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Digital security guarantor or subterfuge of a tyranny?
This article was published on 16.11.2023 by David Thunder, in his ‘The Freedom Blog’. He is a professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. At the end Peter Kopa adds some comments.
Last Wednesday, Thierry Breton, EU Internal Market Commissioner, proudly announced on Twitter/X that he had reached an agreement with MEPs to create a European “digital identity wallet,” which would allow all EU citizens to have “a secure electronic identity for life.” According to the European Commission’s own website, the European digital identity can be used for a range of transactions, such as providing personal identification on and off the Internet, showing birth and medical certificates, opening a bank account, filing tax returns, applying for university, saving a prescription, renting a car or checking into a hotel.
Opposition to digital identity in Europe
Several people, including Dutch MEP Rob Roos, have expressed concern that a centralized digital ID could jeopardize Europeans’ privacy and mobility rights. A letter signed by more than 500 “cybersecurity experts, researchers and civil society organizations from around the world” warns that the proposed digital ID regulations would reduce citizens’ digital security rather than improve it.
But one of its main architects, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, argues that “the wallet has the highest level of both security and privacy,” while EU President Ursula von der Leyen insists that it is “a technology where we ourselves can control what data is used and how.” Either the critics exaggerate the civil liberty and privacy issues, or the technology’s advocates downplay them. Both cannot be right.
A danger to citizens’ freedom
In theory, a universal European digital ID card could be permanently programmed in such a way that the citizen would have full control over which parts of his “digital wallet” he shares at any given moment and which parts he does not. We would have little to worry about if the European digital ID were programmed now and forever by people who were serious about privacy and did not want to take advantage of this technology to enforce compliance with their methods of disease control, non-discrimination and even the promotion of war or climate change measures on citizens.
It would be very naive to suppose that a programmable digital identity document on a European scale, controlled by a centralized bureaucracy, would not be employed, sooner or later, to move people to comply with the measures introduced by the “powers that be”. And it does not take much imagination to foresee the kind of ways in which a European digital ID could be harnessed to erode the equality and freedom of Europeans, since the same individuals, who are the public face of this digital ID initiative, were allegedly the ones who put in place the system of the most pervasive individual biosurveillance in European history, namely the so-called “Covid digital certificates”.
The operation of the Covid digital certificates, which was approved by both the European Commission (the same Commission that is now pushing for a digital ID system) and the European Parliament, can give us a pretty good idea of the uses that European technocrats could put a digital ID system to, if they had the chance.
The bad experience in the Covid 19 pandemic
The Covid digital certificate was used precisely to force citizens who had not received the Covid vaccine within a certain period of time to undergo a costly and cumbersome Covid test every time they crossed a European border. It was even used to deny unvaccinated citizens entry to cultural and recreational births throughout Europe. In other words, the Covid digital certificate served as a mechanism to coerce citizens to inject a certain drug into their bloodstream, and created a two-tier society, in which the unvaccinated were treated as a new social and political underclass.
The salami tactic
In German, the word ‘Salamitaktik’ expresses the method of achieving a very difficult goal by the force of fine cuts of the sausage. Now, imagine that all European citizens were offered a centrally controlled European digital certificate as a tool for accessing a wide range of services, from banking, air travel and hotel stays to car rental, access to entertainment venues and access to online digital services. At first, presumably the certificate would be optional, as citizens could already use other ways to validate their identity. And after a while, under the pretext of improving the “security” of citizens, the certificate could very well gradually become mandatory for an increasing number of transactions.
And the next step would be to gradually expand the information contained in the certificate and use it to deny or approve citizens’ access to certain services based on their spending habits, vaccination status or “social credit” score. Of course, we cannot be 100 percent sure that this will happen. But the recent implementation of vaccine apartheid in Europe should strip us of any illusions that European political leaders are committed to respecting and defending our civil liberties or our equal access to public amenities and services.
The EU manipulated from outside Europe?
Politicians like Thierry Breton and Ursula von der Leyen, and the MEPs and member state governments who cheered them on during the pandemic, would today be willing to treat citizens, once again, like cattle or disease vectors to be vaccinated and tested en masse, with scant regard for their personal medical history and risk factors. Surely it is only a matter of time before people with this kind of disregard for individual freedom feel inclined to take advantage of a technology like the universal digital ID as a lever to control people’s private decisions. And this with a view to advancing their own careers and political goals. Enough citizens said “no” to an experimental vaccine, and enough citizens continue to question the scientific and political justification for imposing burdensome carbon taxes, forcibly expropriating farmland based on climate directives, living in “15-minute cities,” accommodating transgender ideology in their hospitals and classrooms, or refraining from what the powers-that-be deem “hate speech.”
What better method to induce public compliance with unpopular or controversial policies and laws than to reward compliance with increased mobility and improved access to amenities and social services, while punishing non-compliance with decreased mobility and reduced access to services and amenities? Isn’t that exactly what the Covid digital certificate, which has been a creation of the same Commission, did? Obviously, the advocates of a European digital ID will publicly claim that they are only interested in promoting the security of our transactions and protecting our privacy. But since they are the same ones who dare to claim that medical segregation and coercion through vaccinated passports “reaffirms us in (the) spirit of an open Europe, a Europe without barriers,” their assurances about privacy and citizens’ freedoms lack any credibility.
Comments:
China has reached a very advanced stage of citizen control, which is why it is the model that some in the EU are inspired to impose in Europe:
https://thinktanklatam.org/2021/10/20/china-intenta-controlar-el-mundo/
https://thinktanklatam.org/2021/10/20/china-intenta-controlar-el-mundo/
