Americans' privacy in jeopardy as Congress pushes digital ID task force, 3 privacy-related bills



House Democrat Rep. Bill Foster (Ill.) is part of three separate bills that push digital identification on Americans through legislation.

The Illinois congressman first announced the Improving Digital Identity Act in September 2020, stating on Twitter then that "it's time the United States catches up with the developed world on digital identity technology."

Citing the benefits of a "bipartisan" bill, Foster said it had become "vitally important to ramp up safeguards to protect against identity theft and fraud " so that businesses and consumers could have confidence in their online transactions.

In a bipartisan manner, members of Congress appear to be collecting evidence to bolster their argument for why digital identification should be required.

Apparently, this can only be done through digital ID.

Foster has been relentless about this bill, reintroducing it in 2021 and again in 2024, Reclaim the Net reported.

According to Foster's website, the bill asks for the creation of a Digital Identity Task Force made up of federal, state, and local representatives. The task force would develop methods for government agencies to "validate" and "protect" the identities of individuals online, including "tools for verification."

This, of course, means government-issued digital IDs and government-operated verification programs.

The task force would also determine whether a "fee-based model" for verification programs would be required.

The bill, H.R.4258, comes with an estimated $50 million price tag over five years to develop the digital ID. It was originally co-sponsored by 10 Democrats and three Republicans, including Georgia's Barry Loudermilk (R), Rhode Island's James Langevin (D), and New York Rep. John Katko (R).

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In September 2024, Foster introduced another digital ID bill to "establish a Government-wide approach to improving digital identity, and for other purposes."

The text for H.R. 9783 had yet to be submitted at the time of this publication.

In June 2024, Foster co-sponsored Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins' bill on the same topic.

H.R. 8658, the Emerging Digital Identity Ecosystem Report Act of 2024, asked for a report from TSA on "digital identity ecosystems."

The report will include the benefits and risks of digital identities as they relate to homeland security in the United States.

Bipartisanly, members of Congress appear to be collecting evidence to bolster their argument for requiring digital identification. The most popular reasons congressmen have given in their bill texts so far are tightening national security, securing online transactions, and preventing identity theft.

Digital ID has long been a topic of discussion at the World Economic Forum, the yearly event where society's elites meet to decide which policy proposals to pursue in their jurisdictions.

Since at least 2020, the WEF has advocated for a digital ID system to help society's most vulnerable members.

"A digital ID system allowed Chile rapidly to pre-enroll millions of new beneficiaries in social programs," the organization wrote.

In 2023, the WEF said it was "difficult or impossible" for the roughly 850 million people who don't have ID to "fully engage with society." This, according to the WEF, showcases a perfect reason to implement a cost-efficient, paperless ID system.

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Digital ID is coming: Will Americans lose freedom in the name of security?



America was founded on liberty and rights, but Big Tech and Big Government keep trying to take them away.

The latest example comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is currently working to develop wide-reaching digital IDs. More specifically, NIST is collaborating with tech companies and banks to link mobile driver’s licenses with people’s finances. The broader purpose is to work toward developing a digital ID for everyone that centralizes all their personal information, supposedly to boost cybersecurity and provide more convenience for financial transactions.

The more digital ID is developed in America, the more alternatives to digital ID will become rarer, more complex to use, and, eventually, outlawed or severely restricted.

Working with various associations, the California DMV, the Department of Homeland Security, Microsoft, iLabs, MATTR, OpenID Foundation, and various large financial institutions, including Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, NIST has now contracted various digital identity specialist companies to implement the project.

According to NIST digital identity program lead Ryan Galluzzo, NIST’s advances are about allowing people to present ID in the most convenient and secure way possible while still allowing them to rely on traditional physical ID.

“We want to open up the use of modern digital pathways while still allowing for physical and manual methods whenever they may be necessary.”

By linking banking information with mobile driver's licenses, NIST will move one step forward to implementing a central digital ID that contains people’s private information. NIST promises that this new digital ID acceleration “will address ‘Know Your Customer/Customer Identification Program Onboarding and Access’ which will demonstrate the use of an mDL and/or Verifiable Credentials (VC) for establishing and accessing an online financial account.”

The project will move forward in three main steps. According to NIST, it will aim to standardize and promote “digital ID standards” while still respecting and maximizing “privacy and usability.” This digital ID project is currently in the build phase.

With technology that now analyzes how people walk and breathe and their irises, to identify them beyond a shadow of a doubt, and phones and GPS systems geolocating individuals at almost every moment of the day, digital ID is ripe for abuse by an authoritarian government or malicious actors. The easier it becomes for a citizen’s important data to be accessed by law enforcement, government, or bad actors, the closer we get to a digital panopticon in which citizens are constantly tracked and subject to potential suspicion while having no recourse to alternative methods of payment or identity.

This move forward linking mobile driver's licenses with banking is bigger news than it appears on the surface. While it can be easily justified and explained as necessary, innovative, and forward-thinking, the more digital ID is developed in America, the more alternatives to digital ID will become rarer, more complex to use, and, eventually, outlawed or severely restricted. What starts as an incentive or benefit all too often becomes a mandate and a requirement down the road. NIST’s moves to build up a more powerful and connected digital ID will inevitably lead to Americans becoming less free, regardless of how these policies are framed or how much of a positive spin they are given.

Bill Gates wants to use digital government ID to ATTACK free speech



Bill Gates has recently hinted that he would like to see online speech shaped to curb misinformation by ensuring that people are properly identified online — which would require digital ID.

“We see it every single day right now in China. They have a version of digital ID in order to do anything online, and I mean everything. All banking, commerce, jobs all tied to a single online ID that the government gives you. And if they decide that you’re saying the wrong things, or they want to turn off that digital ID — you have no recourse,” Peter Gietl, managing editor for Blaze News' Return and Frontier Magazine tells Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson of “Blaze News Tonight.”

Peterson is rightfully concerned.

“How do we cut this off at the pass?” He asks Gietl, adding, “and maybe even before we get there, isn’t it already the case that we sort of have digital IDs?”

“We all can be traced, tracked, and presumably punished if some powerful entity wanted to,” he adds.

“Yes, that absolutely exists,” Gietl answers, noting that credit card companies have been building a digital ID structure in the background. “They haven’t had the ability or the will yet to roll it out in a way of like, ‘We’re going to start censoring people and tying this ID to everything that you do on the internet.’”

“And that’s what’s disturbing about what Gates is advocating. He’s describing being tied to a single ID to use the internet, and that would make it much more easy to track people and control, even though they do track and generally know what you’re doing online,” he adds.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been a major force behind the push for digital ID, even rolling it out in Africa as a digital ID pass.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the really scary stuff they kind of test in Africa because they know that the media doesn’t really report on these things, and it’s a great way to see how it operates in the society,” Gietl explains.


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Bill Gates pushes for digital IDs to tackle 'misinformation' and curb free speech



Bill Gates has evidenced, both directly and through his foundation, an intense desire to shape public health, the news landscape, education policy, AI, insect populations, American farmland, the energy sector, foreign policy, and the earth itself. He recently hinted that he would also like to see free speech and engagements online shaped to his liking.

CNET asked Gates about what to do about "misinformation" — a topic explored in his forthcoming Netflix docuseries and some of his blog posts. The billionaire answered that there will be "systems and behaviors" in place to expose content originators.

The online environment Gates appears to be describing is some sort of digital ID-based panopticon.

Gates suggested that the "boundary between ... crazy but free speech versus misleading people in a dangerous way or inciting them is a very tough boundary."

"You know, I think every country's struggling to find that boundary," said Gates. "The U.S. is a tough one because, you know, we have the notion of the First Amendment. So what are the exceptions? You know, like yelling 'fire' in a theater."

The billionaire has previously hinted at the kinds of speech he finds troubling.

For instance, in a January 2021 MSNBC interview, Gates took issue with content encouraging "people not to trust the advice on masks or taking the vaccine."

When fear-mongering about potential "openness" on Twitter following its acquisition by Elon Musk, Gates intimated the suggestions that "vaccines kill people" and that "Bill Gates is tracking people" were similarly beyond the pale.

Gates, evidently interested in exceptions to constitutionally protected speech, complained to CNET that people can engage in what others might deem "misinformation" under the cover of anonymity online.

"I do think over time, you know with things like deep-fakes, most of the time you're online, you're going to want to be in an environment where the people are truly identified," continued Gates. "That is they're connected to a real-world identity that you trust instead of people just saying whatever they want."

The online environment Gates appears to be describing is some sort of digital ID-based panopticon.

Gates has backed various efforts to tether people to digital identities.

Gates' foundation has, for instance, been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a program called the United Nations Development Program-led 50-in-5 Campaign, which features a strong focus on digital ID.

The UNDP said in a November 2023 release, "This ambitious, country-led campaign heralds a new chapter in the global momentum around digital public infrastructure (DPI) — an underlying network of components such as digital payments, ID, and data exchange systems, which is a critical accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)."

Return previously reported that the Gates-backed Gavi, also known as the Vaccine Alliance, Mastercard, and NGOs in the fintech space have been trialing a digital vaccine passport in Africa called the Wellness Pass.

This vaccine passport, characterized as a useful way to track patients in "underserved communities" across "multiple touchpoints," is part of a grouping of consumer-facing Mastercard products aimed ostensibly at bringing people into a cashless digital ID system that both automates compliance with prescribed pharmaceutical regimens and fosters dependency on at least one ideologically captive non-governmental entity.

Extra to funding research into biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots indicating vaccination status, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backed the World Health Organization's 2021 "Digital Documentation of COVID-19 Certificates: Vaccination Status" guidance, which discussed the deployment of a vaccine passport "solution to address the immediate needs of the pandemic but also to build digital health infrastructure that can be a foundation for digital vaccination certificates beyond COVID-19."

Whereas there remain ways online by which people can interact anonymously — including whistleblowers and persons whose employment situations might otherwise preclude them from freely expressing their views publicly — largely free from government or private clampdowns, Gates fantasized in his CNET interview about "systems and behaviors that we're more aware of. Okay, who says that? Who created this?"

According to CNBC, Gates is "sensitive" to concerns that restricting information online could adversely impact the right to free speech. Nevertheless, he still wants new rules established, though he did not spell out what those would entail.

However, he has, in recent years, given an idea of where he thinks the government crackdown should start.

Gates told Wired in 2020 that the government should now permit messages hidden with encryption on programs like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

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Proving you're human online doesn't require a credit card



Elon Musk went viral last year with tweets suggesting that the future of social media is to pay for it, because otherwise, it’ll all just be bots. This problem of how to prove you're human and not a bot is only getting worse.

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Musk is right: The bots are coming, and we do have to do something. But we have two more options besides the one he offers. Here’s the expanded list of our choices for proving our humanity in the age of ubiquitous AI:

  1. Pay-to-play (i.e., the Musk option)
  2. Web3’s large selection of existing proof-of-human offerings
  3. Government-issued digital ID

I’m guessing we’ll end up with some combination of the above, but insofar as number 3 will be the most attractive option for many people, it’s yet another way in which AI is an inherently centralizing force. But as a decentralization maxi, the likelihood that we’ll end up where the government can digitally unperson me with a mouse click is concerning. If this worries you as well, then read on.

In this piece, I’ll give a very brief introduction to option number 2 — web3 proof-of-human services — for the non-crypto-pilled. Yes, I know, I know — nobody wants to read another piece about how “web3 fixes this.” But don’t close that tab!

Even if you hate crypto, it’s still worth acquainting yourself with just how much effort and money has gone into solving the precise problem Musk is worried about. Here are two relevant facts for the crypto-haters to consider before they bounce:

  1. Digital identity is a critical, well-established front in the “centralization vs. decentralization” war. So, if you care about this fight, then this issue matters.
  2. Recent advances in AI have fundamentally changed the digital ID terrain so that web 2.0 now has a problem that had previously been confined to web3 — i.e., how to do proof-of-human in a network where human nodes can be credibly impersonated at scale and at low marginal cost.

Proof-of-human is an early, fundamental web3 problem

One of the core distinctions crypto has vs. the traditional web is ubiquitous pseudonymity. Crypto types are super into the whole pseudonymous online persona thing.

Now, you may not care about pseudonymity, or you think it’s only for money launderers, dope peddlers, bootleggers, and prank callers. I get it, Boomer. But just bear with me for a moment because I promise I’m not trying to pseud-pill you — I’m just trying to help you understand why proof-of-human is such a longstanding web3 concern.

The de facto standard for identity on the current web (web2) is the email address plus password combination. To sign up for a new service, you usually supply these two items, and then you get a confirmation link in your email that you have to click to prove you’re the rightful owner of that email address.

The standard for identity on web3, in contrast, is the crypto address. This is a public address on a public blockchain — often Ethereum — that you have a private key for and can, therefore, prove ownership of.

Web3 identities, then, have the following qualities:

  • Trivial and cost-free for a single person to create and use in bulk
  • Impossible to link to a single person, company, or other entity
  • Used for accounts on internet services that are web3-based
  • Used for moving valuable assets around

You might say that in web3, every phone is a burner phone — there is no other kind. This is because it’s really easy to create new crypto addresses and use them as identities. You can do this locally by just creating a new public/private key pair in the correct format, and if you want to send some asset to that address (coins, NFTs), you can do that by interacting with the blockchain.

Obviously, this is a pretty treacherous combination of qualities that’s quite easy to abuse, even without any sort of advanced AI. If logging in to a web3-based service only requires a locally generated key pair, then a single, not very sophisticated person could spin up millions of these public/private key pairs on a laptop and use them to SPAM thousands of web3 applications with fake interactions using a few simple scripts. For instance, you could use this to manipulate DAO votes or abuse token-gated applications.

The point: At the very beginning of web3’s existence, the frictionless ease of essentially disposable bulk identity creation has meant that web3 services have had the very proof-of-human problems that are only now truly catching up to web2 in the AI era.

The web3 solutions

If you google “web3 proof of humanity,” you’ll get a ton of results. Everyone has ideas about how to do this, and many of the ideas are very good and practical.

In addition, there are some web3 projects I’ve seen that have their own built-in solution for this that you use to access the service or community, and there are other web3 efforts where proof-of-human sort of happens as a side effect (POAP is a good example of the latter, and I think STEPN may be another in that proof-of-workout equals proof-of-humanity).

If anything, web3’s problem is that there are too many solutions for the PoH problem, and no one has settled on a standard. You’ll notice in the above list that there’s basically a marketplace for proof-of-human services that many web3 hustlers are hoping to dominate with their own solution.

Here’s a very brief list of some approaches:

  • Scan your eyeball data into a creepy orb (i.e., WorldCoin).
  • Multiple humans meet in person and give each other NFTs that essentially say, “I did an IRL thing with the person who controls this wallet.”
  • Users upload videos of themselves answering questions or doing some required task.
  • Users take cognitive tests that are still too hard for AIs.
  • Users either vouch for or challenge each others’ humanity.
  • The platform analyzes your social graph on some network and uses that as proof.
  • The platform looks at your wallet for NFT credentials that it recognizes as normally only given out to real humans for doing a thing in the real world — e.g., an on-chain certificate granted by an institution or program, or an earned community participation token or status badge from an established web3 community.

None of these are scam-proof by themselves, so most PoH offerings will combine multiple approaches to give you some kind of score. But just to be clear on what this list is: These aren’t random ideas or shower thoughts that I or someone else thought might be kinda cool if only someone were to build it — no, there are (or, in some cases, have been) actual shipping products built around these ideas and more, some of them with thousands of users. This stuff literally exists courtesy of the now-busted (but steadily reflating) crypto bubble, and actual communities are testing it.

Again, the problem is the sheer variety of such PoH efforts and the lack of a clear standard or authority. If there were a kind of “LinkedIn” but for PoH (maybe LinkedIn itself could do this), where if you worked at a job with colleagues, you got an on-chain badge that says, “Jon Stokes definitely worked here doing this thing,” that would probably dominate. But there is no such Schelling point — yet.

We’ll probably go with option 3

I can already hear many of you asking, “Couldn’t we do all the ‘web3’ stuff you’re describing with a government-issued digital identity?” (I.e., option number 3 on the list in the first section of this piece.)

The answer is, “Yes, obviously.” And there are a number of country-level efforts to do exactly this, some of which involve the blockchain and some of which do not.

As I said in the intro, the people who want the government to handle this for them will probably get their way, eventually. But it should be clear that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We have a multitude of options for proof-of-human that don’t involve paying centralized service providers, whether private-sector platforms like X via subscription fees or governments via taxes. We should use them if we value our privacy and freedom.

And if we do decide on pay-to-play, there are privacy-preserving options like Bitcoin (either L1 or lightning network) that could be used by social media to filter for bots without wrecking pseudonymity.

World Economic Forum unveils new ‘Digital ID’ plan  — and it's TERRIFYING



The World Economic Forum recently published a new 46-page report detailing its Orwellian plan to control pretty much everything in your life. The report, called Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries describes a digital ID system that would collect personal data about your online behavior, purchase history, network usage, medical history, travel history, energy uses, health stats, and more. This data would then be used to determine who could open bank accounts, conduct financial transactions, access insurance, health care treatment, book trips, cross borders, and more.

On the "Glenn Beck Radio Program," Glenn breaks down the dirty details of this ID system and warns listeners to stop believing that terrifying proposals like this one are beyond the realm of possibilities.

"Look at what’s happened in the last few months alone," Glenn says. "Nothing is beyond the realm of possibilities anymore."

Watch the video clip below to hear Glenn break it all down. Can't watch? Download the podcast here.



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This ‘Digital ID’ would control EVERYTHING in your life

This ‘Digital ID’ would control EVERYTHING in your life