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Censorship Industrial Complex

World Economic Forum pushes digital ID for global metaverse governance: report

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15 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

Apart from tracking every interaction, another major part of this digital ID scheme for the metaverse includes an agenda for complete traceability of all transactions. They call this empowerment.

Under the banner of establishing global governance in the metaverse, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is pushing digital ID for all users, so all blended reality interactions and transactions can be tracked-and-traced.

Published on November 19, the WEF report, “Shared Commitments in a Blended Reality: Advancing Governance in the Future Internet” expresses the desire to establish global governance in blended reality, which requires digital identity for all users to keep track of their interactions and transactions:

Digital spaces have long been a forum for pronounced cyberbullying, harassment, abuse, exploitation, privacy violation, etc. Physical-digital blended spaces will see exacerbated forms of these issues.

When it comes to future interactions in the metaverse, the report asserts that some people will behave badly and that some people won’t know how to deal with what they experience, and for those reasons, digital ID should be a prerequisite under a global governance framework to ensure user safety.

According to the report, “In blended reality, people cannot ‘unsee’ or ‘un-experience’ interactions. While people cannot unsee or un-experience reality today, the types of spatial experiences an individual could be exposed to bring dynamic, evolving, palpable and visceral experiences. This underscores the urgency of refining and implementing a set of guiding commitments.”

The unelected globalist desire for global governance over the future of the internet is exemplified by what they call “fragmentation” when it comes to how each nation chooses to govern, whether it be a mandate from the people or from authoritarian regimes:

Hardware devices – such as smartphones, biometric and IoT sensors, and XR headsets – play a pivotal role in this transformation by reshaping how individuals interact with the internet and each other. These technologies are blurring the line between online and offline lives, creating new challenges and opportunities that require a coordinated and informed approach from stakeholders for effective navigation and governance.

One example of fragmentation has to do with how different regions regulate data collection and privacy, with a particular focus on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) scheme.

Using GDPR as a starting point, the WEF report says, “Fragmentation of national frameworks can hinder the efficiency and effectiveness of global internet governance and the ability to address transnational issues such as cybercrime, digital trade, online harms, secure and trusted cross-border data flows, and the protection of intellectual property.”

All roads lead to digital ID; this is also true for financial transactions in both the physical and digital worlds, including where they overlap.

The WEF report recommends eight commitments that “stakeholders” should apply to global governance in the metaverse – stakeholders being governments, academics, and civil society – the latter of which consists of NGOs like the WEF itself.

These commitments don’t come from the will of the people; they come from unelected technocrats looking to influence policies from the top-down:

Rallying behind these governance commitments will enable technically and jurisdictionally appropriate governance guardrails to be put in place as individuals start to engage in blended reality experiences and move around immersive spaces – bringing with them their identity, money and digital objects.

Source: WEF “Shared Commitments in a Blended Reality: Advancing Governance in the Future Internet“

It is crucial to explore considerations around addressing the provenance, authenticity and protection of physical and digital assets. This includes data, identity and intellectual property (IP), and other forms of assets to ensure possession, access, transactions, transferability and accountability for individuals, entities and common resources.

Central to global governance in the metaverse, once again, is digital ID, which is also referred to as “identification management” in the WEF report.

According to the report, identification management “involves enabling appropriate and suitable identity access management measures of individuals interacting with information technology (IT) systems to enable governance through such systems. This might include, as necessary, aspects of personal identity, digital identity, entities or digital assets and their associated ownership.”

The authors claim that digital identity is necessary for:

Employing traceability and visibility mechanisms to implement appropriate enforcement, redress and remediation.

In this way, digital ID is being pushed forth as a something that will protect individuals, rather than addressing all the ways it can enslave them.

Apart from tracking every interaction, another major part of this digital ID scheme for the metaverse includes an agenda for complete traceability of all transactions.

They call this empowerment.

Empowerment through traceability and control: This involves enabling the attribution of lineage and authenticity of digital and physical interactions and assets.

Keeping in mind that total traceability and control is not just for the digital realm, but also the real world and where the two intersect, the WEF report says that “tracing the ownership and transfer history of assets through mechanisms like distributed ledger technology or digital certificates” will create a chain of custody.

This chain of custody includes:

  • Authenticity: establishing proof of personhood and humanity, especially in the context of AI-generated assets and digital representations
  • Proof of value: establishing verifiable and quantifiable value for both physical and digital asset
  • Proof of ownership: clear assignment and verification of ownership
  • Proof of transaction: comprehensive records for transaction history and settlement

In other words, there is to be no distinction between the physical world and the digital one when it comes to buying and selling.

Every transaction, every change of ownership, everything of value must be digitally tracked and traced and tied back to a person’s digital ID.

Another way in which digital ID is essential to the unelected globalist agenda is to deal with what they call misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech, which is lumped in a category for the metaverse called “experience moderation.”

Experience Moderation – Content and conduct moderation: Prioritizing thoughtful content and conduct moderation that respects human expression while addressing the challenges of harmful content, harassment, misinformation and disinformation, and other harms while ensuring user safety and championing algorithmic accuracy and transparency

But what type of content do these unelected technocrats consider to be harmful?

For starters, if you question any official narrative having to do with climate change, you are spreading hateful and harmful misinformation and disinformation.

If you don’t agree with public health mandates, you are expressing views that harm user safety.

And with a digital ID, if you don’t comply, you can be shut off from goods and services, like we saw with vaccine passports.

Then, in a strange turn of events, the report also mentions the right of the people to not participate in this digital scheme.

The authors call this “Preservation of Choice”:

Preservation of choice: This involves endorsing the development of governance that respects digital autonomy, emphasizing that everyone has the fundamental option to limit or abstain from digital engagement without facing exclusion from essential services such as healthcare, education, utilities, means of communication, emergency response, transport, etc.

But how can an individual have “preservation of choice” when digital ID is required for all interactions – be they online, offline, or in between?

The authors say, “Championing the dignity of choice for nondigital interactions and ensuring that this choice does not preclude access to essential services – this may be accomplished through modernizing infrastructure for processes that enable members of society to reap the benefits of emerging technologies without necessarily needing to interact with them.”

They also add, “Recognizing and affirming the rights to autonomy, agency, mobility and access to information as fundamental human rights in both digital and physical spaces. This includes the right to move and choice of residence, and the ability to seek and impart information through any media, regardless of frontiers (Article 13 and Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights).”

However, all this talk about being able to opt-out of the digital gulag system, along with having the right to move about and having the right to access information, is completely contradicted by everything the WEF and other unelected globalist entities have been pushing for over the years when it comes to digital ID:

This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.

Digital identity is the nexus to an interoperable metaverse. It enables accountability and the capacity to traverse worlds with minimal friction.

Apart from acknowledging that digital ID is exclusionary in nature, the WEF flat-out admits that vaccines passports are a form of digital ID.

According to the WEF report, “Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries,” published in February, 2022, “The COVID 19 pandemic has led to a heightened focus on the power of medical data, specifically so-called vaccine passports.

“These [vaccine] passports by nature serve as a form of digital identity.”

Getting back to the metaverse, the WEF has stated time and time again that digital ID will be central to your daily life and that digital ID will be the “nexus to an interoperable metaverse.”

“A person’s metaverse identity will be central to their day-to-day life.”

If your metaverse identity is supposed to be central to your daily life, and if digital ID is supposed to be the nexus to an interoperable metaverse, how in the hell can they claim there is still a “preservation of choice” for those wishing to opt out?

In a weak attempt to give some consolation to the paradox they invented, the unelected globalists at the WEF are saying in the latest report that there should be a system in place that allows for the deletion and erasure of an individual’s private data after having gone through a process of review, updates, and transfers.

The report describes this with the acronym RUTDE:

Review, update, transfer, deletion and erasure (RUTDE): Enabling comprehensive architecture, processes and privacy controls facilitates:

  • Building IT systems to support the review, update, transfer, deletion and erasure of individuals’ information
  • Providing documentation, structured processes and supporting information for individuals to manage their digital footprints, including the option to request, review, update, transfer and delete personal data from platforms

But wait a second! Why should we have to manage our “digital footprints” if we have already chosen to opt-out in the first place?

Why would we need to request, review, update, transfer, or delete our personal data if we never consented at the outset?

The whole thing reeks of public-private partnership overreach.

They say we can opt-out of the metaverse digital ID data collection scam while simultaneously telling us that doing so would be close to impossible.

It’s the same type of logic that said nobody forced you to take the experimental gene therapy jab, but if you didn’t, you could lose your job, your freedoms, your livelihood – all of which runs contrary to all previous human rights agreements.

When it comes to digital ID, there is no public consensus, only collusion.

There is no choice; only coercion and contradiction to confuse our cognition towards total control.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Apple removes security feature in UK after gov’t demands access to user data worldwide

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From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

The decision was otherwise roundly condemned on X as “horrific,” “horrendous,” the hallmark of a “dictatorship,” and even “the biggest breach of privacy Western civilization has ever seen.”

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Bipartisan US Coalition Finally Tells Europe, and the FBI, to Shove It

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FLICKER OF HOPE? Left, Senator Ron Wyden. Middle, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Right, Rep. Andy Biggs

Racket News  By Matt Taibbi

While J.D. Vance was speaking in Munich, the U.K. was demanding encrypted data from Apple. For the first time in nine years, America may fight back

Last Friday, while leaders around the Western world were up in arms about J.D. Vance’s confrontational address to the Munich Security Council, the Washington Post published a good old-fashioned piece of journalism. From “U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts”:

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.…

[The] Home Secretary has served Apple with… a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies… The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand.

This rare example of genuine bipartisan cooperation is fascinating for several reasons. Oregon’s Ron Wyden teamed up with Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs to ask new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for help in beating back the British. While other Democrats like Michael Bennet and Mark Warner were smearing Gabbard as a Russian proxy in confirmation hearings, Wyden performed an homage to old-school liberalism and asked a few constructive questions, including a request that Gabbard recommit to her stance against government snatching of encrypted data. Weeks later, the issue is back on the table, for real.

The original UK demand is apparently nearly a year old, and Apple has reportedly been resisting internally. But this show of political opposition is new. There has been no real pushback on foreign demands for data (encrypted or otherwise) for almost nine years, for an obvious reason. Europe, the FBI, and the rest of the American national security apparatus have until now mostly presented a unified front on this issue. In the Trump era especially, there has not been much political room to take a stand like the one Wyden, Biggs, and perhaps Gabbard will be making.

The encryption saga goes back at least ten years. On December 2, 2015, two men opened fire at the Inland Center in San Bernardino, killing 14 and injuring 22. About two months later, word got out that the FBI was trying to force Apple to undo its encryption safeguards, ostensibly to unlock the iPhone of accused San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI’s legal battle was led by its General Counsel Jim Baker, who later went to work at Twitter.

One flank of FBI strategy involved overhauling Rule 41 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure. The FBI’s idea was that if it received a legal search warrant, it should be granted power to use hacking techniques, if the target is “concealed through technological means.” The Department of Justice by way of the Supreme Court a decade ago issued this recommendation to Congress, which under a law called the Rules Enabling Act would go into force automatically if legislation was not passed to stop it. In 2016, Wyden joined up with Republican congressman Ted Poe to oppose the change, via a bill called the Stopping Mass Hacking Act.

Two factors conspired to kill the effort. First, the FBI had already won its confrontation with Apple, obtaining an order requiring the firm (which said it had no way to break encryption) to write software allowing the Bureau to use “brute force” methods to crack the suspect’s password. While Apple was contesting, the FBI busted the iPhone anyway by hiring a “publicity-shy” Australian firm called Azimuth, which hacked the phone a few months after the attack. The Post, citing another set of “people familiar with the matter,” outed the company’s name years later, in 2021.

The broader issue of whether government should be allowed to use such authority in all cases was at stake with the “Stopping Mass Hacking” bill. It was a problem for the members that the FBI called its own shot in the San Bernardino case, but the fatal blow came on November 29, 2016, when the UK passed the bill invoked last week, called the Investigatory Powers Act. This legal cheat code gave agencies like Britain’s GHCQ power to use hacking techniques (called “equipment interference”) and to employ “bulk” searches using “general” warrants. Instead of concrete individuals, the UK can target a location or a group of people who “share a common purpose”:

THE IPA: Bulk warrants, warrants by location, warrants on groups with “common purpose”

The law was and is broad in a darkly humorous way. It mandates that companies turn over even encrypted data for any of three reasons: to protect national security, to protect the “economic well-being of the UK,” and for the “prevention or detection of serious crime.”

Once the Act passed, American opposition turtled. How to make a stand against FBI hacking when the Bureau’s close partners in England could now make such requests legally and without restriction? The Wyden-Poe gambits were wiped out, and just two days after the IPA went into effect, changes to Rule 41 in America did as well. These granted American authorities wide latitude to break into anything they wanted, provided they had a warrant. As one Senate aide told me this week, “That was a game-over moment.”

Once the British got their shiny new tool, they weren’t shy about using it. The Twitter Files were full of loony “IPA” dramas that underscored just how terrifying these laws can be. In one bizarre episode in August of 2021, Twitter was asked to turn over data on soccer fans to a collection of alphabet soup agencies, including the Home Office and the “Football Policing Unit.” The Football Police informed Twitter that “in the UK… using the ‘N word’ is a criminal offence — not a freedom of speech issue.”

Twitter executives scrambled to explain to football’s cyber-bobbies that many of their suspects were black themselves, and tweets like “RAHEEM STERLING IS DAT NIGGA” were not, in fact, “hateful conduct.” (The idea that British police needed American executives to interpret sports slang is a horror movie in itself.) Accounts like @Itsknockzz and @Wavyboomin never knew how close they came to arrest:

N**** PLEASE: British police invoked the Investigatory Powers Act to get user information about nonwhite football fans

British overuse was obvious, but Twitter elected not to complain. They also kept quiet when American authorities began pushing for the same power. Though the Apple standoff aroused controversy, 50% of Americans still supported the FBI’s original stance against encryption, which seemed to embolden the Bureau. Senior officials began asking for the same virtually unlimited authority their friends in the UK (and soon after, Australia) were asserting. Donald Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, seethed about encryption in a keynote speech at an International Cybersecurity Conference on July 23rd, 2019. The Justice Department was tiring of negotiations with tech companies on the issue, Barr said:

While we remain open to a cooperative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited. Key countries, including important allies, have been moving toward legislative and regulatory solutions. I think it is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.

God knows what he meant about a “major incident” that “may well occur at any time,” but Barr was referring to the Investigatory Powers Act and imitator bills that by 2019 were being drafted by most U.S. intelligence partners.

Even without a central “incident,” European officials have been pursuing the dream of full “transparency” into user data ever since, often with support from American politicians and pundits. It was not long ago that Taylor Lorenz was writing outrage porn in the New York Times about the “unconstrained” and “unfettered conversations” on the Clubhouse App. As Lorenz noted, Clubhouse simply by being hard to track aroused the hostility of German authorities, who wrote to remind the firm about European citizens’ “right to erasure” and “transparent information”:

Providers offering services to European users must respect their rights to transparent information, the right of access, the right to erasure and the right to object.

Eventually, the EU tried to submarine end-to-end encryption through dystopian bills like “Chat Control,” which would have required platforms to actively scan user activity for prohibited behavior. This concept was widely criticized even in Europe, and in the States, which was mostly still in the grip of “freedom causes Trump” mania, TechCrunch called it “Hella Scary.”

Chat Control just barely stalled out in October, thanks to the Dutch, but Europe’s feelings about encryption were still more than made clear with this past summer’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov. That event was largely cheered in the U.S. press, where Durov was accused of actively “hiding illegal behavior,” and turning his platform into a “misinformation hot spot” used by “far right groups,” “neo-Nazis,” and “Proud Boys and QAnon conspiracy theorists.” The consensus was Durov himself was helping sink the concept of encryption.

“If we assume this becomes a fight about encryption, it is kind of bad to have a defendant who looks irresponsible,” was how Stanford Cyber Policy Analyst Daphne Keller described Durov to the New York Times after his arrest.

The Durov arrest may have marked the moment of peak influence for the cyber-spook movement. Though the Investigatory Powers Act was a major political surveillance tool, it was far from the only important law of its type, or the most powerful. The IPA was in fact just one of a long list of acronyms mostly unfamiliar to American news consumers, from France’s LCEN to Germany’s NetzDG to the EU’s TERREG as well as its Code of Practice on Disinformation and Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online, among many others. American authorities usually followed the pattern in the case of encryption and the IPA, doing informally what European counterparts were able to effect openly and with the force of law.

Now however it looks like efforts by government officials to completely wipe out encryption have failed, and events have taken a new turn. “Wild,” is how the Senate aide characterized the Wyden-Biggs letter, resuming another bipartisan fight put on hold nine years ago. “I’d forgotten what this looks like.”

IRONY ALERT: Germans protesting FBI efforts to break iPhone encryption, 2016

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