Taking inspiration from Sam Trendall’s excellent summary in Civil Service World, and before it starts actually writing things down in the consultation, we thought we’d take a look at what the Government has said about its digital ID scheme.
(If you want the ‘deep dive’, here’s a Google Doc copy of the article with added comments; if you prefer not to use Google, there’s a copy in Word format here.)
After the CSW article was published, the Government subsequently claimed that digital ID cards would ‘no longer be mandatory’, something they’d have known was coming when they were briefing CSW that they would be mandatory.
Government only ever says what it wants to say, when it wants to say it – and the CSW piece was timed to benefit government.
If you want to understand what government is doing on ID, government isn’t going to tell you. The civil service knows it needs to tell itself what it’s doing, and so government told CSW what it wanted others to believe…
If audio discussions are more your thing, this episode of the “YIMBY pod” has a clear articulation of how you’ll be effectively forced to have an ID – even if you don’t want one, and think that the ‘optional’ bit will be available to you.
There are many details we could correct in the YIMBY pod discussion – they tend to be a bit enthusiastic about things that progress you in directions they like. Take the part when they talk about you having a QR code, like on the COVID Pass, which is incorrect as we (currently) understand it. In the real world, your landlord or employer will expect a “share code”, and can cause you difficulties if you don’t provide one.
A share code is a sequence of letters you give to services, as happens now with eVisas for those who aren’t British. The codes change every few months, so you can’t keep a copy – and the copy you are shown states that knowing the code doesn’t prove anything about you. You have to type it into the Home Office website to check it.
And if the “type it into the HO website to check it” part of the process doesn’t work, you’d better hope that you’re ‘onboarding’ to a job where they can check again in an hour, or not boarding an aeroplane where you’ll be left at the gate.
The e-Gates at Heathrow are (supposedly) the physical embodiment of solutions across the rest of the economy, absent any understanding of reliability. The Home Office refuses to say how often its system stops working, but you can see from Heathrow’s tweets and years of headlines that it keeps happening – and the HO solution is to keep covering it up.
e-Gates might mostly work, but it really matters when they don’t.
The techno-optimists aren’t wrong that the Home Office could build a digital ID system where (married) women won’t be forced to change their names. But their ‘abundance utopia’ interacts with the real world in the same way as when HMRC (using incorrect Home Office data) chose to cut costs on data checks and stripped Child Benefit from families who hadn’t gone anywhere.
In thousands of cases, HMRC (the customs agency!) assumed anyone using Dublin airport to return to Northern Ireland had emigrated, though they hadn’t – a complexity the system didn’t care about, and made into the citizen’s problem.
The Government’s latest solution to this? Create a contact centre and staff it with AIs to “help”!
Government wants it to be “a bit easier” to do hard things, which isn’t wrong. But the thing about hard things is that they are hard – and it’s far easier to claim that doing the hard thing is too expensive, and that people should instead be forced to change their names so the ID system is easier to build. (The same can be true of “counter-fraud” measures, as Child Benefit recipients discovered to their cost.)
Former junior Facebook staffer, now Minister for Digital ID, knows you can force things onto people by not giving them choices – the Home Office approach – but prefers the impression of ‘choice’. It’s much easier and cheaper to create shadow accounts for babies, and to catch everyone else at a point of weakness.
As Josh’s former boss once put it, “they’re trusting me. Dumb fucks”.
The State cares little about your reality, preferring the Official Truth of how it insists your life should be, with any deviation punished because Tony, the techbros and technocrats – and politicians in their thrall – want their shiny toys faster.
And all too often, and in far too many ways, the uniqueness of your life is just a ‘rounding error’ to the Database State.
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