Anonymous IT Reporter
The Daily Sceptic
Don’t you just hate digital ID? It hasn’t even been launched and it has already achieved its goal. You see everyone was talking about fiscal black holes, small boats and that Andy Burnham bloke and yet the mere mention of digital ID has blown it all out of the water. That’s how powerful it is. Who in government cares if the technology ever comes to fruition? Dear boy, that is not the point.
Talk of digital ID in the UK has very little to do with technology and everything to do with distraction politics. Who in government frets about how it works, what vulnerabilities it has, or whether, like in Estonia, it could make public services work together in ways we can only dream of in the UK? That is not what digital ID is used for here in Blighty. It is not about the tech. It is about its political uses.
We have been here before. Matt Hancock really tried to convince us that a virus could be suppressed with some software on a phone. Meanwhile the government destroyed the economy and a generation of kids’ development. We don’t talk about that these days. Nice work comrades.
I am less sure Starmer believes a single migrant will be deterred by his Brit Card but I do think he believes the digital ID debate will be less damaging than anything about migrants or party leadership. Never mind ‘Smash the gangs!’ when you can smash the glass and deploy the emergency digital ID cards debate instead. Phew, that was close.
Not that it matters, but that makes life tricky for your humble Daily Sceptic tech correspondent. Worse than that, from a right-leaning libertarian tech perspective it pains me to report that the government knew what to do and how to do it. Take it from me that the Office for Digital Identity and Attributes was doing the right thing, keeping up with privacy concerns and distributed tech to enable people to have sovereignty over their own data. Then came the politicians to ruin it all. We could discuss the problems in their proposals of security, centralised databases, technology adoption and mission creep. But does anyone really care about that? The passport office, DVLA and HMRC have all those problems and literally nobody is campaigning to remove them. That’s because this isn’t about IT or even digital ID. It is about IG, Independence from Government. Let’s campaign for that instead.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
