Privacy

A national digital ID could hand the government the tools for population-wide surveillance – and if history is anything to go by, ministers probably couldn't run it without cocking it up.

That's the warning from Big Brother Watch in its new "Checkpoint Britain" report, published just days after Keir Starmer confirmed the government is considering a national digital identity scheme to tackle illegal immigration.

The civil liberties group says the government's argument that digital ID will meaningfully reduce illegal immigration or employment fraud is poorly substantiated and warns that touting digital ID as a political fix for migration problems is misleading. It argues that ministers have also been far too vague about the plan's scope, which it says could easily extend beyond right-to-work and right-to-rent checks to cover "online banking, booking a train ticket, shopping on Amazon, or scheduling a GP appointment."

The result would be a "checkpoint society" where identity checks become an unavoidable part of daily life, Big Brother Watch says.

And all service providers/hosts around the world are expected to comply.

Here's one summary of the looming access control measures.

Reading and understanding all this (and the linked sources) feels so.. difficult, obtuse, complex.

Comments

A blocking minority has been found for the 4th time 🙂. See y'all in a couple of months when the EU commission makes the same proposal again! 🤝

Voters in:

• Austria.
• Belgium.
• Czech Republic.
• Finland.
• Germany.
• Luxemburg.
• Netherlands.
• Poland.

Your members of european parliament have made a good choice!

Voters in:

• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Cyprus
• Denmark (!)
• France
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Malta
• Portugal
• Slovakia
• Spain
• Sweden

In 2029 there's new EU parliament elections. You can list your representatives on https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates and make sure not to vote for them ever (again) 👍

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/08/08/return-of-chat-control-something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-denmark

I'm not sure what kind of algorithm they could use to find CSAM.

sauce

San Francisco billionaire Chris Larsen once again has wielded his wallet to keep city residents under the eye of all-seeing police surveillance.

The San Francisco Police Commission, the Board of Supervisors, and Mayor Daniel Lurie have signed off on Larsen’s $9.4 million gift of a new Real-Time Investigations Center. The plan involves moving the city’s existing police tech hub from the public Hall of Justice not to the city’s brand-new police headquarters but instead to a sublet in the Financial District building of Ripple Labs, Larsen’s crypto-transfer company. Although the city reportedly won’t be paying for the space, the lease reportedly cost Ripple $2.3 million and will last until December 2026.

The deal will also include a $7.25 million gift from the San Francisco Police Community Foundation that Larsen created. Police foundations are semi-public fundraising arms of police departments that allow them to buy technology and gear that the city will not give them money for.

The United States has emerged as the largest investor in commercial spyware—a global industry that has enabled the covert surveillance of journalists, human rights defenders, politicians, diplomats, and others, posing grave threats to human rights and national security.

Metadata is as sensitive as the content of communications. There is this wrong idea – especially in the mind of policy-makers when we meet them – that metadata, so the data about the communications, is less sensitive than content data. This is this myth that we have to bust every time when we talk about this topic.“