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Digital ID

Lawmakers advancing digital ID in effort to establish mass surveillance

Published

1 month ago

3 minute read

Digital ID Schemes Make Strides in Congress Despite Rights Advocate Opposition

It’s one of the “commandments” of global organizations like the UN, and the World Bank, to name but two, and also those less official ones like the WEF and the Gates Foundation: the digital ID.

And in the US, lawmakers have for years been struggling with the concept, heavily criticized by rights advocates for its ability to take mass surveillance to the next level.

On the one hand, the lawmakers have (or are supposed to have) their existing laws and constitutional protections in mind, but on the other, new legislation is cropping up both from Democrats and Republicans that signals a more or less slow creep towards the ultimate digital ID goal.

At the state level, the push is mostly focused on mobile driver’s licenses.

But the proponents of the schemes – who insist that the unprecedented centralization of personal information will provide for more trust and security – want things to start moving faster at the federal level, too.

One of the main cheerleaders here is Congressman Bill Foster, a Democrat. In September, he reintroduced a bill that, if adopted, would produce something called, the Improving Digital Identity Act.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

That, in turn, would set up an Improving Digital Identity Task Force, which would operate as part of the president’s Executive Office, whose main task would be getting rid of physical credentials in favor of digital ones.

Meanwhile, the act wants the government to look into all the ways it could provide solutions for Americans to prove their identity on the internet.

This isn’t the only legislative effort Foster has been involved in lately, particularly on the “reintroduction old proposals” front; in June, he and Congressman Clay Higgins, a Republican, worked together to make sure the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) submits a report to Congress informing its members “on its use of digital identities and their potential impact on homeland security.”

That one has made its way through a relevant committee but is yet to clear the House.

Like many of his digital ID-championing peers, Foster likes to talk about the promised positive side of things: less fraud and identity theft, and safer transactions.

He even managed to work the “deepfakes menace” into the message, claiming that this is another thing a future, deeply controversial digital ID system would be able to take care of.
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Digital Currency

Conservatives urge Canadians to reject mandatory digital IDs proposed by Liberal gov’t

Published on November 12, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canadian federal regulators have disclosed they are working on digital credentials for Canadians despite the fact MPs have repeatedly rejected the proposal over safety concerns.

The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) called on Canadians to resist and oppose “mandatory digital ID.”

“He’s (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) trying to encroach on your freedom and privacy, again. The Liberal government has been CAUGHT trying to create a mandatory digital ID,” the CPC said in a recent email to members.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Canadian federal regulators have disclosed they are working on digital credentials for Canadians despite the fact MPs have repeatedly rejected the proposal over safety concerns.

Shared Services Canada, which is a federal IT department, is developing “digital credentials” like Social Insurance Numbers, which one needs in order to work.

The CPC has launched a petition that anyone can sign calling for Canadians to “oppose” any such digital ID system.

“This Liberal government can’t be trusted to protect confidential information. They have already been HACKED and scammed, costing Canadians hundreds of millions of dollars,” the CPC said.

The CPC noted that Trudeau is “trying to win re-election through TOTAL CONTROL.”

“Canadians do not want more intrusive government surveillance,” the CPC stated.

CPC leader Pierre Poilievre is opposed to digital IDs as well as a federal digital dollar, which seems to be on hold for now, and has promised to introduce a new online harms bill that would “expressly prohibit” digital IDs in Canada.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Biometric and Digital ID in Crisis Zones: Is the Red Cross Paving the Way for a Privacy Nightmare?

Published on October 20, 2024

By

From Reclaim The Net

By Didi Rankovic

The Red Cross (ICRC) is the latest long-established and operating international organization of considerable repute, that has found itself enlisted to, essentially, help the biometrics data-reliant ID happen.

Specifically, the Switzerland-based ICRC seems to have gotten involved in a scheme developed to such an end by Germany’s CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and also Switzerland-based Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL).

The scheme is called the Janus system.

While formally and generally working in any region affected by natural or human-created disasters – helping refugees, casualties, the issue of missing or displaced persons – the ICRC is mandated first and foremost by the 1949 Geneva Convention.

But the times have in the meantime clearly changed quite considerably – and now there’s the initiative to “hoover up” ICRC’s many decades of experience, and repute, into a “new reality.”

Such as creating new tools “aimed at verifying the identities of humanitarian aid recipients.”

And once again, the focus is on developing nations. This time – not entirely unlike the stated rationale behind recent UK’s recent mass surveillance effort under the guise of fighting tax money fraud – the focus is supposedly to make sure that those caught up in humanitarian crises areas do not submit “multiple registrations.”

It’s either to make sure humanitarian aid gets to as many people as possible – or, a handy opportunity to present this problem as one without a solution, other than drastic things like biometric data getting introduced into the mix.

There has now been a disturbingly high number of instances of Western-based and/or majority-funded organizations, formal (like the UN), or informal but powerful ones, “testing abroad” the tech that they know would face serious and strong opposition at home.

And that’s in countries and societies where the dangers to privacy and security are either not well-advocated or are simply voided by the everyday bare necessity to survive.

Biometric data harvesting, retention, usage, and (ab)use fall in this category, and as much as civil rights organizations in developed countries are to be praised for the work they do or attempt to do at home, it should be said that the “backdoor experiments” taking place in poorer countries not getting enough spotlight is something these groups definitely need to work on.

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

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