Why we shouldn’t trust digital ID

The government wants us to live in a condition of perpetual surveillance.

During a trip to Russia in 1785, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham sketched an outline for a new prison design. The cells were arranged around the circular perimeter and, at the centre, he placed his ‘panopticon’: a watchtower which afforded a view of any of the cells at all times. The prisoners might not always be being observed, but they could never be sure that they weren’t.

Bentham’s design was never directly used, but the idea took hold as a symbol of state overreach and control, most famously in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). Foucault was alert to the political ramifications of such a concept, and how surveillance might become an internalised experience. With Keir Starmer now pledging to introduce a digital ID system as a mandatory condition for the right to work, are we seeing the first step towards the realisation of Bentham’s vision?

I suppose we are already there. I have seen friends switch off their phones before discussing politically sensitive issues, genuinely convinced that digital eavesdropping is the norm. Many people are mistrustful of the ‘Alexa’ voice assistant, which they are persuaded is recording their every word. While this all seems terribly conspiratorial, I’m sure most of us remember those reports a few years ago about the Pegasus spyware which had been covertly installed on the phones of journalists and government figures, turning the devices into pocket spies.

Then there are the cameras. We are continually being recorded on CCTV, a fact that led Fraser Sampson, the former biometrics and surveillance commissioner at the Home Office, to describe Britain as an ‘omni-surveillance’ society, and to remark that there ‘isn’t much not being watched by somebody’. In China, cameras with facial recognition software, as well as digital IDs, are key aspects of the harvesting system that supports state surveillance and its ‘social credit system’.

So one might argue that complaining about digital IDs at this point is rather like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted and live-streamed its journey on TikTok. That said, I think there is cause for concern about any attempt to return the UK to the kind of ‘papers, please’ society that we haven’t seen since the Second World War.

In March 2021, I appeared as a panellist on the BBC’s Moral Maze to argue against vaccine passports. I remember drawing a direct comparison to Tony Blair’s unsuccessful efforts to introduce identity cards in the early 2000s. Blair’s plan had its cheerleaders, but many stalwart Labour supporters objected. The Pet Shop Boys even wrote a song called ‘Integral’ to protest this sinister development. The lyrics envisaged a dystopian future in which the state had full access to all our private details: ‘Everyone has their own number / In the system that we operate under / We’re moving to a situation / Where your lives exist as information’.

That said, the song did not seem to reflect the popular mood. One poll conducted by MORI in 2004 found that 80% of the public were in favour of a national identity card. This has shifted markedly in the intervening years, with a recent YouGov poll showing only 42% support for Starmer’s digital ID system, with 45% opposing.

Few will be surprised to hear that public trust in political institutions has plummeted. The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of successive governments, our two-tier policing system, public manipulation as embodied in the ‘nudge unit’, and the corrupt prioritisation of the interests of the political class over the people they serve – perhaps best demonstrated by parliament’s flagrant efforts to overturn the Brexit vote – have all contributed to this climate of mistrust. The bizarre overreach of police during the lockdowns – in which dog walkers were publicly shamed with drone footage, and shopping trolleys were probed for ‘non-essential items’ – has hardly helped matters.

To many of us, it is baffling that anyone at all would support the prospect of the government keeping track of our movements and holding our private details in a database. Starmer claims that the scheme will curb illegal immigration, but we are talking about criminals who already work outside the system and will doubtless continue to do so. Besides, identity cards have been a reality on the continent for years, and have done precisely nothing to resolve the problem. Employers in the UK are already legally obliged to insist on proof of immigration status from workers.

Labour’s digital ID scheme seems more about control than anything else. The possibility of fraud is also a major concern. It’s not as though the government has an unblemished track record of preventing data breaches. We all recall the massive leak of official MOD data regarding Afghans who had worked with the British government during the UK’s military campaigns. And who could forget the senior civil servant who, in 2008, left top-secret documents concerning al-Qaeda and Iraq’s security forces on a train from London Waterloo? Are we really to suppose that the creation of an all-encompassing centralised database will not leave the public open to risk from hackers and hostile foreign powers?

Ultimately, our principal concern ought to be that any centralised identity register creates the foundation for mass surveillance. If the state can build profiles of its citizens based on biometrics and personal details, how long before the ‘function creep’ sets in? Whatever justifications the government currently makes, it cannot possibly anticipate how these powers will be used in later years.

If digital ID becomes tethered to every personal transaction, the result will be a permanent audit of our activity. And if we cannot trust the government of today to safeguard our liberties, why on earth should we entrust a government of tomorrow - whose motives and methods we cannot possibly predict - with the power to track our every move?

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