Global Smart ID For All UK CitizensJulie Beal When I try to tell people about this, and how its a global scheme, they just dont seem to hear me. I can only think that the power of the media is responsible they simply arent informing the public properly about this matter, so because youre only hearing it from me, it perhaps doesnt seem as real? Well, it is. Horribly so. There arent any glossy adverts for it yet, but if you wade through the documents, and listen to lectures and webinars aimed at industry professionals, its all there on the Web. Maybe youre already one of the many victims of the transition to AI government those wishing to claim Jobseekers Allowance must already make their claim online. It is not possible to do this by interacting with a human in any way.[1] The thing is, the next stage is forcing people to sign up with an Identity Provider (IdP) to prove they are who they say they are, when they use government services which are only available online. It was supposed to start next month, i.e. the transition to Universal Credit (the new benefit which will replace most of the current ones) was meant to introduce identity management to the UK, by requiring all claimants to authenticate themselves online by using an IdP. However, the plan has now changed, and the latest news is that instead of starting with Universal Credit, there will be 25 government departments moving their services online, and to access these, citizens will need to sign up with an Identity Provider. The services include online driving licences, and other DVLA documents; State benefits, redundancy payments, and tax matters; civil claims; visa applications; electoral registration; and booking prison visits. In June, the government announced, They dont want to provide staff to man phonelines, or offices everything will be digitised, and for that you need smart ID. The UK government (Government Digital Services, or GDS) announced this month they have contracted the services of five companies, and we get to choose which one to sign up with! Gosh, thanks! The five IdPs chosen by GDS for the UK are Experian, Verizon, the Post Office, Mydex, and DigIdentity; the first/beta phase is just about to start. There weresupposed to be eight IdPs, but PayPal and Cassidian have deferred their involvement for the time being. It was reported last week that a government spokesperson has stated, Universal Credit remains part of the future delivery plans for the cross-government IDa Service in development at the Cabinet Office. Last year, (September, 2012), the UK Cabinet Office published the Local Authority Review of Citizen Online Identity Assurance which acknowledged one of the issues in enforcing the system is that citizen trust may be difficult to achieve. Too right!!! Itll be even harder once people realize how easily they can be spied on, the fact that biometrics arent reliable enough, and that many things can go wrong when allowing a third party to handle your ability to live a life. If your global ID doesnt work, you cant do a thing. The Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group Draft Identity Assurance Principles were also published in June, and were actually endorsed byBig Brother Watch and No2ID, but all pretense of privacy is washed away by the exemptions (the Exceptional Circumstances Principle), which mean privacy can be violated for the following reasons: This list kinda covers every excuse under the sun dont ya think? Besides, theres always the audit trail, and a whole variety of types of data about you that will be looked at. According toMike Bracken, director of the Government Digital Service unit (GDS) in the Cabinet Office, The UK has contracted its e-Gov services to one company, owned by only one man, who will host the services in the cloud, using software it has contracted from EMC Global Services, an American corporation. Does this mean the UK government is granting control of all her citizens to a private US company? Identity management enables full personality profiles for each of us, with a unique ID number, which works worldwide, using, for instance, the standards of the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) and ISO certification. Chris Ferguson, the man in charge of Identity Assurance here in the UK, is on the board of directors of the OIX. In a workshop called Comparing and Contrasting NSTIC with EU Approaches at this years World eID Congress, Chris Ferguson is due to give a presentation with the provisional title of UK, a Laboratory for NSTIC in Europe. this aligns with Fergusons commitment to working with his counterparts on his trip to the White House Colloquium on the NSTIC in May of last year, when the Cabinet Office noted, In March, the Open Identity Exchange held a summit at the Microsoft headquarters in London, where Stephen Ufford, the founder of Trulioo(partnered with Verizon to deliver IdM in the UK, the US, and elsewhere) discussed the problem in the UK of the five million unbanked people mainly the young and the old who are classed as being thin-file people. Ufford also stated that instead of trying to educate the public, citizens could be eased in by getting them to use government services online. Trulioo specialises in social ID verification, and Ufford insists the government intends for us to use social sign-ins to begin with, such as through Google or Facebook, which would allow them to, leverage existing consumer behaviour . to make the verification process more simple. The social (identity) file, he says, can include an email address, phone number, and even the device ID, and is, created and aggregated just like a credit file. Its reported from different identity providers, different instances of your social behaviour.. Speaking at the Japan Identity and Cloud Summit , Ufford said that only 5% of e-commerce websites use social log-ins at present, but experts expect that over the next three years, this number will rise to over fifty per cent. He also assured the corporate attendees that they neednt worry about using Trulioos product (called Profile Plus) because, he said, this process (the data were using to verify the identities) is completely unregulated so you dont have to worry about the various types of privacy legislation around the world. Trulioo gathers all of the bits and pieces of your digital footprint and assembles them as an ID, to provide internet life verification, i.e. to prove the person is still alive. Don Thibeau, Founder of the Open Identity Exchange, and involved in setting up the NSTIC, believes the global identity ecosystem could use social and transactional information from the web and repurpose it for other applications. Perhaps hes thinking of how much identity profiles are worth to marketers, financiers, researchers, and politicians. A webinar by a company (Janrain) partnered with Trulioo (see above), called Leveraging Rich Social Profile Data for Advanced Segmentation, stated Janrain could get rich profile data, e.g. photo, address, and psychographics, as well as relationship status, declared interests, movies, sports, and even explicit access to their friends graphs- this would give marketing companies close to a 360 degree view of customers and could enable one to one marketing using centrally stored personality data. The UK government guide for businesses, Identity Proofing and Verification of an Individual, describes the four levels of identity verification; a social log-in is the lowest level of authentication, as it is only level 1 and no evidence is obtained to verify the claimed identity; a level 2 identity has sufficient evidence . for it to be offered in support of civil proceedings; a level 3 identity has been physically identified, meaning the owner of that identity has provided sufficient confidence for it to be offered in support of criminal proceedings; whilst the highest level of identity verification adds biometrics, to further protect the identity from impersonation or fabrication. A level 4 identity biometric is a measure of a human body characteristic that is captured, recorded and/or reproduced in compliance with ICAO 9303. The guide also notes that the following documents may be used, alongside other evidence, to authenticate a level 4 identity: The governments Midata initiative, which requires businesses to compile consumers consumption and transaction data in a portable, machine readable format is very close to being made compulsory for all businesses. Midata was developed by the Department for Business, Innovation Skills (BIS), using insights and evidence from the Governments Behaviour Insights Team in the Cabinet Office. The scheme is already compulsory for the energy, credit card, current account and mobile telephony sectors, but if secondary legislation is passed, all companies would have to comply. It is said to benefit consumers, but it will also facilitate ID authentication for thin-file people, since it is transactional data, and will make all audit investigations of ID far simpler. Our health records will be regularly scrutinised by algorithms trying to understand such things as the spread of disease for this a full ID profile helps make sense of each record. Our profiles will also be collated and spread around by marketers, looking for the golden all-round view of who we are, to create a personalised consumer bubble for each of us. Were told the UK government wont have a database of our IDs, but centralisation is no longer the issue it is the ability to access and aggregate information from across the World Wide Web in real-time that counts, and Identity Assurance does precisely this. Worse still, it moves our IDs to the cloud, where we are even less protected by law, leaving us vulnerable to companies from the US, a country which believes it has the right to snoop on us for the sake of national security. IdA just makes it easier for them. The Privacy Principles make it clear our IDs can be checked to prevent crime, which is effectively giving full clearance for all citizens to be surveilled, just in case. Spread the word and dont give in right? Notes: Jobseekers are also told you must tell us if you leave your home, even if only for a day. This article first appeared at Get Mind Smart Julie Beal is a UK-based independent researcher who has been studying the globalist agenda for more than 20 years. Please visit her website, Get Mind Smart, for a wide range of information about Agenda 21, Communitarianism, Ethics, Bioscience, and much more. 