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Digital ID

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

Published

6 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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Business

UK lawmaker threatens to use Online Safety Act to censor social media platforms

Published on January 20, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Didi Rankovic

Labour MP Lola McEvoy defended the Online Safety Act’s censorious measures, including bans and fines for social media platforms which ‘don’t comply’ with the strict age verification law.

Politicians from the U.K.’s ruling Labour party are starting to openly “out” the country’s Online Safety Act for the sweeping censorship law that its opponents have all along been warning it is.

The extreme case of using the law to completely ban social media platforms in the U.K. is now being promoted as a possibility by Labour MP Lola McEvoy.

“If these big platforms that have huge users don’t comply with the Online Safety Act, then they have no right to be accessed in this country,” the MP said while appearing on a podcast, adding, “So I think that’s what the law’s about.”

The masks are coming off, prompted by the latest clash between the government and Prime Minister Keir Starmer in particular and X owner Elon Musk – who criticized their role in a historical child sex exploitation scandal in the U.K.

In addition to saying that failure to comply with the law could result in the platforms getting banned, McEvoy suggested that “unelected citizens from other countries” should not be allowed to criticize U.K.’s government – she justified this by saying the criticism of Minister for Safeguarding Jess Phillips created “a very dangerous situation,” equating it to “bullying and harassment.”

McEvoy even made a point of public figures needing to be even more aggressively protected through censorship – effectively from whatever the government backing those figures decides to pack into the vague categories such as “bullying” and “harassment,” and in that way deal with critical, including legitimate, speech.

And where would any controversial call to step up online censorship be without getting served to the public as a way to above all – protect children?

McEvoy spoke about regulator Ofcom’s powers, which she described as “really significant” in enforcing the fines under the law that is being gradually implemented.

And as that is happening, this MP wants the Online Safety Act to be “strengthened” where it concerns the focus on things it treats as harmful to children, such as access to illegal content or pornography.

Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.

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Artificial Intelligence

Canadian Court Upholds Ban on Clearview AI’s Unconsented Facial Data Collection

Published on January 20, 2025

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By Didi Rankovic

Clearview AI is said to subjecting billions of people to this, without consent. From there, the implications for privacy, free speech, and even data security are evident.

Facial recognition company Clearview AI has suffered a legal setback in Canada, where the Supreme Court of British Columbia decided to throw out the company’s petition aimed at cancelling an Information and Privacy Commissioner’s order.

The order aims to prevent Clearview AI from collecting facial biometric data for biometric comparison in the province without the targeted individuals’ consent.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The controversial company markets itself as “an investigative platform” that helps law enforcement identify suspects, witnesses, and victims.

Privacy advocates critical of Clearview AI’s activities, however, see it as a major component in the burgeoning facial surveillance industry, stressing in particular the need to obtain consent – via opt-ins – before people’s facial biometrics can be collected.

And Clearview AI is said to subjecting billions of people to this, without consent. From there, the implications for privacy, free speech, and even data security are evident.

The British Columbia Commissioner appears to have been thinking along the same lines when issuing the order, that bans Clearview from selling biometric facial arrays taken from non-consenting individuals to its clients.

In addition, the order instructs Clearview to “make best efforts” to stop the practice in place so far, which includes collection, use, and disclosure of personal data – but also delete this type of information already in the company’s possession.

Right now, there is no time limit to how long Clearview can retain the data, which it collects from the internet using an automated “image crawler.”

Clearview moved to try to get the order dismissed as “unreasonable,” arguing that on the one hand, it is unable to tell if an image of a persons face is that of a Canadian, while also claiming that no Canadian law is broken since this biometric information is available online publicly.

The legal battle, however, revealed that images of faces of residents of British Columbia, children included, are among Clearview’s database of more than three billion photos (of Canadians) – while the total figure is over 50 billion.

The court also finds the Commissioner’s order to be very reasonable indeed – including when rejecting “Clearview’s bald assertion” that, in British Columbia, “it simply could not do” what it does in the US state of Illinois, to comply with the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).

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