Your Papers, Please - The Internet Is Entering The Digital ID Era

Your Papers, Please - The Internet Is Entering The Digital ID Era

 PNW STAFF

For most of the internet's history, opening a website required little more than an internet connection. You could read, search, post, debate and browse without first proving to a government-backed system who you were.

That era may be beginning to close.

Governments increasingly want online platforms to know something about the person sitting behind the screen -- beginning with age. Canada is moving toward tougher age requirements for social media, while Europe is developing age-verification technology that can be incorporated directly into its new continent-wide Digital Identity Wallet.

The justification is easy to understand: protect children from pornography, predatory behavior, addictive social media and harmful content.

But once the infrastructure exists to prove something about you before allowing you through a digital doorway, an enormous question follows.

What else might eventually require that digital credential?

First, Prove Your Age

Canada's proposed Safe Social Media Act would establish a new Digital Safety Commission and give it authority to develop rules concerning age estimation and age verification. The government says it intends to establish a minimum age of 16 for social-media accounts, subject to possible exemptions for platforms with sufficient safeguards.

Europe is moving even further technologically.

The European Commission has developed an age-verification system that allows someone to prove that he or she meets an age threshold without necessarily revealing identity or other personal information. The Commission emphasizes that the technology has been designed around privacy.

But there is another important detail.

The EU calls it a "mini wallet." It uses the same technical specifications as the European Digital Identity Wallets being rolled out across all 27 EU member states and was deliberately designed so age verification can eventually be integrated into those wallets.

In other words, Europe isn't merely building an online age gate.

It is building an identity ecosystem.

This Isn't Just An ID Card

The phrase "digital ID" can create the misleading impression that governments are simply putting your driver's license on your phone.

The European Commission's own vision is much broader.

The EU Digital Identity Wallet is designed to allow people to identify themselves to public and private services, store official credentials, electronically sign documents and prove specific attributes about themselves.

Its proposed uses include government services, driver's licenses, employment and educational credentials, travel documents, SIM registration and social-security information.

Then come two particularly important categories: health and money.

EU documentation describes using the wallet for medical prescriptions and health-related credentials. Its ePrescription system envisions citizens storing a Health ID attestation in their wallet and presenting the wallet at a pharmacy to retrieve prescriptions.

The wallet can also be used to open bank accounts and authenticate payments. EU technical documentation describes payment authentication for both online and in-store purchases.

Consider what is converging inside one technological framework:

Identity.

Age.

Banking.

Payments.

Health credentials.

Prescriptions.

Government services.

Travel.

Education.

Employment qualifications.

Social benefits.

And potentially access to major online platforms.

The EU presents this primarily as convenience, security and user control. And there are obvious conveniences. One credential could eliminate countless passwords, forms, photocopies, identity checks and repeated submissions of personal information.

But convenience and control are not opposites.

A system can provide enormous convenience while simultaneously creating an infrastructure capable of exercising enormous control if its rules, architecture or political environment change.

The Prophetic Question

For Christians watching these developments, there is an unavoidable prophetic dimension.

Revelation 13 describes a future system under the Antichrist in which economic participation becomes conditional. Those without the required mark cannot buy or sell.

For most of human history, constructing such a system on a worldwide scale would have been extraordinarily difficult.

Not anymore.

Digital payments, biometric authentication, centralized platforms, programmable financial systems and interoperable digital identity are rapidly creating technological capabilities previous generations never possessed.

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A new flash point in the Iran war: The narrow strait called the 'Gate of Tears'

A new flash point in the Iran war: The narrow strait called the 'Gate of Tears'

Nabih Bulos

To visit Bab el-Mandeb is to understand that old adage about looks being deceiving. For this humble fishing village in Yemen, a tumbledown grouping of barely-there huts nestled between the water and an imposing mountain range, stands sentinel over one of the world's most vital waterways.

The village shares its name with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow passageway connecting the Red Sea with the Arabian Sea that's become another flash point in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

"You hear so much about Bab el-Mandeb, you'd think we would be like New York, with skyscrapers and money," said Saleh, a 58-year-old resident who, like all people interviewed here, refused to give their full name to avoid reprisals.

"So many ships pass near here. If the Yemeni government knew how to invest in it, we would be rich. We should be bringing in billions of dollars. Instead, look around you," he said, pausing as his gaze took in the sorry-looking boats haphazardly laid on the beach.

"We have nothing."

Saleh was interviewed in January, when Bab el-Mandeb was thrust into the power struggle between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the friendly-but-occasionally-fractious backers of Yemen's internationally recognized government.

That war of wills ended with the Emirates ceding control of Bab el-Mandeb — along with the nearby island of Perim, where the Emirates had built a drone airbase — to Saudi Arabia.

But this month, control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait switched once more, when the Houthis, Yemeni rebels backed by Iran, ousted government forces from the waterway in a blitzkrieg in which they seized all of Yemen's Red Sea coast.

The move grants the Houthis a valuable foothold in controlling the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a ribbon of Red Sea — known as the "Gate of Tears" for the dangers involving its navigation — between Yemen's coast and Djibouti and Eritrea.

About 7% of global energy supplies and around 12% to 15% of all global shipping transit the strait. And in taking Perim Island, which lies in the middle the Red Sea at the strait's narrowest point (a mere 12½ miles), the Houthis could harass ships with ease.

"We don't need a drone or a missile," one Houthi commander bragged in a social media video posted from the island. Instead, he added, all they had to do was place a few artillery units on Perim's coast and they would be able to strike any ship crossing the strait.

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How Many Ministries Of Truth Does One Country Need

How Many Ministries Of Truth Does One Country Need

Michael Rainsborough

In previous essays I have sought to describe the political condition into which Britain and other Western democracies have been drifting by offering various analogies.

At first, I tried being serious. My initial forays drew comparisons with the post-totalitarian societies of late communist Eastern Europe, where the widening distance between official propaganda and observable reality produced an ever-greater institutional effort to enforce the official world view. 

Later essays pursued the analogy more directly, asking whether Britain was becoming increasingly Sovietised, with some of the same characteristics of a political order in severe decline becoming recognisable. With the supply of serious comparisons running low, and the ironies apparently passing unnoticed, there seemed little left to do except laugh.

Once the absurdities become difficult to describe with a straight face, parody is the logical next step. The difficulty now has been making the exaggeration last until publication. Institutions and bureaucratic inventions for comic effect have acquired real-world counterparts before the joke has had time to land.

A few weeks back my satirical turn took the form of 'The Spy Who Came in From the Consensus', a John le Carré spoof in which the machinery of the contemporary British state deployed its formidable powers of information gathering to confirm what it already believed. 

At the centre of the story was WISDOM, the Whole-of-Institution Strategic Data and Outcomes Management system. Created to defend Britain against foreign disinformation, it soon graduated to monitoring "harmful narratives", "problematic nostalgia", declining trust and negative sentiment about immigration. A genuine photograph of migrants arriving on a beach was flagged for "decontextualised visual framing". Requests for original sources and factual corrections became possible indicators of hostile interference.

Having begun by investigating Russia, China and Iran, WISDOM eventually discovered that the most troublesome source of misinformation about Britain was British people's stubborn attachment to feeling British. WISDOM's final diagnosis of the country's deteriorating social cohesion was commendably concise: "The problem isn't the problem, the problem is the people noticing the problem."

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham stood before the United Nations and announced the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence. Barely had WISDOM escaped onto the page before reality began catching up with the satire.

According to Burnham, NCID will detect, attribute and disrupt hostile-state information attacks. He cited Russian bots masquerading as British citizens, fake websites, fabricated reports, forged newspaper branding and covert interference. Most insidious of all, naturally, was the amplification of "far Right narratives". Russia, Burnham said, was creating a narrative of British decline. Britain, he claimed, had surrendered too much ground to those promoting such an account.

Burnham insisted that the "negative" and "corrosive" narrative about life in Britain "bears no resemblance to reality". A few moments later in the very same speech, Burnham described people struggling with the "cost of living", lives that were "not improving", young people outside employment, education or training, widening inequality and a society vulnerable to division. Making life more affordable, he then announced, would lie at the heart of a new "10-year plan" for Britain.

The narrative of decline therefore bears no resemblance to reality, although reality apparently requires a 10-year plan.

Burnham began his speech alleging that Russian agencies had forged BBC branding, faked websites and used bots to "stoke tension", "spread lies" and "play on people's fears". There is nothing inherently implausible about any of this. A fake newspaper article is false. A Russian bot pretending to be Derek from Wolverhampton is not Derek from Wolverhampton. No doubt Russia conducts information operations against its enemies, as does nearly every other major nation. It's part of statecraft. It always has been.

However, contentions about whether Britain is declining, its economy is struggling, its institutions are failing or its social cohesion is deteriorating are not in themselves acts of deception. Arguments about the condition of the country do not become disinformation because somebody in Moscow presses the retweet button. 

For all the concern about foreign deception operations, Britons are perfectly capable of looking at their country and coming to what the Government perceives as the "wrong" conclusions without Russian assistance.

The irony is that Whitehall already has an expanding bureaucracy operating across this field. Britain has units dealing with misinformation, hostile states, strategic communications, cyber interference and influence operations. Having concluded that these arrangements are fragmented and overlapping, Whitehall has reached for its traditional instrument of administrative simplification: another organisation.

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The Rising Drone Threat: Why Our Critical Infrastructure Has Become Dangerously Exposed

The Rising Drone Threat: Why Our Critical Infrastructure Has Become Dangerously Exposed

Mike Adams

The era when America's above-ground infrastructure could be considered safe is now over. The drone revolution has quietly dismantled that assumption, and I believe we are dangerously unprepared for the era of distributed drone warfare.

The same precision-strike capability that hit Saudi pipelines and Qatari gas trains can be replicated here by lone actors or small cells, and it doesn't take much in the way of manufacturing technology for a small group to accomplish this. Pointing this out is not alarmism. It is a straightforward consequence of the availability of cheap guidance systems, open-source know-how, and a vast, undefended homeland ^[1].

During my recent interview with Matt Bracken on Alex Jones, we discussed how the rise of decentralized drone warfare represents an existential threat to a nation that has never seriously defended its homeland. We examined the vulnerability of critical infrastructure, the evolution of drone technology and autonomy, the democratization of warfare, and the profound risks of artificial intelligence ^[2]. Every one of those topics deserves far more attention than it is getting. I believe our national security establishment continues to underestimate this threat, and that refusal to confront it head-on will eventually be paid for in blood.

We no longer live in a world where only nation-states can wage war. The technology that once belonged exclusively to superpowers now sits in the hands of anyone with a credit card and a grudge. I have argued repeatedly that the hollowing out of America's industrial and defense base, combined with the proliferation of cheap autonomous systems, has created a perfect storm that virtually guarantees a domestic attack sooner or later ^[3]. The question is not whether drones will be used against American infrastructure, but when.

America's refineries, pipelines, power grids, and data centers are, unfortunately, wide open. They sit in plain sight, mapped by publicly available satellite imagery, and their locations are cataloged in government databases that have long since been compromised. Anyone with insider knowledge or even rudimentary research skills can identify single points of failure that would cause chaos for millions of people. The vulnerability is not theoretical; it is a matter of public record.

The recent Joliet refinery incident is a perfect illustration of how fragile our systems have become. When that refinery went down, it triggered a diesel panic and sent shockwaves through the regional fuel supply chain ^[4]. Imagine that same scenario replicated across a dozen refineries simultaneously. The economic fallout would be catastrophic, and our current strategies for defending these sprawling assets are nothing short of inadequate. You cannot surround hundreds of square miles of pipeline with barbed wire and armed guards.

Russia has already recognized this reality. Its government authorized its central bank and Sberbank to operate anti-drone systems and arm personnel to defend financial infrastructure, effectively turning bankers into air-defense operators ^[5]. Putin even moved to allow the state to temporarily seize commercial critical infrastructure that is not sufficiently protected from drone strikes ^[6]. I find it telling that Russia, which we are supposed to consider our inferior, is adapting to this threat while our own officials issue warnings but do nothing. The FBI has publicly acknowledged that cheap commercial drones now pose a significant threat to U.S. security and the homeland, and that low-cost drones can kill personnel and damage critical infrastructure ^[7]. That warning should have been a wake-up call. Instead, it has been largely ignored.

The drones of a decade ago were toys. The drones of today are weapons of precision warfare, and the drones of tomorrow will be autonomous killing machines. DARPA has been developing armies of drones for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions for years, with biologically inspired robotic systems that fly. While micro air vehicles fly slow and low, DARPA's hypersonic stealth drones fly high and fast, with the armed Falcon HTV-2 launched from a rocket and designed to travel at Mach 20 ^[8].

The Ukraine war has served as an accelerant for this technology. Both sides have deployed drone swarms, AI-enabled targeting systems, and kamikaze drones on a scale never before seen in combat. Russia has used Geran-2 and Geran-4 Seeker drones equipped with artificial intelligence to strike Ukrainian ports and shipping ^[9]. For its part, Ukraine has launched swarm attacks involving hundreds of drones at a time, with Russia's Defense Ministry reporting 519 UAVs shot down in a single night across more than twenty regions ^[10]. This is the new face of war.

Autonomous drones represent a quantum leap beyond remote-controlled systems. Once a drone can identify and engage targets without a human pilot, jamming becomes irrelevant, and the decision loop shrinks from seconds to milliseconds. Glenn Diesen has noted that the emphasis in military affairs could shift back toward quantity with low-cost military hardware such as swarms and other inexpensive weapons platforms, making it possible to create mass effects without mass armies ^[11]. And the technology is only getting cheaper and more accessible. The barrier to entry for building a lethal drone is now measured in thousands of dollars, not millions

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The Socialist Indoctrination Machine:

The Socialist Indoctrination Machine: Schools Are Teaching Young People To Embrace Big Government, Hate Capitalism

Ken Buck

A recent headline from a well-respected news outlet caught my attention: "Could socialism make America happy again?"

Surely, the article must be satirical, I thought. Who in their right mind would believe that the most oppressive form of government, responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths, horrific living conditions, and the elimination of personal freedoms, would make anyone "happier"?

It wasn't a joke. Nor are the slew of articles these days proclaiming that "Socialism's moment is here" and similar findings that show socialism's popularity is quickly climbing, especially among young people.

America has a socialism problem - or a socialism perception problem. A great swath of our country has bought into the lie that socialism can somehow provide a better quality of life, and it owes largely to progressives' success transforming our education system into an indoctrination machine.

It's no secret that higher education has long been a bastion of liberalism. In one recent poll, half of college professors at four-year schools self-identified as liberal, compared to only a quarter who identified as conservative. Conservative faculty were considerably more likely to hide their political affiliations for fear of being fired or retaliated against.

Likewise, a survey in 2020 found that nearly 40 percent of conservative college students did not feel comfortable expressing their political views because they worried their peers might file a complaint against them.

One might think that our country's institutions of learnings would actively seek to educate young people about the dangers of socialism. There are, after all, numerous examples from recent history. Instead, they preach the evils of free-market competition, which has made the United States a global beacon of hope and freedom for over 250 years.

An annual study this year found that nearly 40 percent of students said that their college classes and activities negatively affected their views of capitalism, compared to less than 10 percent who said their experience improved it. That shouldn't be a surprise. The same report two years earlier found that faculty were "more often positive toward socialism and negative toward capitalism."

Today, 46 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 have a favorable opinion of socialism - more than twice as many compared to those who had a negative opinion of it.

In 2016, a now-often-cited survey found that one-third of millennial and Gen Z students believed more people were killed under former President George W. Bush than by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Almost one in five students did not know who Stalin was.

U.S. civics education hardly seems to be trending in a better direction. A poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in 2019 found more than seven in 10 Gen Z students and over six in 10 Millennials said they did not learn about communist regimes throughout their K-12 careers.

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Mamdani: Socialism "Will Absolutely Translate" Nationwide