Tony Blair’s digital ID plan sparks zombie idea

Despite the fact that Tony Blair has been out of power and government for more than 15 years, he has a habit of putting forward new political ideas.

They are often unwanted and sometimes helpful. Blair, for example, unexpectedly showed up with his former adversary William Hague to propose the spread of universal digital identities.

The digital ID cards proposed by the Blair Institute for Global Change will digitize public records and allow people to prove their right to work and live in the UK by combining education documents with medical records.

The success of the NHS vaccination card, sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, was cited by Blair as an example of how attitudes towards digital passports and ID cards have changed since the former prime minister last tried to publicly issue ID cards in 2006. Blair once said that concerns about how mandatory ID might affect people’s rights are overblown, stating that he doesn’t think “the civil liberties argument carries much weight”.

In interviews praising his new system, Blair mentioned Estonia and India as examples of countries already using digital identity systems and suggested that this would revitalize the country and the way it operates.

“I can’t believe we’re back,” said Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey. “My first question is: what problem do you think you are solving? We’ve tried things like Government Gateway and Verify. [two digital government login systems]but the record was bad.”

Woodward is particularly concerned about how the deployment of such a system would further widen an already gaping digital divide. While many people are ready to interact with government and business through digital methods, there are people, mostly older people, who do not. Some people don’t have smartphones; others cannot afford the reliable, always-on Internet connection or mobile phone data they need for their digital lives.

“Is this because some online services, in particular government ones, have been blocked without ID?” Woodward asks. “It would be a real digital lockout. We already see that many communities only deal with people online, so will this be mandatory? This raises so many questions that they soon return to why this is necessary.

There are also concerns that it could be the first step towards a Chinese-style social status system that would bring together disparate data from governments and private service providers to compile a picture of a person and give them a “score” based on reward. . about their contribution to society.

“A sprawling digital identity system like that described by Sir Tony and Lord Haig is completely regressive and will be one of the biggest attacks on privacy ever seen in the UK,” said Silke Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, one of the lobbying groups. , which was created to resist excessive government interference in our daily lives.

More constructive than a mandatory digital system vulnerable to hacking, Carlo says it gives people freedom of choice. “In the technological revolution, building the future means innovating and protecting public interests and privacy, giving people the freedom to choose whether to use digital services online or offline, and being in control of their own data,” she says.

The key question is whether the government is up to the task. Various state government digital projects have stalled or stalled. Although Blair correctly calls Estonia the country that has succeeded in implementing the digital ID system, its population is approximately two percent of the population of the UK. The best comparison is India, which Blair also cited as a precedent, though the story there is less rosy.

India’s Aadhaar digital identity scheme has been plagued by cybersecurity concerns and fears of leaving some non-digital citizens behind. In 2018, the massive Aadhaar hack exposed the data of more than a billion people. Further hacks and arrests from these digital intrusions into citizens’ data continue to this day. Preventing such attacks is difficult enough, and the work required to mitigate these risks for private companies will be more of a frustration than an advantage to using the system.

“If you listen to them, there seems to be a suggestion that with these digital IDs we will somehow make the UK a better online experience and nurture a new generation of online businesses,” says Woodward. “Personally, I don’t see these dots coming together.”