Australia is having a Reichstag Fire moment. A government that slithered into power on a minority vote is exploiting a crime in order to bring the jackboot down on the citizens’ necks. Labor are shameless in their opportunism.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has called together all the digital ministers to kick-start the rollout of a national identity system, amid calls for the government to build a new technology infrastructure that would reduce the risk of identity theft, following the Optus data breach.
It comes as NSW Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello called for a decentralised identity system and the end of paper-based ID.
It’s almost as if they planned it.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that the government engineered the hack as part of a grand conspiracy (although we know for a fact that ideological fellow-travellers, the Trudeau government, has employed hackers to do their dirty work). More likely, they simply had everything ready to roll when the next inevitable big data breach happened.
Labor have wanted to impose a central ID system for decades. The Hawke government tried it on in the 80s. The ID card issue was so toxic — even Labor backbenchers called it “the Hitlercard or Stalincard” — that it forced a double dissolution election. Labor won the election, but was forced to drop the proposal.
They’ve had to wait 35 years, but they’re losing no time seizing the opportunity.
The Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF) has been iteratively developed by the Digital Transformation Agency, which now sits within the department of Finance, since 2015 […]
The scheme would mean that once a person’s identity had been verified by a trusted provider, they would be able to link it across a range of services and products.
It’s a regular ol’ Mark of the Beast. Like all very bad government ideas, it’s being sold as a convenience.
“Moving to a system of self sovereign digital identity would make the concept of 100 points of ID entirely redundant,” Mr Dominello said. “It also retires the need for organisations to hold on to people’s paper-based ID documents, and associated information, in their databases for years and years.”
In other words, your official identity will be solely digital — and like all digital records, able to be rewritten or erased at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s key. We’ve already seen what supposed democratic governments are willing to do to legally protesting citizens, in the last few years.
Imagine not just your bank accounts frozen, but your ability to open new ones, your ability to travel, even to vote, instantly erased.
Even worse, do we really trust governments any more than corporations to keep our personal data safe? We know that the Chinese Communist Party-linked entities have been buying up Australian medical businesses, as a way of gaining access to sensitive information stored on the My Health Record, by anyone who agreed to it.
Dr Vanessa Teague, a researcher at the ANU who specialises in cryptographic identity systems such as the Digital ID, said […] there “are some pretty serious concerns with the basic security properties of the system,” Dr Teague said.
“The current attempts to solve the digital identity problem in Australia are not well-informed by good design, and are likely to cause us more privacy problems down the track,” she warned.
AFR
Teague is, by the way, someone who wants a Digital ID — yet, even she admits that the government would do a pretty shit job of it.
What a vote of confidence.
