There follows a guest post by our in-house technology correspondent. He wrote a series of pieces for Lockdown Sceptics about the NHS Covid-tracking app last year and now he returns to the fray to cover the NHS vaccine app.
All that is missing from the dystopian movie that our lives have become is a Bond-style henchman, created through diabolical processes by the wicked super villain. Speaking of which, Michael Gove has a cunning plan to fill that gap. The runt of the NHS app litter, whose creators couldn’t even be bothered to give it a name beyond “The NHS App” has been selected for a set of maniacal modifications transforming it from a lacklustre dictionary of medical conditions into a cyber-bully fit to harass and torment a nation. As we shall see, this once unloved and overlooked app is set to become the accomplice and collaborator of scammers, blackmailers and fraudsters.
According to the Daily Mail, Gove envisages a world where you can’t just go somewhere freely: you have to be permitted by a state-operated app that displays your medical records to unwitting restaurant owners, bar staff, and presumably anyone with an authoritarian streak who sees themselves as an agent of our new bio-security state. It is morally and ethically bankrupt, but technically, could it work? What we know about its implementation is sketchy, but we can contemplate what would be involved.
To prove you have had a jab you must show the relevant entry on your medical record, which is held by your GP, assuming you are registered with one and you didn’t opt out of summary care records in the past. If you are a tourist or business traveller from abroad that rules you out. No Diet Coke for you. Those records are the most personal, private data possible and there is rightly a lot of security around who can access them. Indeed, this information is considered so private that in 2004 the NHS instructed BT to build an entirely separate national network just to handle it! Now for the app to work, any random member of the public needs access to that private data, by connecting to the correct medical record at the correct GP surgery. Get that wrong and you are exposing medical records on a massive scale.
The NHS was already working on a system to do this, called NHS Login. It has various levels of “proofing”, and access to medical records requires the highest, known as level nine. Proof level nine is simple: enter your email address and create a new password, accept the terms and conditions and wait for the validation email, return to the app and enter your full name, date of birth and the postcode that you gave your GP, accept the two check boxes for the terms and conditions, get your passport, UK drivers’ licence or EU ID card, and use your phone to take a photo of it and answer some questions about it then allow the app to take a picture of your face unless flashing lights and colours make you feel unwell in which case you can record a video of yourself reading out some numbers instead, submit and wait up to two hours for email saying that your picture is ok. Got that?
That’s your NHS Login account set up, now to find your GP surgery. Let’s hope they have one of the seven recognised systems in which case you get an email from your GP confirming the connection. Or it might be from a scammer, it’s hard to tell. This is a big problem. The onboarding process puts you in a frame of mind where you are clicking anything, getting emails, taking photos of identity documents and you just want to get to the end of the process so you can go to the pub. If you get lost or distracted or have a question or just want to ask someone about it all, then the opportunities for scammers to insert themselves into the process are endless. At which point they have your most fundamental identity documents and access to your medical records to boot. Blackmail, extortion and fraud are sure to follow.
If they get this wrong, they will truly have created a monster for our technocratic age. An enabler of identity theft and medical data leakage on a national scale, exposing every embarrassing medical episode and blackmailable exploit imaginable. Scammers, crooks, and menaces around the world must be licking their lips.
Beyond the setup process, how does Gove’s fever-dream play out? If you have a jab the app will not know until it makes its way onto your summary care record at your GP. How long will that take? What is your status in the meantime? What if it never appears? Who you do call to fix it, your GP? If it is on your record when does the app consider immunity to be effective, how many weeks after the jab? Is it the same for all vaccines? Does it consider you immune after just one jab or will you be forced to wait for a second jab? And how long does it consider immunity to last? Your app could be showing green for months, then just as you are going to your daughter’s wedding, oops red, the app thinks you need a booster shot. No wedding for you. And if you can go to the wedding if you can show you’ve tested negative, who puts those tests on your medical record? Lateral flow tests are easy to do at home, but it would be too easy to fake a negative if you could write your own record. So, it will have to be carried out by an official at their convenience not yours, and the result will have to make its way onto your GP-held record. How long will that take? It had better be quick because the result is only valid for two days.
The doughty few that make it through the setup process will be rewarded by an app that puts them at the whim of NHS data entry clerks and ever-changing rules from public health panjandrums. They will live in a constant state of anxiety, fearful that it will turn from showing green to red and all their plans will be on hold for an arbitrary time with no reliable way to fix it.
I can only appeal to any developer building this app to realise what they are doing and make a stand. Refuse to work on it. Consider it as bad as any spyware, ransomware, virus, or weapon system. It is going to make a lot of people’s lives miserable and that is not why you went into software.
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I’d be very interested in any attempts to make fake copies of this app, not the sort of fakes which scammers would use to harvest private data, rather fakes which let people forge an “i’m clean” and forge it with totally bogus details so it is useless as a surveillance tool too. Thankfully the UK government has a track record in being pretty incompetent with the technical execution of their evil plans, so I suspect it might not be all that hard to make workarounds for any passes they try to introduce. Faked covid test results are already easily fabricated, and while they might try to clamp down on that I suspect other avenues for beating the system will open up.
Any time a Government bans something, it creates golden opportunity for a black market and enterprising people will figure out a way around the system. In this case, the Government is planning to basically ban everything in life unless you have a “golden ticket”, ergo there will be a massive demand and opportunity for anyone who figures out how to beat the system and sell it to people.
Just look at history – prohibition in the US created a huge opportunity for mobsters and the “war on drugs” has made billions for enterprising cartels, without reducing availability of drugs for anyone who wants them.
The people pushing these Covid passes probably already have their fingers in the black market for them, ready to make a fortune in the market they are creating.
I assume this “app” will go the same way as the centralised NHS medical record that took £billions to develop and was eventually abandoned.
Unfortunately, it’s going to make a lot of people’s lives a misery until it does.
Got an email from my local GP surgery saying the predictable “You have been invited to book a Covid-19 vaccination”. Given the prevalence of recent scams I was hesitant to click on even this. Maybe there’s a silver lining in the scamming problem here in the UK. Maybe it will wake people up to thinking twice about handing their details over to self-proclaimed “authorities” who call people up out of the blue.
Might I recommend, if you ever get something you are sure is your local GP replying with: “I’d love a vaccine but I refuse to be coerced. I am therefore informing you that I will accept a vaccine only when the government has made a legally binding pledge not to implement vaccine passes for domestic use. Dear Dr please understand what I mean here, I am refusing the vaccine for now because of the threat of such passes, i am refusing the vaccine for now to make it clear that using such passes will derial the vaccine rollout. Please inform your colleagues and managers that vaccine refusal will rise with the threat of vaccine passes, not drop. I say again I would welcome the vaccine, but I need the coercion ended first.”
Indeed. I told the receptionist that I was not interested in the gene therapy they were offering, and please call back when an actual vaccination against the Chinese flu is available.
She did not understand.
I feel the ‘prefer not to say’ option should be perfectly acceptable.
We just said we were waiting for now until more information and data is available. No one has argued, including our local hospital, who actually agreed with us.
Hasn’t stopped the NHS from sending us texts, which I ignore.
I am mostly ignoring it. But when challenged the other day I simply said that I do not take street drugs, and every other drug I have used is fully licensed and has been in use for decades. I have never taken an experimental drug yet, and I’m not about to start. I’m waiting for if to be fully licensed, and then I’ll wait until I’m seriously at risk. Then I’ll consider it.
And I’ll start protecting others when the Criminal justice system starts to properly and prophylactically protect women children from sexual predators so they can conduct their lives free of fear and abuse. Until then, if rapists and child molesters are free to move in society, posing a far greater risk to a group more far vulnerable than “the elderly”, then I’m out. And if they take my freedom of movement they lose the last shred of my compliance. (And it was a sliver).
Apparently Bupa is aware the vaccine is experimental so won’t cover any side-effects
I’d also include a point about waiting until the clinical trials are completed in 2023, and in the meantime you’re not having an experimental treatment with potentially serious side effects, as rare as those may or may not be
I’m extremely relieved I didn’t give my email address or mobile number to my GPs surgery. If I move house and register with another practice I will quite happily conform with the stereotyped notion of an older person refusing to embrace technology and insist that I don’t use a mobile phone or understand email.
Send apologies. It’s only an invitation and you are free to decline it. As for the app..its time to go back to data free phones. This app is to police populations. There is a serious shortage of law enforcement and this is designed to serve as population management and control.
Remarkable that we may be forced to submit our most private confidential data at the request of a man who won’t even tell people how many children he has. And ironic, that last year they paid us to go out and enjoy hospitality, but this was never admitted as a cause of increased infections. So why do we need passports this year?
You are making a massive assumption here – that he knows how many children he has!
Hahahaha! Have they not heard of paper?!
Of course software developers will get involved. Who wouldn’t want to dip their snouts in the trough swilling with the gadzillions of taxpayers money wasted on NHS IT systems? They have businesses to run after all and an appeal to their consciences will fall on deaf ears; sadly.
Toby, this is more like it. Especially the last paragraph.
I have a flu jab every year. My online record has a few missing. So not the most accurate system.
I got my records a few years ago and was shocked to discover that around the same time I gave birth, I got a hip replacement. It transpired that my notes had me as a 78 year old male. They did eventually right themselves, but a chunk of extremely bad “care” is permanently missing from my records and replaced by his. Very convenient.
I was almost scammed by a vaccine offer email, I wanted to decline so they stopped harassing me. It was only near the end when the email asked for my Bank Details that I stopped in horror.
Cant we just have some good old fashioned segregation? Vaccinated and unvaccinated clubs?
Let’s ask the Irish how that kind of division is working out for them?
Like this you mean?
https://off-guardian.org/2021/03/29/the-great-unvaxxed/
I read somewhere yesterday that the government has hired tech companies to work on facial recognition apps.
Bring back the balaclava!
balaclava wearing is illegal
Nope, someone recently made enquiries about that to a senior police officer and was told balaclavas are fine if worn to defend against the Covid.
Why not just buy it off the shelf from CCP, incl people wearing masks.
Is that a cunning plan to get us reprobates to wear masks?
“Lateral flow tests are easy to do at home, but it would be too easy to fake a positive if you could write your own record”
Given the requirement for self-isolation if you test positive, I’d suggest it’s a damn sight easier to fake a negative self test. Just test water.
Words and the Lockdownista/ Maskholes
I replied to the Cabinet Office, which was gathering views on ‘COVID status certification’. I posted my reply on the relevant item on page 5. It covered some of the issues above, though not in that level of detail. Overarching this in the comments in the end, though, my viewpoint was it is completely unnecessary as the pandemic is retreating, we do not want or need ID cards in the UK, it’s completely anti-democratic and prejudicial. Also, they have not made clear what is the purpose of it and how it will be used. Shocking, truly shocking.
As long as you stay local and build local relationships this will not be too much of an issue
My main objection to vaccine passes (beyond that the whole concept is dishonest) is this. It’ll create for the first time in human history a single database, with every person having a digital ID & one medical field (VP.? Y/N). Your privileges are set using this, from a ability to cross a border to ordering a pizza, whoever controls that database controls everything.
When an arbitrary decision is made that you’re due your top up, you’ve no choice but to get it.
As I am convinced these top up vaccines aren’t necessary, there is another agenda running here. That agenda is opaque, but could be anything from making pots of money all the way through to massive scale depopulation.
Perhaps the whole event has been exaggerated or even staged purely to shepherd those foolish enough to accept an experimental gene based contrivance in exchange for the possibility of a pint.
Even if you largely believe the official narrative to date, you should object to the formation of the most dangerous database ever, because of the perfect totalitarian control it enables.
It’s been said that “the Covid19 pandemic is basically an IQ test”.
But it gets even worse. Consider enforcement. What if the police decide they need to verify your identity, or the veracity of your claim to have had a vaccine? Do the police need a view into this? It would seem likely. Now, how do the police decide if you, in this app, are you, on your driver’s licence or you, at your at home address? what is the unique identifier that is valid across the NHS database and onto the PNC database? well there currently isn’t one. Does it become your NHS number? Ouch. Your NI number? Ouch – there’s another database brought into the mix.
This is not possible to do in a secure, uncrackable, and effective manner WITHOUT a brand new all encompassing ID system, including every man woman and child in the country. The fudge outlined above will be a classic example of GIGO, with dozens of inbuilt ambiguities and operational lags. Nope, i think this is designed to fail and is intended to form an argument for a new ID system joining all state databases and commercial databases too – it will be our social credit app. Blair will be all over it.