Digital ID: one more bar of the control grid is being welded in place right now
In an ideal world this would be a simple tech advance. This is not an ideal world
Digital ID is here: the Bill is on its second reading before the Senate.
It’s got a worthless “opt-out” principle that means nothing because it’s not backed by anti-discrimination law.
That means there’s nothing to stop corporations making it almost impossible to access the necessities of life such as a bank account if you refuse.
Remember how the covid gene-vaccine was “voluntary” and you could “opt out”. Just ask Queensland nurse Ella Leach.
Often I write a “have your say” piece ahead of time and urge people to get involved so they can be heard - but this time you aren’t going to have a say.
Submissions are open until tomorrow, links at bottom: but it makes no difference.
This is a complex piece of legislation, years in the making, and it will be rubber-stamped without substantial change.
Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency has chaired the eight-nation Digital ID Working Group since it was founded in 2020.
The only way it could be stopped is by mass protest, the way the Australia Card was defeated in 1987 - and maybe not even then.
To recap on the Australia Card: the Hawke Labor government tried a nation-wide ID card in 1987, “to catch welfare cheats and tax fraud”.
Australians didn’t like the potential for misuse and saw it as a threat to liberty. As University of NSW law professor Graham Greenleaf wrote at the time, it would have established a prototype data surveillance system.
The price of freedom and privacy is that some measure of crime is inevitable. Australians valued their freedom more than they cared about catching welfare cheats in 1987.
It was possible to stop the juggernaut because back then, Australians had a nation.
Citizens with a sense of their own cultural identity had a genuine say in their own governance.
“It’s a free country” was a common phrase at the time.
People don’t say that anymore.
The Australia Card was defeated by mass opposition and protests by everyone from small business, unions and public servants to Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett who helped launch the Australian Privacy Foundation to fight it, long before he became a Labor MP.
The rebellious states threatened to block the legislation taking effect. Prime Minister Bob Hawke had to call a double dissolution election after it was rejected by the Senate a second time.
That’s how much it was hated. A piddling little ID Card with your name, address and date of birth.
Now it’s 2024, and Digital ID is here.
Digital ID: an interoperable ID that will work globally across public and private sectors, verifying your identity.
Think of your social media passwords, driver’s license, banking passwords, MyGov access - all rolled into one.
It will save time and paperwork. Your biometric data will make it safer from fraud.
You won’t have to give your private information to many different agencies and corporations in order to access services, thus saving waste, duplication and the risk of leakage.
Having an accredited provider responsible for data security means they have to comply with standards, which may reduce the risk of fraud or theft.
The Bill has beefed up Privacy Act protections. Accredited Digital ID providers will be policed by an Information Commissioner, with civil penalties in the form of fines payable for breach of your privacy.
What could possibly go wrong?
It’s true to say Digital ID is not evil in itself, it’s just a tool.
The problem is not the tool, it’s that hand that wields it - and the opportunity for abuse.
The push for Digital ID isn’t coming from Australia’s elected government, even though it is Labor introducing it again.
The Digital ID is part of the UN sustainable development goals to be implemented by every country by 2030, through public-private partnerships, which is a euphemism for textbook fascism.
This is coming from the global “stakeholder capitalism” bureaucrats, billionaires and corporations who are meeting right now at Davos to do backroom deals without scrutiny, organising global governance strategies.
These are people from the UN, the corporate lobby group World Economic Forum (WEF), the WHO, World Bank, private global banks and fund managers like BlackRock, the billionaire “charities” like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, state security agencies and their proxy foundations.
In particular, the Digital ID push is coming from finance.
Governments have required financial institutions to become spies for the police in the last two decades with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) legislation.
Financial institutions collect information and scrutinise your transactions to prevent crime.
If you withdraw $10,000 in cash in Australia, your bank will ask what it is for and report your answer to Austrac, a government agency.
Financial institutions want an interoperable Digital ID system to streamline their operations. They want international regulations standardised across borders to reduce their regulatory burden, and they want global governance so they are empowered to set the rules.
The corollary is that you are disempowered. You can’t vote these people out.
And will it be misused? Look at what they already do.
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), a WEF partner, offers a risk intelligence product to finance sector clients to avoid “reputational risk”.
They provide data such as titles, positions, passport numbers, age, date of birth, location, names as well as:
“Records categorized into 30+ categories such as country, type of crime, political party, organization or individual.
“Identification of whether subjects are politically exposed (PEP).”
There are prohibitions on sharing this information in Australia’s Digital ID Bill.
But how will that protection be enforced in practice, overseas?
Imagine that with an interoperable Digital ID, with the penalty of a relatively small civil fine in Australia by the Information Commissioner - if you can catch them.
If they blacklist you they may do it offshore and how would you even know.
But there is worse: the Digital ID will not operate in a vacuum, it will interact with other innovations.
The globalists of the Bank for International Settlements, World Bank and IMF are preparing to introduce programmable digital currencies, with tokenisation of your assets. This opens a whole new world of opportunity for abuse such as currency that expires after a set time, or that controls what you can buy, or that stops you purchasing anything if you are blacklisted.
As the World Bank reports:
“Programmability could be applied to digital cash for all kinds of purposes, including … to set conditions for the transfer of money to specific types of users or types of goods and services; to automate the transfer of specific values, such as tax payments for each purchase from a merchant, or to ban certain users from access to cash in a way similar to blacklisting.”
Digital ID in tandem with programmable digital currencies would give the state-corporate combine the power to end human freedom.
China uses denial of services as an extrajudicial punishment for non-compliance with its social credit score system.
Digital ID makes this too easy to implement.
Do we have human rights protections to prevent this? No, we do not.
The covid debacle showed Australia is not the democracy it was in 1987.
Now we live in a country run by Permanent Canberra bureaucrats and the corporate lobby, without meaningful individual rights protections. It’s corporatism, which is textbook fascism, run for the corporate-state combine.
There is no robust media sector anymore, it has been controlled. You don’t see daily headlines on opposition to government policy in the newspapers as there was in 1987. Covid showed that. Even small independent media such as this Substack will be on the chopping block after the censorship bill is passed.
There is no Bill of Rights.
There isn’t much to stop this tool being abused.
Yes the Digital ID provider must deactivate your ID on request, according to the Bill.
But you won’t be requesting that, because increasingly you won’t be able to access corporate services such as banking without it.
Peter Fam, human rights lawyer at Maat’s Method has the right idea.
He says you should scrutinise new legislation with an eye not to what might go right, but to how it can be abused - that is what really matters.
What can be abused will eventually be abused.
CLICK HERE to read Peter Fam’s excellent and detailed Substack analysis of the Digtial ID Bill.
CLICK HERE to watch Peter Fam on Cafe Locked Out on Thursday
How you will be shamed into Digital ID
The majority will take up Digital ID because it is convenient and sold to them by government propaganda.
A minority of refusers will be left with very difficult access to necessary corporate services.
Refusers will have their lives made increasingly impossible. They will be demonised as fringe “cookers” so their complaints can be dismissed without care.
This demonisation is seeded by anonymous accounts such as the digital brownshirts at #CookerWatch.
CookerWatch is a set of head-kicker accounts on X (formerly Twitter) that bullies and humiliates people who oppose government policies.
It is anonymous and therefore deceitful, and most likely backed by government departments and/or security agencies.
They are amplified by allies in corporate media including at the ABC which isn’t supposed to do such things. For a detailed example of how CookerWatch works CLICK HERE.
CookerWatch affiliates last year described Crikey associate editor Cameron Wilson as “a friend of ours”.
Mr Wilson has already come out in support of the Digital ID scheme, telegraphing that you will be characterised as “loud and conspiracy minded” if you dissent. There is a detailed description of how you will be painted at his story, archived here.
In an ideal world, this Digital ID would be useful and convenient.
We don’t live in an ideal world.
RESOURCES:
The Digital ID Bill can be seen here, with links to the explanatory memoranda and the text of the Bill itself.
Closing date for submissions is Friday, 19 January. CLICK HERE for the Parliamentary submissions page.
Senator Alex Antic has a petition against the Digital ID Bill here, which had more than 120,000 signatures as of Thursday. CLICK HERE to sign.
Watch below, Senator Malcolm Roberts, warning of the risks.
Excellent presentation on Digital ID from July 2023 by Newcastle, NSW, researcher Kate Mason: on YouTube below, or click here.
Journalist Whitney Webb talks about AI-powered tyranny here and the cyber attack war-games, YouTube video embedded below or for Rumble click here.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald explains why privacy matters psychologically to all people, and why mass surveillance is so corrosive, from 2014, on YouTube below.
I notice that in 1987 Australia was a nation, with a majority of people unified by shared history and culture. Bob Hawke it was who set about destroying the nation with multiculturalism, which is the opposite of nation. A state or country is not the same thing as a nation. There can be no effective opposition to this Bill as there is no longer a pool of people large enough to have both the shared history and will to defend their freedom - which was only ever culturally protected and not protected in law.
Phenomenal article Alison, thank you.
I recently had a young person in my family tell me: "I would sell my soul for a digital ID."
This same young person watched me stand alone during the vax pass lock out, as I was denied entry to his graduation. I congratulated him in the car park. This made no impression on him.
When I explained to him about the digital ID (as you have done here), he said: "it's just the convenience." Yes, he is injected with the covid bioweapon, which he did to attend festivals that were cancelled anyway.
Unfortunately, this is what we are up against. I am ready, and I know all of you reading are as well.
Edit: just cross-posted, thank you again for this, although I take exception to the notion 'It is anonymous and therefore deceitful' which seems an odd statement when writing about digital privacy.
Those who are most ruthless in unmasking are usually those who would pursue and punish government whistleblowers. Please see relevant article "A brief history of anons, a tribute to the top modern anons, and why anon culture fosters free speech, creativity, and trust" by account dedicated to Yuri Bezemenov https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-stay-anonymous-top-anons-creativity-trust
"Writing as an anon unleashes creativity by suppressing the ego and insecurities that accompany a real name. Before picking up the pen as Yuri, I never wrote anything publicly under my name and it will stay that way. I don’t do it for fame or glory, I do it for the dialogue and the friends you make along the way."
People can choose to follow or not, but if the choice of anonymity is removed there is no longer choice. Australians (in particular) have a terrible fetish for government to save them rather than preserve their liberties, which is how the camps were built.
Truth is truth no matter where it comes from, and it is much more difficult to 'spread the word' when the power of credentialism, sex appeal, ego or physical characteristics are removed. That is the power of the anon. You rise and fall only by your word.