The ID Crowd

Our busybody government is getting all up in our grill.

Back in the 90s I used to own a big chunky monkey of a desktop PC. One with a huge box full of gubbins which sat under my desk constantly bashing into my knees.

It was fine. It more or less did what I wanted, and I didn’t have any problem with it, except that it was constantly assaulted by a tsunami of malware and viruses which were definitely, patently, and categorically unrelated to my net surfing habits.

Over time this thing became slower than David Lammy in a pub quiz.

Until I eventually got sick of the constant demand for updates, patches, and security fixes, and bit the bullet. I bought an iMac from Apple.

I know a lot of people are sniffy about Apple products. And fair enough. Though I do sometimes think a lot of that is just reverse snobbery. But whatever you think of the brand, it does seem to have better protected me over the years from computer viruses, data breaches, and hackers

But not any more.

Apple has just significantly downgraded the data security of British users by removing end to end encryption from its services in the UK.

It did this reluctantly, in response to our joyless Miss Trunchbull of a Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, and her demand that Apple secretly create a special ‘backdoor’ into its encrypted servers which the Labour government could use to access, monitor and surveil, the private files of all Apple users.

That’s not just Apple users in the UK. That’s all Apple users. Everywhere in the world.

If Cooper had got her way, even herdsmen on the Mongolian steppes would potentially have had their embarrassing late night visits to HotYak.com logged and recorded by the British State.

A Hot Yak

You don’t need to be a Bletchley Park level cryptologist to realise that once you have created a ‘backdoor’ into your secure system, you no longer have a secure system.

As the owners of cryptocurrency exchange Bybit discovered just this week when North Korean hackers took advantage of just such a ‘backdoor’ to mount the biggest heist in history. With Kim Jong Un’s cyber crooks walking away with £1.5bn worth of cryptocurrency Ethereum. (Whatever that is.)

Which for context, makes Britain’s biggest ever cash heist, the 2006, £53m Securitas depot robbery, look like a bunch of school kids nicking Curly Wurlys from a corner shop.

So rest assured if our leaky government can gain access to your files through an intentional vulnerability, then it won’t be long before crooks, thieves, and fraudsters find ways to exploit any government mandated weakness.

Kim Jong Un: Like Yvette Cooper. But less authoritarian.

Apple might have refused to compromise the security of its products, but we have no way of knowing which other companies have agreed to Commissar Cooper’s despotic demands.

Has Microsoft? Meta? Google? How about Amazon? Does snooper Cooper now have access to our WhatsApp messages, our Google searches and our gmail, our contact lists and our browsing history? Is Alexa passing on our personal conversations to Plod?

Better not say anything detrimental about Britain’s ever growing legion of rape gangs culturally enriching romance squads.

Your toaster might be listening.

It’s a worry, because if Alexa does dob you in, you could easily end up sharing a cell with punchy Labour MP Mike Amesbury.

Oh hang on. The pugilistic Labour MP, famous for beating the living crap out of one of his constituents, didn’t actually end up in prison. Instead he was released by a balanced and impartial appeal court judge. On the entirely reasonable grounds that Amesbury isn’t a working class white woman expressing wrongthink on Facebook.

Of course the government will claim it needs access to all of our personal data, all of the time, in order to protect us from terrorists, pedophiles, and the ill defined but scarily scary electronic witchcraft they call ‘online harms’.

And fair enough. There does seem to be a lot of terrorists about at the mo. But it’s not like the government doesn’t already know who they are.

I can’t remember a single one of the genuinely countless Islamic terrorist attacks which have plagued our crumbling nation over the last few years, being perpetrated by someone who was not already known to the security services. Not a one.

And the idea that we need to compromise our online security to prevent ‘lone wolfs’ like Axel Rudakubana from ‘slipping through the cracks’ is preposterous.

After all the authorities had been well aware of him for years. As well as being known to the police, he had been referred to the useless and compromised Prevent programme three times between 2019 and 2021.

Rudakubana didn’t slip through any cracks. He walked through a wide open door.

A door left wide open while Cooper and her luckless Peeping Tom Tory predecessors wasted their time fruitlessly snuffling about into our Favourites folders.

Slipping Through The Cracks

If the government really does want to crack down on terrorism then here’s an idea.

Instead of scrolling through our holiday snaps on iCloud, perhaps it could, I dunno, stop importing terrorists.

Showering money, benefits and resources on men and women from Third World countries with cultures which literally celebrate terrorism. And who now they’re here, regularly, openly, and freely, march through our cities chanting Death to the West.

Crazy I know. But might be worth a try.

Of course Cooper’s latest campaign against our privacy and freedoms is not an isolated assault.

This is a coordinated attack, on many fronts.

The latest wheeze is to make it even easier for government to track our movements and monitor our activities by shackling each and every one of us to our own individual hi-tech ankle tag, in the form of digital IDs.

Which are already being rolled out in the UK as a means of age verification.

And sold as a welcome convenience for young people visiting one of the UK’s last few remaining pubs. Watering holes which have miraculously managed to remain open, despite Sunak, and now Starmer’s, pernicious smoking bans, Angela Rayner’s bonkers new employment laws, and Rachel Reeve’s punitive National Insurance hikes.

You might have seen the advert.

It features a young man, walking into his local bar.

First thing to note is that our hero seems delighted to have beaten the odds, and made it this far, unscathed.

And no wonder, he has somehow managed to complete his journey without being mugged for his phone as he strolled down the street. Accused of a sex crime when he accidentally glanced at a woman on the bus. Or sent to prison for tutting quietly to himself as he walked past a local hotel, overflowing with asylum seekers. This young lad deserves a drink.

Despite these genuine triumphs our hero sadly fails at the final hurdle when he’s asked to prove his age by showing the barman his provisional driving licence.

Our butterfingered dunce is incapable of simply opening his wallet without spewing its contents over the pub floor like so much confetti. His clumsy fuckwit fingers powerless to complete this most basic of real world tasks without bumbling calamity.

What a loser.

Thankfully our ever helpful government’s handy new Infraction Monitoring Spyware digital ID App is here to make everything easy for our dunderheaded drinker, and he’s soon happily quaffing away.

Safe in the knowledge that his eyewateringly expensive pint of lager is being logged against his weekly alcohol quota, which has been mandated by predictably puritan anti booze ‘health experts’ at the NHS.

Of course our young chap is free to drink as much as he likes. We live in a democracy after all. But because of the unacceptable strain his greedy freedom is putting on the sainted NHS, it’s only fair that any alcohol he imbibes over his quota, will be logged on the app, so he can be automatically charged with a small £10, NHS-Alcohol Burden Levy. For each additional unit.

Sorry. I’m just being silly. Indulging in unwarranted scaremongering, and ill informed speculation.

Unless you’re reading this in Autumn 2028, by which time the baseless conspiracy theory above, will have inevitably become everyday fact.

And digital ID is not just for young people. With government moving access to pretty much all public services online, it will soon be almost impossible to resist.

Full time digital ID cheerleader, and part time warmonger, Tony Blair has long been enthusiastic for this new monitoring system, explaining to the Times

“We need to take a firm decision that we’re going for digital ID… we should embrace it fully and roll it out as soon as we can because it will have an immediate set of benefits.”

Yes. Immediate benefits for our authoritarian government.

Which thanks to digital ID will find it much easier to surveil us, ration our energy, food, flights, freedoms, and social privileges. And if we dare transgress its ideological boundaries, make it a doddle to track us down, and pop us in prison.

Blair also claims

‘We have a vast flow of people coming through our borders. The small boats are one part of that. This allows you to identify those people’.

But we don’t need digital ID to identify those people.

We already know exactly who ‘those people’ are. They are the ones leaping off the boats at Dover, and running up our beaches, into the welcoming, generous arms of our broken, captured, welfare system.

His increasingly cadaverous mask slips when Blair reveals the real reason the elite class is so keen on these people pigeonholing technologies.

As the Times article puts it, Blair

is convinced that technology will allow Sir Keir Starmer to be tough on populism and tough on the causes of populism.

And there it is. The terrifying bogeyman of ‘populism’.

But don’t be fooled. Populism is simply what the elites call democracy when the little people don’t vote the way they have been instructed.

One of the other supposed benefits of blanket online surveillance is that this ever increasing intrusion, censorship, and restriction is necessary to ‘protect children’ by making things tougher for our nation’s seemingly limitless supply of pedophiles.

But of course there is already an online digital resource to help you keep track of what Britain’s leading pedophiles are getting up to.

BBC iPlayer.

(Yes. That’s a joke. Maybe.)

But let’s be honest. Despite the constant hand wringing, our government doesn’t actually care about ‘protecting children.’

Not really.

If it did then the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal would never have happened.

Sex change treatment for children would be blanket banned.

(Puberty blockers though nominally banned are still available for ‘clinical trials’. What are those? Who knows? I guess they are whatever the people doing the ‘clinical trials’ say they are. So this is de facto not a ‘ban.’)

Inner city knife crime would be a considered a priority, and not merely an inconvenience.

The Southport murders would not have taken place.

And Sara Sharif would still be alive.

This upside down, Opposite Day, Labour government has already trashed our energy sector in the expectation that it will make us more energy efficient. Raised taxes to make us richer. And strengthened Britain’s defences by selling our strategic military assets to foreign dictators.

It now seeks to make us more secure online by demanding tech companies remove our online security.

This illiberal, overbearing, nosy government doesn’t need a suite of new laws, schemes, and powers to save us from terrorists, crooks, pedophiles and dyspraxic teenage pub goers.

It needs to enforce the laws we already have. To focus its attention on the people who continuously, wantonly and incessantly break them, but are never, ever held to account.

Rather than fixating on the law abiding majority, and finding ever more ways to snoop on the lives of those who live by the rules, but are relentlessly, mercilessly, and ruthlessly, pilloried, prosecuted, and punished for doing so.

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