ve left home without it in the last 22 years was when I thought I might get arrested for breaching lockdown rules.
Now why does that comment provoke 5 thumb-downs???
I do when I take my wallet with me but that’s not every time I walk out of the house. The point is choice and the thought of “papers please sir” in this country is quite frankly abhorrent. Mind you we’re heading that way faster than most folk think.
“I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.” As Ron Reagan said, the scariest words in the English language.
I had a real problem understanding the point of this article! It seems rather disingenuous. However, for the author’s clarification, people (and Jean) aren’t against digital identity or digital anything per se – if fact Jean is probably for it as it simplifies and makes life easier. But the big problem is who controls the digital ID – and your digital ID will affect your money, your travel, your access to benefits and the NHS etc. That is why Jean and I are against it. Does this really need saying?
Well said Geoff. As I said it’s all about trust, something of which our governments past president and future are in short supply.
At this stage, after everything that has happened, and after yet another WEF-supported global lockstep toward digital ID, to not be able to see that Digital ID will be used for permissioning to enable access to spaces and currency, is delirious and seriously negligent.
Hence, at best you are a useful idiot.
Was this articulate enough for you?
Now crawl back again under whatever rock you came from.
The author of this article only sees the technical issues around ID. Sure, digital id would be more convenient, just as cashless payments are more convenient. However, the author does seem to assume that authorities and government are inherently trustworthy and always have just the welfare of citizens at heart. Anybody who believes that has not been following the news recently. The “old” methods of id are less convenient but they at least give us autonomy because they are not under centralised control. Give us a political system that works for the benefit of the people of Britain instead of serving globalist elites and we may warm to the idea of digital id. Until then, the clunky old methods are at least free from the clutches of big state.
“… they are not under centralised control.”
When it would be so easy to withdraw your digital ID, and deny you access to anything.
And if someone nefarious got your digital ID ……
The other problem of course, it’s that WE won’t be able to withdraw our digital ID FROM the Govt.
Jeez. Some people will never be able to question authority, and will always be naïve beyond belief. Quite simply, given the last three years, if you still trust your government in any way whatsoever then you’re a bl*ody fool.
Some form of identification is essential when individuals deal with government and business.
When the systems they use are disconnected and disparate, people can deal with these entities in a relatively segmented and partially anonymous way. For example I can use different email addresses, use my middle name or initial or not, change my name or use a nickname, have different contact numbers. I don’t have to broadcast every detail of my life on anti-social media.
When power (and information IS power) is centralized you’re asking for trouble. All power centres are eventually taken over by the power-hungry, the sociopathic, the authoritarians, the amoral. National governments, the EU, the UN, it doesn’t matter how lofty the goals and utopian the founding ideals, sooner or later, and usually sooner, they all succumb to those forces.
Power and control should be distributed as much as possible, ideally down to the individual level. Personal responsibility.
When IT systems are all connected together and use one central database to confirm your identity, it only takes one button-push, one flag on your identity, one black mark, one transgression, and that’s the end of your career, your access to banking and other essential services, your ability to communicate with others.
The idea that we can trust those with control over digital ID? Laughable.
I haven’t used my middle initial, ever, since I was old enough to get a driving license. I remortgaged a house recently and ended up paying a solicitor (I imagine an administrator did the form filling) to have the entry on the land registry updated with my middle initial because that was what was on my passport which was derived from my birth certificate. They get you every way
Is that you Tobias? Having a bit of a slack day at 77th HQ are we?
I thought so, it seems like he dropped in to register his downvote.
The UN’s Development Programme has an international network of “digital advocates” as part of its strategy to implement digital IDs. I wonder if Anonymous IT Reporter is one such digital advocate?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Even if Anonymous IT Reporter is merely a private individual advocating decentralized digital ID, it would be naive to think that decentralized systems would be allowed to exist for anything important.
Nice try with the public services angle. Funnily enough, that’s the main Blair Institute argument. Public Services would become far more efficient if only everyone had digital ID and handily, Deloitte did a report for them that “demonstrated” once people understood public services would improve because of digital ID, they were suddenly in favour! Thank goodness for Deloitte!!
The dangers: Judge Napolitano, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern – all well connected – are entirely certain that though it’s illegal and unconstitutional, and was blown-open by Edward Snowden, US intelligence is still hoovering up all digital data on every citizen, and can of course search it for “seditious” keywords, or trawl the data of suspected individuals for stuff to incriminate them or discredit them.
The same is undoubtedly true in Britain, where the legal safeguards are less but GCHQ mimics the US pattern. To have the power to tie that into your financial dealings, in a climate where mass-closure of accounts is already rife, is an immense, and already present, danger.
The advantages: Somebody tells me proving your identity is a huge problem in Britain. It’s never been more than a minor inconvenience to me, and the inconvenience is entirely because of the risk of someone hacking my digital records. Put all those digital records together, and not only can hackers mimic me – they can abolish me too.
Even mark of the beast chips could be wiped, or maliciously altered to identify me as a criminal or a Chinese spy, with a mountain of digital evidence to convict me. And if that seems unlikely, ask why governments have insisted on the creation of back-doors to encrypted private communications: that which is immune to hacking is a challenge to central power, so will not be tolerated for long.
Oh, I didn’t find any advantages, did I?
At the present time it is reckoned that around 90% of the people in the UK have a passport, leaving around 8 million without a passport. It is already the case that your passport can be used as the I.D. for many Gov services, I recently renewed my over 70 driving licence, you can just enter your passport details and it links your driving licence and your passport.
The fact that despite 90% of people having a passport, which is ‘de-facto’ digital i.d., TPTB are still going on about digital I.D, makes me very suspicious that something much more insidious and sinister is envisaged that goes way beyond driving licences and passports. In that respect the cynical and sceptical would seem to have a good point.
More or less the same here. A few of years ago, I renewed my passport, then about 6 months later, my driving licence photo card needed renewing on account of it being just over 10 years since it was issued (during the panic, the DVLA didn’t bother to tell me that it needed updating), so I handed over £14 to the DVLA so that they would copy my image from the Passport Office, so that my passport and DVLA photo card are identical. There’s a slight oddity that the latter is actually still valid for it’s full 10 years, so the real image is 10.5 years!
Incidentally, the revised rules for passports were a back door tax rise, because when you used to renew them before the end, they would carry forward remaining months. With the new one, it was only valid for 10 years precisely, not 10.5 or whatever. Many countries won’t let you in if it’s going to expire within 6 months.
That’s a bit hyperbolic. No mention of multi-factor authentication which can already improve security without a digital Id.
As there’s almost certainly a paperless option for a utility company, you can print them off when necessary.
Are the current systems really that inconvenient for so many people?
The improvement in public services sales pitch is similar to a 20 min neighbourhood one. How great things will be if you accept this. But why can improvements not be made now without the public having to accept some potentially freedom-inhibiting option?
….still waiting for someone to tell me how MY life would be improved by this complete digitalisation…?
I can see the benefits for the people pushing it..but not so much for me….….
The author seems quite sure that the rest of us haven’t got a clue what we are talking about….but I’d suggest that people aren’t at all against ‘improving privacy, reducing identity fraud and making access to pubic services easier’…….it would just be nice if there was some actual proof that any of this would happen…so where is it?
It seems to me Anon is guilty of the very thing they think Jean is guilty of….
Show me how it works first..show me the clear benefits beforehand..doesn’t seem too much to ask….
Just to be clear …. I don’t want a ‘centralised’ health passport..I want what stands between me and my doctor to be private…ditto my bank.. I’m quite happy to fill a form in, or use another password if that’s what it takes to function on my terms….
I want to use cash….because I’m just funny like that…and before I’m subjected to any more faux fuc**ng experts telling me it’s ‘safe and effective’..I want to see the evidence first…..!!
P.S
Wetherspoons, British Airways, Wonga, TalkTalk, 3Telecom….etc etc etc……
Hear, hear.
When granting any government power, just imagine that power being wielded by your political enemy against you.
I don’t even need to be a conspiracy nut to believe this. We saw what our blessed leaders did with their elevated power over us. We saw how they flirted with totalitarian behaviours. We saw the deployment of multiple digital means of control, all of which steps were foretold by sceptics, but dismissed as utter bunk.
In the tale of the frog and the scorpion, a broken promise not to sting the frog was justified by “but I’m a scorpion”.
A lion invites you to put your head in his mouth. You’re to blame for trusting the lion.
The fact remains that a digital-id of any kind is part of the toolkit that would be deployed against us when they next flirt with their baser instincts.
It’s a hard NO from me.
Digital ID? I’m all for it. I have many. One of them is ‘soundofreason’.
Anonymous IT Reporter seems or pretends not to understand the difference between Identification, Authentication and Authorization which is a subject dear to many IT managers hearts. The main problem with digital ID is it concentrates everything into the first of that triad.
The author leaps straight into the deficiencies of passwords when discussing digital ID. Passwords are just one potential solution to the Authentication part of the triad.
The triad works like this:
I assert my identity – eg I provide my username.
The service challenges my identity by requesting authentication – eg it asks me for one or more passwords or some form of time-based code.
Having satisfied itself about my identity, the service can authorize me to perform certain actions – eg it might authorize me to add comments to an article but not to write new ones.
In the light of cancel culture, leaky government and company information systems and ubiquitous advertising tracking and snooping, wanting to have multiple digital IDs is a damned good idea.
Indeed. The recent PSNI débacle is a good demonstration of what can go wrong. Some organisations no longer use passwords – e.g. for my online banking I have to use either a physical secure key, or a smartphone with face ID, and one-time verification code numbers for certain activities, like transactions to novel external accounts.
PSNI is an excellent case in point. Should their state digital ID have been part of their employment records? Most definitely not.
Perhaps if the Government and the rest of politicians had not created the mistrust then the effort to convince would not be so difficult. I agree that digital is a “trigger”, but look at what has happened since the Blair years. Tony Blair introduced and expanded mass surveillance of the public through cameras, we were told it was for “our safety”, to help the Police etc, etc, yet here we are 20 plus years later, one of the most caught on camera populations in the world, has the crime rate decreased?, have the Police captured and charged more criminals?. No, but these Cameras have been used by Governments, councils, private operators to tax, fine, law abiding citizens,
Then we have all bought into the mobile phone culture, many of us have phones which we pay for, which we pay the telecoms companies for service lines, however Government again has taken it upon itself to use the product we pay for, not them, to interfere and control our lives, track and trace, spying on citizens, location data, sending alarms of impending terror not asked for. They and many basic utility companies I include banks in this, now expect us to use our bought and paid for laptops, phones to access our own money, to pay our bills, they parasite on the back of our property in order to reduce the quality of service, to get rid of jobs, and as we have seen witjh Nigel Farage, to buy our personal data from the providers in order to censor us, and as we saw during Covid to actively shut down the disobedients lives.
Speaking of Covid, remember the “digital passports” a pass book controlled and implemented by western Governments, rather like the Chinese, to monitor and control and to introduce a Caste system into the citizens of respective countries. In the country I was in at the time, I could not go into a public place for shelter, when it was a torrential rainstorm, I could not go into places to eat, I could not use Public transport, I could not fly abroad. In short I was under house arrest.
These are just a few examples of how Government and large corporations have over the past 20 years inserted themselves into life of the private citizen, how they have used technology for tyrannical and frankly inhuman ends.
So Digital I.D?, I.D in gerneral, Health passports?, CBDC? No thank you I have zero trust in anything this or any other current Politician of the main parties espouses, because I watch what these people do and have done, rather than what they say.
They have transferred a lot of costs to us, the customers, on the grounds of not having to print things and post them, because it is (allegedly) good for the environment.
An excellent post.
Yes agreed Hester..see my post….we know what they SAY it’s for, but the reality doesn’t even come close..not on anything. …..I mean who loves the ‘press 1 for whatever’..on the phones..rather than talking to a human?….NO ONE,!
…but we friggin got it anyway, and we were told it would make life better..it did not, it just made it easier for THEM….….this is exactly the same….and I’m not falling for it..
Set it all out..exactly how it will work, how will it benefit and make life easier for me..from A to Z … then we’ll talk..otherwise..piss off!!
A Digital ID is a file that one creates in order to digitally sign a document. Like many things pushed by the government recently, including Central Bank ‘Digital Currencies’ that aren’t really digital currencies and ‘vaccines’ that don’t vaccinate, there is clearly a duplicitous use of terminology that itself provides reasonably grounds for suspicion. Anyone familiar with the NHS Track and Trace App or the Chilean Pase de Movilidad or the various ‘Vaccine’ passport and Green Pass apps would understandably come to the conclusion that, far from being an innocuous file which which to prove authorship of one’s latest report, the government’s so-called ‘Digital ID’ is actually another attempt to push these dystopian apps onto the populace with a view to controlling movement and money flows of the many in the interests of the very few.
“In the U.K., proof of identity is a mess. Everyone hates having to use dozens of constantly changing passwords…”
I don’t, I use (pay for) Dashlane which encrypts and does it all for me.
Security experts warn about using same ID/PINs for multiple accounts, since if the bad people get hold of them from one account they can then access others.
So now we all have digital ID – the One ID That Rules Them All – and somebody steals that digital ID. Well done.
“The Government, which is starting to understand, is also trying to explain – for example, with plain English FAQs telling us what it is intending to do.”
I stopped reading at this point.
and they’re NOT explaining all the other things they want to do or might do in the future future.
Perhaps it was intended as satire. I can’t explain why they’d publish such utter nonsense otherwise. I’ve got no issue with a variety of views being expressed but it’s so poorly argued and missing the point by a mile. We understand the technical aspects sufficiently, it’s the trust and control issues that need to be addressed. Write an article explaining how and why we can trust the government on some initiatives and not others. All the major initiatives (war on terror, war on covid, war on disinformation, war on Ukraine, war on carbon, war on freedom of speech) are based on breathtaking, wicked lies.
I love it!
Someone singing the praises of digital ID so that people can be identified chooses to go by the name of “ANONYMOUS IT REPORTER“
It’s Sunday today, no-one is in the Daily Sceptic office, maybe that’s why we’re treated to a recycled post from 26th July (In Defence of Digital ID – Wait, Hear Me Out).
ANONYMOUS IT REPORTER‘s arguments were clearly and unilaterally rejected last time. Nothing has changed since then.
Next attempt: 27th August
I have met many “IT Reporters” in my professional career in technical marketing and I am struggling to remember one that I would call a normal person. I was even interviewed by one freelancer in his home and it rates as one of the most disturbing experiences of my life. I was truly glad to get out.
Frankly Sir would you trust any government with your personal details after their fraudulent dishonest fear mongering behaviour over the last 3+ years? What’s to say they won’t use digital ID against their citizens to stop them travelling or buying essential goods and services? You see it’s all about trust and to use my late Father’s phrase “I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could kick a piano”. You’re being very very naive.
Dear ‘Anonymous IT Reporter’,
Your contempt for “the public” is misplaced (and patronising, obviously); they don’t need to have “the feintest [sic] clue what modern digital ID is all about”, since it’s something that emanates from…the government. Now, many people don’t think an awful lot of…the government.
To quote the peerless Derek & Clive – Are you twigging yet? Can’t you see that something’s afoot?
The time of ‘experts’ has to come to an end – even if they’re right. (which is moot). ‘Experts’ will be the death of us all.
After the last 7 years (since the Brexit Referendum which the Establishment REFUSED to deliver) and in particular the last 3+ years of Covid Tyranny, trust in the Government is at an all time low.
Surprised?
It is blindingly obvious that a Digital Identity which will provide a myriad of personal data and will be shared across multiple Departments, Agencies, the Police and foreign organisations, gives the Government far to much opportunity for control.
And you’d think that the recent release of data on all the Northern Irish Police contingent onto the internet for anyone to see, would make those pushing the Digital Agenda and claiming it will be secure blush just a tiny bit.
“And you’d think that the recent release of data on all the Northern Irish Police contingent onto the internet for anyone to see, would make those pushing the Digital Agenda and claiming it will be secure blush just a tiny bit.”
Cracking point. Is there any need to say any more. Rhetorical question!
Government are less trusted today than ever before. No one believes a word they say. Is it such a big surprise then that people don’t jump into the snake pit even though they know most snakes are not poisonous? Nope it isn’t…. Why take the chance? When government are so full of s..t, is it any wonder any of us believe a word they say? So when they come up with a good idea that doesn’t involve pretending to save the planet or monitoring us for “hate speech” we might tend to be a bit suspicious.
First of all not sure why the author is anonymous?
Surely he/she should not be worried about her/his ID?
I certainly can see the ‘convenience’ argument, providing all runs well.
The issue not covered by the author is the problem if it is not run well or misused to control.
So the question is really whether the ‘convenience’ is greater than the potential downsides.
And in my book it isn’t.
That is why I am against the imposition of digital ID.
The other problem of course with a Govt digital ID, it’s that WE won’t be able to withdraw it FROM the Govt. A core definition of a ‘service’ is that we can choose to use it and choose not to, without prejudice.
In the immortal words of Shania Twain “That don’t impress me much!”
I had to look up the lyrics (you’ll be relieved to know), but I wonder if she was thinking of you and your ilk in the first verse.
“ I’ve known a few guys who thought they were pretty smart
But you’ve got being right down to an art
You think you’re a genius, you drive me up the wall
You’re a regular original, a know-it-all”
i trust the British public rather more than the so-called experts who seem to think they have a monopoly of intelligence and understanding when in fact they are clearly blind to the obvious risks that are apparent to those of us with not only intelligence and understanding but good old fashioned common sense!