Technology

During lockdowns and medical mandates, the power of the state and its corporate allies truly reached its apotheosis, and failed us miserably. Our times cry out for justice, for clarity, and for making a difference to save ourselves and our civilization. We should approach this great project with our eyes wide open and with ears to hear different points of view on how we get from here to there. 

With Canadian authorities creating the infrastructure required to implement a digital identification network, some are concerned that a social credit system similar to the one in China is just around the corner. Their concerns are warranted. Digital IDs lay the path for social credit systems. Without them, a credit system would be impossible.

In the United States, according to Bennett Cyphers, a technologist who focuses on consumer privacy and state legislation, data brokers have formed an unholy alliance with the country’s military, intelligence communities, and law enforcement agencies. This immense, highly secretive partnership was established for one reason and one reason only—to surveil the actions and activities of U.S. citizens.

Big Tech platforms openly collude with governments to suppress the speech of their own people, while overtly abusing the legal system and paying massive settlements to conceal the evidence of their collusion. They craft the false illusion of consensus on political issues of their own choosing, a power unprecedented in our democracy and historically held only by the most despotic regimes, promising in every instance to wield it for good, but falling short every time.

The dangers posed by digital IDs cannot be emphasized enough. As the researcher Brett Solomon—a man “who has tracked the advantages and perils of technology for human rights” for well over a decade—previously noted, the mass rollout of digital IDs “poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered.”