Blogger Najm Al-Din argues that Muslims should oppose Digital IDs because they will likely be weaponised against us as part of the government’s crackdown on civil liberties.
Recently, British PM Keir Starmer announced plans for a compulsory Digital ID to combat illegal immigration.
While proponents of the scheme say it will also improve access to public services and the PM is now calling on Brits to embrace voluntary ID cards, there is a considerable risk of government overreach which we ignore at our peril.
In recent years, the British government has signalled approval for harvesting citizens’ data through partnerships with private companies.
Having used the Investigatory Powers Act for bulk internet and call data collection on the public and with plans to share confidential NHS data with CIA and Mossad-affiliated Palantir Technologies, surveillance technologies are being leveraged to enrich the private sector and undermine the privacy of citizens, whose sensitive information is stored on vast databases.
As human rights organisations sound the alarm about the government’s indiscriminate collection of data without independent oversight, the troubling precedent of monetising and weaponising citizens’ data justifies concerns with Digital ID systems.
Social credit system
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With the rollout of Digital IDs, the entire sum of human interactions can be reduced to data sets on a government-accessible centralised platform.
Once dismissed as a conspiracy theory, the real-time surveillance of everything from our economic transactions to genomic data has the backing of billionaires like Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle who argues Digital IDs can help governments ensure that citizens are “on their best behaviour.”
Having pledged millions to think-tanks aligning with his vision for a dystopian behaviourist panopticon – including Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change – unelected power brokers are paving the foundations for a system of technocratic compliance and control, where the public is micromanaged through a social credit system.
Similar to the pilot in China, a social credit system describes a big-data enabled surveillance ecosystem where citizens are algorithmically assigned social credit scores based on their digital footprint.
As the Labour government increases investment in the country’s Internet of Things infrastructure, there is growing anxiety about how these computational capabilities can be deployed to develop an AI-powered surveillance regime which monitors and predicts the trustworthiness of citizens through an overarching system of punishments and rewards.
The fear of mission creep among millions who sense a genuine risk with Digital IDs being expanded for other uses not originally intended, is not unfounded.
In recent years, ministers have resorted to increasingly authoritarian measures to suppress grassroots organisations and silence activists who have protested the government’s complicity in the genocide against Palestinians.
With free speech under unprecedented assault, mandatory Digital IDs may normalise a culture of self-censorship as every citizen’s contribution and threat to the system can be calculated, eventually ferreting out anti-establishment voices under the pretext of national security, whose punishments may include anything from restricted travel to inadmissibility for business grants.
Economic surveillance
With Digital IDs promoted as the key to unlocking economic growth, we must also question if they will mark a new era of financial stability or herald the arrival of a hi-tech neofeudal age.
In my opinion, Digital IDs will not be limited to biometric data alone.
Eventually, they will be used as a repository for multiple interoperable data storage which will interface with CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) as part of a seismic shift to the economic order.
A few years ago, the Bank of England floated the prospect of controlling a person’s access to Universal Basic Income and regulating expenditures to mitigate the effects of climate change and meet UN sustainable development goals through programmable CBDCs.
While common forms of money exist as records in the computers of commercial banks, CBDCs offer central banking institutions unprecedented oversight over transactions by embedding additional mechanisms of conditionality.
This includes in-built restrictions on accessing public services through time and transaction limits, automatically deductible penalties for non-compliance and conditional cash transfers where payments are only processed upon successful demonstration of approved behaviours.
Not only does this empower the architects of these systems to snoop on the data from our transactions which will no longer remain anonymous in a cashless society, it can also corral citizens into a new corporate value chain for the enrichment of private financiers.
But how exactly?
The future of financial operations
With stagflation looming, AI predicted to disrupt labour markets and draconian net zero targets potentially overhauling the industrial economy, a dramatic downsizing of the global workforce is approaching.
As debt reaches unsustainable levels and consumer confidence dwindles, the transnational plutocracy recognise that the financial system needs new plumbing and are seeking alternative revenue streams and means of circulating capital.
Enter ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) markets, widely tipped as the future of financial operations, where business and investment strategies are guided by a company’s performance across environmental, social and governance factors.
ESG markets are crucial for managing the risks and disruption caused by technology by providing a framework for responsible and sustainable corporate behavior, and is forecasted to grow to over $125 trillion by 2032.
Among the barriers impeding investors include a lack of standardised data and the absence of a reliable instrument for measuring the ESG impact of investments over time. However, with efficient data capturing platforms like blockchain which have a unique ability to store and transfer value between digital identities in financial services and allow real-time auditing of ESG metrics and impact verification, scaling may no longer be an obstacle.
The meta-data generated from Digital IDs will be required to reskill a new impoverished underclass of educated British workers heavily impacted by automation, to determine their worth as human capital in the upcoming fourth industrial revolution (4IR), where millions compete for remote on-demand AI assigned work in a gig economy.
Dig a little deeper and we begin to unearth a predatory investment infrastructure masked as philanthropy, enabling powerful stakeholders to operate a poverty management complex, where employment and educational pathways are financed by wealthy hedge funds for millions of vulnerable citizens and any measurable impact of their investment over the course of one’s lifetime is identified on the blockchain ledger for returns on investment.
Once global financial operations are reset in this new economic contract, to cover the costs for investors, future wages can be garnished and income sharing agreements will become the norm as data-driven smart contracts create behavioural changes through incentivisation or coercion.
These human capital bond markets, also known as pay for success business models represent the new gold rush of stakeholder capitalism, where citizens are treated as numbers on the e-portfolios of global financiers and the freedom to dictate our economic future hangs by a thread.
In a world where data is the new oil, Digital IDs are indispensable to the survival of capitalism, allowing asset managers to capitalise on the transition to an AI-driven economy by indenturing the future wealth of the next generation workforce who will supply the labour demands of the 4IR and be farmed as data commodities.
As Muslims who are often the target of the government’s anti-immigration rhetoric and crackdown on civil liberties, it would be remiss to ignore how a Digital ID can be weaponised by the pioneers of the modern data economy to criminalise activism in already marginalised communities, by monitoring public activity at a granular level and ushering a new age of surveillance capitalism through predictive analytics and risk profiling.
