FUTURE OF DIGITAL IDENTITY
In April 2022, less than two days after Emmanuel Macron claimed victory in his hotly contested bid for re-election, the French president signed a decree launching a mobile digital identity app.1 Macron’s administration lauds the new smartphone-based “Digital Identity Guarantee Service” (SGIN) as a tool to automate “the processing of personal information” required to access services in both the public and private sectors.2
Around the same time, journalist James Corbett of the Corbett Report pointed out that digital IDs are being hyped in a suspiciously coordinated manner “by every government, corporation, financial institution and globalist-connected NGO [nongovernmental organization] as ‘the way of the future.’”3 However, while Macron and kindred globalists try to pass off digital identities as a no-downside innovation that will make modern life more “efficient” and “streamlined”4—making it possible, as European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen enthuses, to “do anything from paying your taxes to renting a bicycle”5—Corbett and other independent observers such as Solari Report publisher Catherine Austin Fitts understand that a much more sinister control agenda is at play.6
According to Technocracy News editor-in-chief Patrick Wood,7,8 digital identities are one of the “bedrock” technologies facilitating movement toward a dystopian technocracy in which invisible elites control resources and tether ordinary people to impersonal, technology-enforced rules and regulations tailored to each individual.9 The aim, in Corbett’s words, is the creation of a “global digital ID prison,”3 one that traces, tracks and surveills “every human being and every product.”10
CONTROL IS THE GOAL IN DIGITAL IDENTITY
From the time when Macron first took office in 2017, commentators described him as “king of the technocrats” and “a leader set on. . . undermining liberty”—with one of the hallmarks of technocracy being to “put power in the hands not just of the state, but of supranational bodies.”11 Macron’s speedy action on the digital ID front at the beginning of his second term seemed to confirm this assessment, sending a clear signal that France is fully on board with the Europe-wide and planet-wide push for digital-identity-enabled surveillance and control.
As digital identity proponents happily exclaim, “We are seeing a proliferation of digital identity schemes globally,”12 helped along by the Covid “pandemic.” For example, juiced by “pandemic” restrictions, Italy’s slow-to-catch-on “Public System of Digital Identity” (SPID), launched in 2016, added fourteen million identities from March 2020 to July 2021 alone (an average of one million per month), rocketing the total up to twenty-three million.12 With a population of roughly sixty million, the Italian government claims its goal is a “penetration level” of at least forty million. The heaviest uses of SPID to date are to access the national retirement system and to “interact” with services such as payment of taxes.
The digital identity freight train has picked up so much momentum that it even has some insiders spooked. Sometime World Economic Forum and Davos participant Brett Solomon, who heads an organization to “defend and extend the digital rights of users at risk around the world,”13 argued in 2018 that digital IDs pose “one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology we have encountered.”4 Citing companion technologies such as facial recognition, biometric identifiers, artificial intelligence (AI) and geolocation (the ability “to track an individual’s whereabouts down to. . . a physical address”),14 Solomon worriedly cut to the chase, pointing out that digital IDs can be used not so much to enable but to disable “full and free participation in society.” Corbett, Fitts and others put it even more bluntly: with a digital identity infrastructure in place, “they can turn your ability to participate in society on or off with a flick of a switch.”15
COUNTRIES WITH DIGITAL IDENTITY
FRANCE: CASE STUDY OF A GLOBAL AGENDA
France furnishes an illustrative case study of the advance planning that has gone into the seemingly inexorable move to corral the world’s citizens into a “digital ID prison”—a prison whose core features would include “an all-digital financial transaction system, digital identification and tracking using some combination of vaccine passports, digital ID wallets and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).”16 As Fitts and attorney John Titus have explained, successful implementation of these measures would spell the end of individual—and national—sovereignty.17
France took its first step toward eventual digital IDs in 2009 when it enacted biometric passport legislation.18 French legislators justified the law as a means of combating “identity fraud,” but within just a couple of years, one in ten of the biometric passports in circulation was acknowledged to have been obtained through fraudulent means.19
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) noted this dismal track record in 2012 when the Gallic nation—famously pledged to “liberty” (along with “equality” and “fraternity”)—took another step impinging on French citizens’ rights and freedoms, passing a law requiring biometric identity cards.19 Fierce pushback, including an almost instantaneous French Constitutional Council ruling of unconstitutionality,20 held the biometric IDs at bay for almost a decade, notwithstanding French companies’ leadership in biometrics technologies. With a French senator decrying biometric IDs as “a time bomb for civil liberties,” the EFF likewise warned about the threat of “mission-creep” and the potential for biometric IDs to become “a dangerous, draconian tool” for authoritarian control.19
Meanwhile, many other countries were quietly taking similar steps. A round-up assembled by Corbett in 2017 showed that over forty countries had, beginning around 2005, been steadily adopting biometric ID measures for a wide range of purposes, including travel controls (passports and airport check-ins), ID cards, residence permits, border security, monitoring of school attendance, census-taking, voter registration, access to social benefits, access to payment systems and criminal investigations.21
By 2021, taking full advantage of the Covid “pandemic”-induced nudge pushing more people onto digital systems, France overcame the remaining hurdles to biometric identification and began rolling out a national digital identity card with facial biometric data, embedded fingerprint biometrics and an embedded QR code.22 From there, it was a short hop, skip and jump to Macron’s April 2022 SGIN decree. In May, Macron also chose as his new prime minister Elisabeth Borne, a trained engineer characterized in the media as a “long-serving technocrat.”23 Intensely loyal to Macron, Borne is unpopular with a large swath of the French public, in part due to her association with “pandemic” restrictions including, notably, suspending without pay employees not presenting a “valid” vaccine passport.24
WHAT DO QR CODES HAVE TO DO WITH IT?
France was not the only place where the two-year Covid cover story allowed vaccine passports to gain prominence as “the fig leaf for the implementation of the digital ID system.”15 Virtually overnight, many other nations and localities turned the passes into gatekeepers of access to restaurants, cultural and sporting events and more.25 As Dr. Mike Yeadon, former top scientist at Pfizer, explains it, “There’s no limit to the evil which will flow from [the] strategic goal” set into motion with vaccine passports. For example, Yeadon says, “Your VaxPass pings, instructing you to attend for your 3rd or 4th or 5th booster or variant vaccine. If you don’t, your VaxPass will expire & you’ll become an out-person, unable to access your own life.”26
Although there has been some temporary letup in demands for proof of vaccination, there can be little doubt that the global leaders steadily building out the digital identity infrastructure intend it to serve as a tool to coerce compliance not just with vaccination mandates but with anything the system claims it needs.27
In an outstanding series titled Global Landscape on Vaccine ID Passports, journalist Corey Lynn of the Corey’s Digs website explains that all of this “begins with a QR code.”28 Far more than just “a convenient little app on your phone,” seemingly innocuous QR codes open the door to a flood of privacy invasions and controls. Invented in the mid-1990s in Japan, the QR code is “a machine-readable visual symbol that contains data for identifiers, locations, tracking points” and more. Although QR codes have limits to the amount of data they can store (just under seventy-one hundred characters), the advent of blockchain platforms and a new Internet protocol (version IPv6) now makes it possible to “store a person’s entire life data,” including genetic data. As Lynn elaborates, “From education to health records, finances, accounts, travel, contact info, and more, all will be linked to your QR code, along with biometrics and fingerprints”—and from there, migrated onto blockchain. Citizen researcher Alison McDowell calls this “life on the ledger”—“a transaction center for everything, and every move you make.”27
Lynn is stern in her counsel regarding QR codes:
“The QR code was never about a free doughnut or an easier way for people to shop or market products—those were just stories put forth to normalize its use and play it off as a ‘convenience,’ just like handy smartphones. The reality is that it’s about controlling the human race by aggregating all data on every human being and object, while enabling full surveillance over your life, and giving scientists full access into your body. So the next time a restaurant provides a QR code to access their menu, demand an actual menu or leave the restaurant. Stop using the QR codes everywhere you go. Stop swiping your smartphone and playing right into their hand. REFUSE QR CODES.”
CRADLE TO GRAVE DIGITAL IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM
Lynn and other freedom advocates have been warning about the push to bring children into the blockchained digital identity system from birth. As one example, Lynn cites a “proof of concept” initiative in 2019 that conducted fingerprint identification of Kenyan newborns.29 The company doing the baby fingerprinting, again Japanese, was NEC (once upon a time, Nippon Electric Company), which has been at the forefront of developing biometric authentication technologies as well as AI-driven technologies for “predictive detection” and “optimal planning and control.”30
Lynn also advises the public to pay attention to ID2020—a public-private digital identity “alliance” launched by entities like the Rockefeller Foundation, Microsoft and the Bill Gates-created Gavi Vaccine Alliance, among others. In 2019, ID2020 launched a digital ID program in Bangladesh, in partnership with Gavi, to test “cutting-edge infant biometric technologies.”31 The press release announcing the program gleefully noted “the opportunity for immunization to serve as a platform for digital identity” through a leveraging of “vaccination and birth registration operations to offer newborns a persistent and portable biometrically-linked digital identity.”
As an article by Michael Nevradakis in The Defender explained in late 2021, the push for digital identities from birth and the drive to vaccinate very young children are two prongs of a single, ambitious agenda being accomplished through the “melding” of Big Tech and Big Health.32 He points out that Gavi itself is not shy about its promotion of “digitally stored health records” for purposes that extend far beyond vaccination—including access to bank accounts, school and other services.
In the education space, scholar and educator John Klyczek, author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education,33 has written about the decades-long “love triangle” between America’s two largest teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA)—and IBM.34 IBM has been a major player in the development of blockchain technology and used this technology as a springboard for its Digital Health Pass and, later, Excelsior Pass—an app rolled out in New York State during Covid35 that “expedit[es] the process of checking the credibility of health credentials.”36 This is where the QR code comes back around: “When [an Excelsior Pass] user has a test or vaccination, the results from numerous participating laboratories are reported to the State’s Lab reporting system,” which “enables the generation of a QR code that can be scanned from the Excelsior Pass Wallet app or printed out”; in addition, the app “provides a name and date of birth to cross-check against photo IDs.”36
According to Klyczek, the two teachers’ unions both pushed for mandatory Covid injections for students and educators.34 Spelling out the wider implications of this betrayal of health freedom, Klyczek wrote that by backing compulsory jabs “and, in turn, digital vaccine passports,” the unions “are championing the blockchain infrastructure necessary to aggregate students’ psychometric and biometric algorithms into Social Credit databases that can restrict students’ access to education, jobs, housing, transportation, healthcare, due process and even food.”
NO IDENTITY, NO FOOD
Klyczek’s mention of food is no accident. In 2022, daily headlines have increasingly laid bare the corporate and technocratic drive to accelerate control over populations through greater control of the global food supply. Digital identities play an important role in this regard. As Lynn explains, “[I]f they control the food, they can use the digital ID to control consumer access to the food.”37
Scarily, Lynn asks readers to “Imagine a day where farmers markets no longer exist, you can’t drive over to your local farmer to buy produce or cuts of meat, and the only food growing outside of the globalists’ secured indoor vertical farming and lab grown meat facilities, is in your windowsill, garden, or greenhouse.” Describing the proliferation of corporate “vertical farms” in which gene-edited produce, including “edible vaccine lettuce,” is grown with neither sunlight nor soil, Lynn notes that “smart” and “traceable” are the new ag buzzwords.
Stories out of India illustrate the perils of harnessing food access to digital identities, and there is much we can learn from India’s wholehearted embrace of digital ID-related technologies. In 2010, the Indian government launched “Aadhaar cards” as the gateway to public entitlements and subsidies, including public food assistance. When it passed the “Aadhaar Act” in 2016, the government cemented a “strategic vision” elaborated at least a decade earlier.38 The 2016 act formalized the responsibility of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for issuing biometrically authenticated identification numbers to all residents of India. As of November 2021, the UIDAI had issued over 1.32 billion identification numbers—capturing about 94 percent of the population of 1.4 billion and 99 percent of Indians aged eighteen and older.39
In 2017, the Indian press began reporting cases of public food assistance being denied to individuals either unable to link their ration cards to Aadhaar or experiencing problems with biometric authentication,40 resulting, in some instances, in death by starvation.41 Commenting on the case of an eleven-year-old who died of starvation, the girl’s lawyer cited “tens of thousands of such cases in the country.”40 In 2018, activists traced half of hunger deaths in their locality since 2015—deaths “after prolonged hunger because there was no food or money in the house”— directly to Aadhaar.42
Indian news accounts have also described problems accessing money that could be used to buy food. One woman’s “old-age pension. . . went to someone else’s bank account that got linked to her Aadhaar without her knowledge”; another woman “could not withdraw her pension. . . from her Aadhaar-linked bank account as internet connectivity disrupted when she was authenticating her thumbprint at the [point-of-sale] machine.”43
Meanwhile, India has been praised for “outpacing” the world in use of digital payment systems through smartphone “Unified Payment Inter face” (UPI) apps that allow mobile payments without the need for credit or debit cards.44,45 UPI transactions soared during the pandemic, doubling between September 2020 and September 2021, and are projected to account for almost half (47 percent) of all payments in fiscal year 2022.44 The leading UPI apps are PhonePe (a payments app “built for India, by Indians”) and Google Pay.
The pandemic was also the excuse to deploy a new digital health ID in September 2021 that links to each citizen’s personal health records and can also link to Aadhaar.46 Although the Aadhaar linkage is supposed to be voluntary, the press has reported cases where “people who have enrolled in the COVID-19 vaccination programme using their Aadhar [sic] number have had their [Unique Health Identifications] created without either obtaining their specific consent or being given the option to opt out.” To market the digital health ID and entice Indians to sign up, the program tells would-be users that they can automatically and easily update their health records each time they visit a health facility simply by scanning a QR code.
RECLAIMING LOCAL
Lynn reminds us that ten companies monopolize the food industry, and BlackRock and Vanguard—the two largest asset management firms in the world with a combined fifteen trillion dollars in global assets—are their top shareholders.37 In fact, the two firms have ownership in almost 90 percent of all S&P 500 firms, “and through their investment holdings they secretly wield monopoly control over all industries.”47
Notably, BlackRock and Vanguard also have influential ownership stakes in most of the large employers that chose to mandate Covid injections, “even though the Supreme Court ruled they didn’t have to,” including vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, and the technology companies (such as IBM and Google) driving vaccine passports and digital wallets.48 In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that fed-up Republican senators were exploring legislation to “curtail” some of the asset managers’ power over public companies.49
With such large and shadowy players pulling strings behind the scenes, and a pervasive biosecurity agenda that, in the words (quoted by Corbett) of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “outdoes every form of governance that we have hitherto known,”15 it is easy to feel overwhelmed. But throwing our hands up—or, as Agamben states, “unresistingly consent[ing] to limitations on [our] freedom that [we] would never have accepted in the past”—is exactly what we cannot afford to do. The “Solutions” page on the Corey’s Digs website offers a great starting place for those trying to figure out actions they can take.50 Lynn also outlines fifteen “big solutions to survive and thrive through tyranny,” including not buying “smart” products and avoiding digital identity QR codes at all cost.51 The digital identity agenda—“to put everyone on the blockchain to be traced, tracked, surveilled, and controlled in ways that are unimaginable”—is something most of us can agree we want no part of.
SIDEBARS
THE DYNAMIC DUO: BLOCKCHAIN AND DIGITAL IDENTITIES
According to the website “101 Blockchains,” blockchain technology can be explained as “a database that stores information in a unique way,” with the crucial distinction that, unlike in a database, “any data that would go in the block can never get deleted or altered” and “will stay there forever.”52 In blockchain speak, the information is stored in a “ledger system.” Each “block” contains some form of data—and blocks are strung together in a chain-like format where “all the blocks will be linked to the previous block and the block in front of it.” As Investopedia explains it, blockchain’s data structure “inherently makes an irreversible timeline of data,” and when a block is full, “it is set in stone and becomes a part of this timeline.”53
As Alison McDowell further clarifies, “life on the ledger” is “transactional.”27 Crucially, the ability to “transact” (exchange data) requires a digital identity with “proper authentication.”52 According to 101 Blockchains, “blockchain and digital identity is a really great pair.”54 The site also approvingly notes that digital identities are enabling a scaling-up of “global cooperation.”
In the digital identity zeitgeist that is emerging, a digital ID is made up of a variety of “identity attributes” represented through digital means—parameters increasingly required to access education, banking, health care and other realms of human activity.54 A digital identity, says 101 Blockchains, can be “atomic” or it can be “cumulative.” In addition to “governmental” attributes such as name, address, birth date or marital status, cumulative attributes are, increasingly, biometric—face, fingerprints, voice patterns and more.
GLOBAL AND LOCAL FOOD SUPPLY UNDER ATTACK
On the Solari Report website, a “Solari Food Risk Tracker” is tracking food supply challenges on a wide variety of fronts.55 These include:
- Consolidation
- Farmer buyouts
- Fertilizer and fuel
- Fires and floods
- Infrastructure
- Government policy and regulation
- Government slaughters (with “bird flu” representing the current cover story)
- Inflation
- Labor shortages
- Soil degradation
- Supply chain issues
- Synthetic food and transportation
Weston A. Price Foundation members can proudly claim to have been ahead of the curve in recognizing these threats and taking measures to counteract them, including through support of local farms (and the “50-50 pledge”),56 pushback against irrational and onerous regulations, education about the importance of soil fertility, warnings about fake food and much more.
REFERENCES
- Boralevi P. Macron launches digital ID in France after re-election, raises fears of social credit system. LifeSiteNews, Apr. 29, 2022.
- Hersey F. France announces user-controlled mobile digital identity app for use with national ID. Biometrics News, Apr. 28, 2022.
- Corbett J. Episode 415—The Global Digital ID Prison. The Corbett Report, Mar. 12, 2022.
- Solomon B. Digital IDs are more dangerous than you think. Wired, Sep. 28, 2018.
- Digital identity for all Europeans. https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-digital-identity_en
- Fitts CA, Betts CA. 3rd Quarter 2021 Wrap Up: U.S. Taxation: With or Without Representation. The Solari Report. https://ourmoney.solari.com/taxation/
- Patrick Wood—Technocracy: the system is the controller. Dryburgh.com, Nov. 30, 2020.
- https://www.technocracy.news/amidst-questions-of-stolen-election-macron-launches-digital-identity-app/
- Fitts CA. Control is one person at a time. The Solari Report, Jan. 14, 2022.
- Lynn C. The global landscape on vaccine ID passports part 4: BLOCKCHAINED. Corey’s Digs, Aug. 26, 2021.
- Slater T. Macron: king of the technocrats. Spiked, Jul. 6, 2017.
- Parkin-White A. Italy demonstrates success in mass adoption of a digital identity scheme with SPID. Mobile Ecosystem Forum, Sep. 7, 2021.
- https://www.accessnow.org/profile/brett-solomon/
- Frankenfield J. Geolocation. Investopedia, Jan. 25, 2021.
- Corbett J. Interview 1698—James Corbett lays out the biosecurity agenda. The Corbett Report, Feb. 10, 2022.
- Nelson K. Covid-19 injections and the global control grid—just say no. Wise Traditions. Spring 2022;23(1):83-92.
- Fitts CA. 2021 Annual Wrap Up: Sovereignty with John Titus. The Solari Report, Feb. 17, 2022.
- https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2008-06-02/france-biometric-passports/
- Daly A. “A time bomb for civil liberties”: France adopts a new biometric ID card. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mar. 8, 2012.
- France: biometric ID database found unconstitutional. European Digital Rights (EDRi), Mar. 28, 2012.
- Corbett J. The biometric ID grid: a country-by-country guide. The Corbett Report, Jan. 31, 2017.
- Burt C. France’s new biometric ID cards from IN Groupe actually fit in people’s wallets, enable EU travel. Biometric News, Mar. 17, 2021.
- Chrisafis A. Elisabeth Borne: a long-serving technocrat and “woman of the left.” The Guardian, May 16, 2022.
- De Lauzun H. Emmanuel Macron chooses a left-wing technocrat as prime minister. The European Conservative, May 18, 2022.
- Speak C. Update: Italy makes Covid “green pass” mandatory for restaurants, gyms, cinemas and more. The Local, Jul. 22, 2021.
- Yeadon M. Halt vaccine passports! The Solari Report, Jun. 9, 2021.
- Alison McDowell crashes blockchain dinner. https://aboutthesky.com/aboutthesky/smallstorm-blog/2021/1788-alison-mcdowell-crashes-blockchain-dinner
- Lynn C. Global Landscape on Vaccine ID Passports book—PDF version. Corey’s Digs, Feb. 11, 2022.
- Fingerprint identification of newborns provides children all over the world with a “legal identity.” NEC, Jun. 20, 2019.
- https://www.nec.com/en/global/about/history.html?
- ID2020 Alliance launches digital ID program with Government of Bangladesh and Gavi, announces new partners at annual summit. Business Insider, Sep. 19, 2019.
- Nevradakis M. Digital surveillance—the real motive behind push to vaccinate kids. The Defender, Dec. 15, 2021.
- Klyczek J. School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education. Trine Day; 2019.
- Klyczek J. America’s largest teachers’ unions push vaccine mandates that will usher in technocratic digital ID. Unlimited Hangout, Nov. 3, 2021.
- McBride AV. Vaccine passports have arrived in New York. Here’s how to fight back. The Defender, May 13, 2021.
- New York goes live with IBM health passport statewide. Ledger Insights, Mar. 29, 2021.
- Lynn C. New controlled food system is now in place and they will stop at nothing to accelerate their control. Corey’s Digs, Apr. 27, 2022.
- https://uidai.gov.in/about-uidai/unique-identification-authority-of-india/about.html
- Singh M. 99% of Indians over 18 now have Aadhaar cards. The Times of India, Jan. 28, 2017.
- Vaid D. The link between India’s biometric identity scheme and starvation. DW. Mar. 26, 2021.
- Pandey A. Woman died hungry, ration shop denied food over Aadhaar, says UP family. NDTV, Nov. 16, 2017.
- Aadhaar linked to half the reported starvation deaths since 2015, say researchers. Huffpost, Sep. 25, 2018.
- Dutta S. Aadhaar-enabled starvation in Narendra Modi’s “New India.” The Wire, Jan. 18, 2018.
- Chadha S. Explained: how India is outpacing the world in digital payments. The Times of India, Dec. 30, 2021.
- Ganti A. Unified payment interface (UPI). Investopedia, Mar. 22, 2021.
- All you need to know on Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, health IDs and personal records. The Wire, Sep. 29, 2021.
- Mercola J. American dream of home ownership turns to dust. Technocracy News & Trends, Apr. 26, 2022.
- Nevradakis M. Corporate vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—brought to you by BlackRock and Vanguard? The Defender, Feb. 16, 2022.
- https://www.sullivan.senate.gov/newsroom/in-the-news/article-lawmakers-seek-to-curb-voting-power-of-blackrock-vanguard-and-other-big-asset-managers
- https://www.coreysdigs.com/solutions/
- Lynn C. 15 big solutions to survive and thrive through tyranny. Corey’s Digs, Sep. 29, 2021.
- https://101blockchains.com/blockchain-technology-explained/
- Hayes A. Blockchain explained. Investopedia, Mar. 5, 2022.
- https://101blockchains.com/digital-identity/
- https://nts.solari.com/food-risk-tracker/
- https://www.westonaprice.org/50-50-pledge/
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2022
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