EU to step up digital push with digital identity wallet

Thanks for that, and you are absolutely right.

The digital pants down is a risk obviously but too many people just accepted the post-9/11 TSA panty raid as a reasonable response to nobody from Iraq being involved in a joint Saudi / Afghan wahabbi inspired terror attack where the Saudis were too rich and well-organised to kick their a55e5 and for that reason we are where we are.

I think the market will provide an answer to this. COVID has shown this to some extent.

Employers in the UK who insist on unnecessary COVID tests while also insisting that everybody get back to 2 hour commutes to a sweaty open plan office are seeing their vacancies going unfilled even after offering to pay for the season ticket or onsite parking.

What berk is going to sign up for that when the company over the road is offering the same salary, but with 40 hours a week working from home, a $3k allowance to kit out your home office, and only one mandated office day a month? A canny person can get all their hours done by Thursday lunchtime, have 12 hours of paid overtime, and still do less hours than they’d have done in the old place.

Same will happen for travel and other things. If people are too inconvenienced by unnecessary tests, they’ll go elsewhere.

If the state starts being intrusive but in a less intrusive way than the way my bank keeps pestering me to use the full Monty multifactor combination of app + fingerprint + card + pin + name of payee every time I want to transfer payment to a new third party, they’ll tolerate it.

And that’s probably the biggest long term risk. “It’s no hardship” + “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”.

Might interest you to know the EU is wondering exactly how this tech will work... in several years’ time, when they’ve finished constructing it. Of course this is all a bit “blue sky” thinking but one protocol that I’ve seen in mock-up goes roughly like this:

1. Citizen installs app on phone, and links app to digital wallet. Like their online banking (which already uses the same regulatory principles), it’s bound to their device and their biometric, and ALL data they choose to share is stored in an encrypted file, locally, not uploaded to any central server.

2. Citizen opts into medical data sharing and specifies what can and cannot be shared with emergency responders.

3. Emergency workers have to register with a licensed provider of services - usually their employer. As part of mandatory employment checks, their identity has to be confirmed, along with their qualifications (this is Captain Obvious stuff - you don’t want someone with a fat jacket of criminal prosecutions who’s merely pretending to be a cop / paramedic / whatever, getting access to national and/or EU-wide and/or Interpol databases).

4. Once vetted, they are given access to an app. Just like the citizen one (and just like their own bank’s app already does), it needs THEIR biometric to be presented in order to use it.

5. In the event that you’re a victim of crime or in an accident, then no matter where you are in the EU, the emergency responders can nominate a person to lead the team. The apps then sync up so a team is created for that one “encounter”, and all named qualified attending personnel are added to the list.

6. Before they can do ANYTHING with ANY data, they need your consent. If you’re conscious they can just ask. If not - how can you give it? Simples - your app on your phone has your pre-approved “I’m happy for the emergency responders to identify me” rule enabled AS WELL AS the “even if I’m unconscious or dead” rule.

7. One nominated responder uses NFC to link their device to yours, all this does is ask your device for approval. Since you may have pre-approved that, it’ll say YES. If you didn’t pre-approve, it might ask you to swipe left for yes or right for no, subject to your fingerprint unlock.

8. At this point the back end of the responders’ app tells the backoffice that you’ve given your consent, and it then establishes a full audit trail for everything they do after that. If they ask for your blood group, it captures the team members, the encounter, who requested the blood group, and when they asked. It then requests the information from the phone.

9. Cleverly, the proposition also includes some provision for natural language translation, so if all your vital statistics have been captured in English and you’ve been involved in an accident in Slovakia, there’s not going to be any language barrier.

Now, this all sounds immensely complicated - and technology-wise it will be - but there’s nothing insurmountable. And the upshot of it is, we’re not talking about a system that’ll be here next year.

In 20 years’ time this will all come to pass, and crucially by the time it arrives the citizen and the emergency responder will have had 20 years to get the hang of it.

It’ll be far less complicated to any end user than trying to ask and answer a bunch of questions verbally while slipping in and out of consciousness.

If you think that sounds completely nuts, consider how completely effortlessly a ten year old “digital native” can navigate their way round computer tech that would’ve baffled a college graduate 20 years ago.

It’s the same as how, twenty years before that, many of my dad’s generation couldn’t even figure out how to set a VCR timer via the remote control, while I (even as a tender 7 year old) could do it blindfold without even reading the instruction book.

In twenty years’ time this technology will be so intuitive to any millennial that any argument that the old way of doing things was “simpler” will be simply laughed at.

Yes.

It’s a goal that was conceived before the technology age, when the perception was that taking control of manufacturing and mining/refining would be essential to neutralising western power.

It was largely rendered redundant by the USA and UK moving away from heavy industry in favour of service economies, letting Asia take the lead on microelectronics, and the fetish for offshoring/downsizing in the 80s.

MBAs and venture capital quarterly numbers obsessions were enabling the commie takeover 30 years before we even had Woke.

Tech giants and mass production of cheap goods were encouraged BY CAPITALISM to move their HQs around the world, bypass competition rules, and find the sweat shops.

They’re now uncontrollable.

The commies don’t need to own the tech giants because the tech giants are already beyond democratic control.

The commie manifesto is a red herring; a far more apt reference is the WW2 reaction to Zaibatsu in Japan.

By the 80s it had turned into a silly meme for the movie industry with Nakatomi in Die Hard, Yutani in Aliens and OCP’s aggressive acquisition by Kanemitsu in Robocop 3. Almost always painting Japan not China or Russia as the puppet master being a “too big to fail” global megacorp.

The concept also fed into Taco Bell in Demolition Man. As a result of all this, Wall Street loves business until it becomes a diversified conglomerate, applies a huge risk rating, artificially deflates it’s value, and then wonders why the American giants are now all part owned by China.

The technology age is everything after World War II. A lot of commerce and technology was computerized and digitized throughout the 1950s onward. Thus, the 45 communist goals for the USA are no anachronism.

Tech giants and mass production of cheap goods were encouraged BY CAPITALISM to move their HQs around the world, bypass competition rules, and find the sweat shops …

Actually, not by capitalism. The rest of the 45 communist goals bear that out, as do Karl Marx’s own words:

… (I)n general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

— Brussels, 01/09/1848

I find you too dismissive of the Communist Manifesto. All its ideology is still active, particularly its four targets for abolition, that being of the family, private property, religion and (eventually) national borders.

Not to mention, the takeover of both political parties of the USA was goal number 15. In The Conscience of a Conservative, the author expresses dismay at observing that takeover in action. It was no new thing to be a RINO in the 1950s; Reagan found that out the hard way throughout the 1970s into the 1980s.

People don’t seem aware of how the commie manifesto was enabled by Harvard economics and hard right wing casino capitalism and I get laughed at if I explain it. Until I present this...

Simple question: why is it that a tech firm with one good idea that’s never traded at a profit and has never made anything that works, can be worth 50x more on Wall Street than a prestige brand that makes tens of millions of dollars in profit year after year?

The whole concept of “worth” was flipped on its head decades ago. Sack 100 productive people to get a .01% boost on the company value even if it reduces productivity. Sell off your good machinery. The cash value of a well cooked golden goose is higher than its worth as a thing that lays golden eggs.

If you presented modern economics to the postwar generation they’d think the commies were pulling the strings in Wall Street even in the 70s.

I’m not dismissing it. That’s the complete opposite of what I’m saying.

I’m saying you lost THAT battle decades ago and as a result of losing it decades ago a compliant that makes nothing and sells nothing can be worth more than General Motors.

With an equation that skewed, all the Left needs to do is wait for Wall Street spivs to devalue a viable American brand, as they always end up doing eventually, buy it up in the fire sale, and bingo.

Or, they can start a tech business in a garage and end up richer than Midas without hiring any more than a dozen American workers. Move the company registration to the state which is regulated the least, and get even richer. Within 15 years you’ve gone from a jobbing inventor to an influencer of governments with factories in China. Just look at James Dyson.

Google “travel safely with your data” (in quotes) and you’ll see a link near the top from 11th February. “Nico is 56 years old...”

Very simply put, it’s a walkthrough showing how even a ton hatted privacy fiend who distrusts the state completely will provide explicit consent at every step when talking either to his cardiologist of choice, or getting cardiology support while in another country. What it doesn’t spell out, but in my view should spell out, is the inherent absurdity of the counterargument that this is totally unsafe and oppressive when it’s compared to having to carry bits of paper round on your person AND set up international phone calls between doctors AND get faxes sent between them for physical signing ... All to achieve the exact same result while exposing the week long faff of it to a multitude of “man in the middle” interception risks.

Now that’s just one consent-based scenario out of hundreds that are in the early planning stages.

I already test one such solution, it’s not a state supplied version but the underlying principles are nearly identical.

I decide what goes in my test wallet, I decide what to share from it, and when, and who with.

I don’t just give someone the information to keep, I let them view it for the duration of an “encounter” after which their system ends the session and ‘forgets’ the authentication evidence. Which is abstracted for the audit trail, not cloned.

Just like how a cash card transaction uses the information from card and PIN and certificate to verify a purchase, but BY LAW the merchant can’t hold onto the CVC and PIN. It’s used only by the device, then forgotten by the device.

Philosophically an agency could insist on me going through the process before letting me do something uncontroversial or buy something, but the free market consumer base will discourage practices that harm end user acceptance.

A restaurant that insists on checking your passport before finding you a table will soon find it has no customers, while the rival over the road that isn’t being silly in that way had queues around the block.

I’m not complacent about it, because no setup is perfectly safe and totally immune to state/corporate abuse.

But this is way, WAY less easy to abuse UNDETECTED than the ad-hoc, poorly documented, multi-actor, hands-dirty manual processes that people (for some totally irrational and inexplicable reason) think are “safer”.

That’s correct, but of course the corporations are not the ones who are independent of government, as Woodrow Wilson tried to claim and tried to use as an excuse for the federal government to break free of its Constitutional constraints. As he put it:

… Corporations grow on every hand, and on every hand not only swallow and overawe individuals but also compete with governments.The contest is no longer between government and individuals; it is now between government and dangerous combinations and individuals. Here is a monstrously changed aspect of the social world. In face of such circumstances, must not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control? ‘Yes,’ says the democrat, ‘perhaps it must. You know it is my principle, no less than yours, that every man shall have an equal chance with every other man: if I saw my way to it as a practical politician, I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance. But the means? The question with me is not whether the community has power to act as it may please in these matters, but how it can act with practical advantage—a question of policy.’ A question of policy primarily, but also a question of organization, that is to say of administration.

One of the first manifestations of what you describe, in the USA, is what the federal and state governments did to private railroads via regulation and taxation. (And Wilson, during WWI, federalized the railroads, reluctantly returning them to the private sector afterwards. And as you can see, he wanted to also make “corporations” the bogeyman by which to increase governmental power.)

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