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Digital ID

Tony Blair pushes digital ID as ‘essential’ to modern infrastructure but needing public ‘persuasion’

Published

4 months ago

7 minute read

Former UK prime minister Sir Tony Blair

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

In his Cyber Polygon 2020 talk, Blair didn’t make the case for why having a digital identity was actually necessary to prevent a cyber pandemic, but rather that digital identities would be an inevitable part of the digital ecosystem and would be crucial for managing health records, transaction data, and immigration status.

Speaking Tuesday at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) “Future of Britain Conference 2024: Governing in the Age of AI,” Blair continued his years-long push for digital ID adoption.

READ: Major anti-globalist TV station debanked in Germany and Austria

“An analysis on digital ID, which is an essential part of a modern digital infrastructure, could yield benefits not only for ease of interaction with government but for the public finances,” said Blair.

“Though, we have a little work of persuasion to do here, it has to be said,” he added.

Speaking at a session on “Why Building a Digital Backbone Is Essential for Britain,” India’s former Minister of State for Electronics, Information Technology, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that digital ID was the “bedrock” of a “digital government architecture.”

When it came to the notion of individual civil liberties and digital identity, Chandrasekhar said that it was “an interesting debate to have” and that digital ID didn’t imply a violation of personal privacy:

People who say digital ID automatically implies a violation of personal information privacy have not read the last two chapters of the book they’ve been reading.

‘A citizen’s digital ID would contain a single unique identifier, which would help link the user with public services. Each service would retain its own unique identifier such as an NHS number or Unique Taxpayer Reference.’ — Tony Blair Institute, The Economic Case for a UK Digital ID, 2024

The report “The Economic Case for a UK Digital ID” claims that digital ID can be used for everything from integrating “personal health records and personal data” to streamlining taxation and welfare payments, as well as for managing refugees and asylum seekers.

The total cost of a digital ID rollout in the U.K., according the report, would cost at most £1.4 billion [$1.8 billion], and a digital ID scheme could be developed and deployed “over the course of a single parliamentary term (five years).”

Citizens would retain control over how linked they want their data from different databases to be via a user portal/app, while controlling how their digital identity attributes are used through a digital wallet (decentralized model).

Tony Blair has been pushing the digital ID agenda for many years for a variety of different reasons, from vaccine passports to tracking refugee statuses.

A TBI spokesperson told Politico EU that the organization was not advocating for mandatory digital ID cards, saying, “Everyone loves to talk about ID cards or government ID. That’s not actually our proposal,” adding that TBI’s vision is for people to be given “the ability to connect [their] data across the public sector.”

Speaking at the WEF-backed, Russian-based Cyber Polygon 2020 cybersecurity training exercise, former UK Prime Minister Blair stated with confidence that governments were “absolutely, inevitably” moving in the direction of digital identity adoption.

In his Cyber Polygon 2020 talk, Blair didn’t make the case for why having a digital identity was actually necessary to prevent a cyber pandemic, but rather that digital identities would be an inevitable part of the digital ecosystem and would be crucial for managing health records, transaction data, and immigration status.

Digital identity is one of three major components of what is known as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), which also includes massive data exchanges, and a fast digital payments system, which can include the use of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

India is considered to be one of the world leaders in DPI, which everyone in the space refers to as the “India stack.”

Last year, India’s Aadhaar digital ID architect Nandan Nilekani said that everybody should have a digital ID, a smartphone, and a bank account because these were the “tools of the new world” upon which everything else was built.

In November 2023, the U.N. and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered to launch the 50-in-5 campaign to accelerate DPI rollouts in 50 countries within five years.

Earlier this year, the European Union parliament said that its digital identity wallet would be voluntary, which is what India said about its own digital ID scheme before government agencies began mandating it for certain services.

At the WEF annual meeting in Davos this year, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands said that a digital ID was good for knowing “who actually got a vaccination or not.”

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable

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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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