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Bigger boys are making them do it, bigger boys far, far away in Brussels. This time it’s Euro Digital ID Wallet, an idea with the sort of superficial attraction of bubblegum flavoured ice-cream, or recreational heroin, with the mild downsides of suffocating surveillance, vastly increased state power, and a government gate-keeping your internet use.
The EU has mandated all member states to implement an app, the EU Digital Identity Wallet “which can link their national digital identities with proof of other personal attributes like driving licenses, diplomas, and bank accounts.” Thus there will be a digital passport for online interactions by the end of this year, a Government App (two words to strike fear into a heart of stone) which will contain everything from your birth certificate, to your bank card, to cryptographic keys, to your academic qualifications for instant easy digital use right across the EU.
The EU Digital ID has been burbling along since 2014 when the first regulations were made to establish a standardized, cross-border system of electronic identification, but the 2024 Regulation is aimed at not just at government agencies and services but also private industry adoption.
While Eurocrats insist this app is voluntary, the growing insistence by the Irish Government and the Commission on “Digital Age Verification” will mean it will be as voluntary as eating or breathing.
Nanny statists have see-sawed from the idea of the internet as a vital lifeline for all children, rescuing them from their families, to needing the state to ban children from all access to social media entirely. Age Verification is sold as child protection which puts it beyond debate as a concept: to oppose it is to side with predators, defend online bullying & PornHub access for twelve year olds.
That High Moral Ground-ism ignores that everybody who uses the internet will have to verify their age with a government Digital ID. On the internet nobody knows you are a dog, so everybody is going to have to have their dog licence. That makes governments the gatekeepers of the internet.
The very existence of a compulsory ID Scheme which links every single aspect of your documented life, enables an automated surveillance state & social credit society that is nightmarishly Orwellian. Expressed the wrong opinion? Read Gript? Bought more than your allocated meat ration or travelled too far this week? We can see you, citizen. Mission creep hasn’t far to crawl to make that horror a reality.
The Irish Government has an abysmal record on ID cards. For 15 years successive governments fought to impose National Identity Card in the form of the Public Service card, only for its own Data Protection Commission to rule its expanded use illegal. The DPC also ruled that the continued use of “biometric facial templates” and of associated facial matching tech (the so called “SAFE II” Registration) for the card was completely banned by the government’s own GDPR regulations. The government’s response to this legal double slap down? To use the discredited, illegal card as the basis of the Irish version of the EU Digital ID.
The Age Verification power grab appeals to both Dublin & Brussels. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her closest ally in the Commission, Henna Virkkunen, issued a joint statement to mark the roll out of the EU’s Digital Age Verification, worth quoting for its bizarre, terrifying insight into how powerful Eurocrats look at our basic freedoms and what they intend to do;
“This is not the first time the Commission comes forward with an innovative solution to a new problem. We all remember the COVID pandemic. Our world came to a complete standstill. But as we came out of lockdowns and as vaccines were available, the Commission developed the COVID app in record time – three months –, to help bring us back to normal life, in a safe way. With a scan of our COVID certificates, we could go to a concert or board a plane to travel again, etcetera. 78 countries across 4 continents were using this app, so it was as huge success. And now we have taken this success and applied it to the age verification app. It follows the same principles, the same model.”
The frank admission that the pandemic is seen by some in the Commission as a successful pilot program for social control is hardly surprising given that Virkkunen, the tech and security commissioner, is an outspoken opponent of the right to free speech, using the wonderfully circular “Illegal Hate Speech is not part of Freedom of Speech” to justify crushing EU citizens right to criticise what the Dolores Jane Umbridges have put beyond comment.
Australia pioneered the age restriction rules, moving last December to ban under 16s from social media: by March more than two thirds of children had worked around the ban. Backers of the restrictions called for a more Draconian ban and much, much more enforcement. Fail more is always the Golden Rule of government.
If the prospect of an enforced national ID card being necessary to be allowed to read your WhatsApp messages is not enough to worry you, then its security should be. There is mounting evidence that the app is being coded so sloppily that your wallet, a hacker’s treasure trove of identity documents, is about as well protected as a coffee cart in a hurricane.
EuroSmart, the European Association for the digital security industry has been blistering in its criticism. Citing the ease with which the system can be hacked, the organisation said it would leave citizens struggling to prove that financial fraud or terrorism committed with their stolen identity was not their responsibility.
We should not have to ask permission from the government, nor seek dodgy licences, to use the internet. We must not hand the government here, or in Brussels, a Digital ID scheme that can turn our world into a digital version of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison designed so inmates are perpetually under observation.
We are not the threat, the Government is.
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