The rise of biodigital surveillance

There is nothing friendly or helpful or optimistic about digital identity schemes, they are domestic passports for movement, and a pervasive, specific and ongoing threat against you as an individual for giving the appearance of non-compliance, or even a lack of enthusiasm for compliance. It&#x27;s dominion. Honestly, a digital ID scheme is what the next global, multi year or even decade long land war will be fought over. I know we have a convention about avoiding discussions of violence, but digital ID, just like the ID schemes of early 20th c Europe and Russia, is the thing that you either nip in the bud in the present, or the number of lives that will be lost over it just grows every single day as the cancer of these systems establishes itself in our societies.<p>There is zero hyperbole in this. I&#x27;ve worked on digital identity solutions, and fundamentally, they are not a consumer product anybody actually wants because their use cases are <i>all</i> about enforcing rules <i>against</i> the identity subject. The only way the tech survives is it must be mandated, and then it&#x27;s a question of whose problem does it solve?<p>The only people that a global digital identity solves a problem for are the people administering it, literally against the whole world. The survivors will ask, &quot;how did it all happen so fast, what were the warnings?&quot; and this obscure comment will be the hunger stone and harbinger. I&#x27;m literally saying millions of people will die, partially because of my inability to be persuasive, but mostly because of your misunderstanding of what this technology does and of what it is the effect.

Making things legible to the state is one of the ever going projects of any state. So while I think it’s important to make sure that refusal to participate in one of these projects doesn’t preclude you from still receiving the services of the state, it’s also isn’t surprising that the state wants to make its constituents more legible to itself. The balance falls in figuring out how to firewall these different functions to prevent certain kinds of identity from making it so you can’t receive the services that are the whole reason why you have a state.

I hope people realize this includes things like gait and gesture recognition and RF fingerprinting across multiple RF spectrums.

Just talking about the US here, but what about our current identification systems are so deficient that we need this?

EU is issuing biometric passports where are loaded your fingerprints and some EU states started to issue biometric citizen IDs, where are fingerprints stored too. So it is kind of already going on?<p>Additionally citizen IDs are nothing new, at least in Eastern Europe, where you will get one when you reach 15 years of age.

The 4th Amendment right to privacy has been so badly violated by the US Federal Government and TSA that the Constitution is no longer valid - the contract is beyond broken, the US government has descended into absolute dictatorship and it is the duty of all Americans to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

&quot;China is using all the means available to an authoritarian state to reach its 5‐year R&amp;D plan to make the biotechnology sector 5% of its GDP by 2020.&quot; - Tara O&#x27;Toole statement to Senate subcommittee 2019<p>Social Credit Systems are just lakes of aggregated data accessible by a government. From your health to how you choose you will end up a model in a prediction system.

Yeah, hard pass.

&gt; This may at first glance sound sensible. But consider: If an impoverished family doesn’t accept the health NGO’s preferred interventions for its children, these children may not be provided any other opportunity to establish a “legal, broadly recognized identity” necessary to access things like primary school. In other words, you are literally nobody until you are vaccinated.<p>Author is making quite a leap that the _only_ way to receive a digital ID is to get vaccinated. If a program like this ever does take off you will see alternative methods of identification acquisition. Case in point: I don&#x27;t need a driver&#x27;s license to get a state issued ID. Functionally they are the same in terms of proving I am who I say I am, but one affords additional benefits of stating I can drive.

&gt; The stated mission of ID2020 is to provide digital identities for all people worldwide by 2030<p>I&#x27;m guessing the stated mission has been changed once or twice since it was founded.

One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles. At the same time, they have an enduring interest in adblocking, freedom, liberal or libertarian values and so on. This creates a situation where their economic wellbeing and working life is directly aimed towards enforcing surveillance capitalism and authoriarian tools, while at the same time they receive enough resources to avoid the brunt of the consequences, and their mental landscape deals with the cognitive dissonance to maintain an identity of progressiveness.<p>It directly mirrors the feudal system with a tiny portion of the population living in unimaginable luxury and employing another much larger but still small portion overall to keep the hierarchy running. In other words, billionaires supported by well-compensated SWE vassals who devise ever more sophisticated tools to extract value and data-powered obedience through surveillance from regular workers.

It&#x27;s a mistake to use biometrics for authentication. Perhaps as weak identification it&#x27;s acceptable.<p>It&#x27;s a username, not a password. Because it&#x27;s public, shared (you leave bits of bioinformation everywhere you go) and not deliberately changeable.<p>A password is none of those things.