DaveW

Digital ID for every adult is not progress. It is the end of a free society dressed up as convenience. I am a cyber security specialist. This is my take. They are selling it as a fix for illegal migration. That is bollocks. We spend hundreds of billions a year on cyber security and yet the volume of breaches is breaking records. The threat is growing faster than the spend. Digital ID will not stop boats. It will not stop trafficking gangs. It will not fix a broken border. 
Criminals will work around it. Honest citizens will pay the price. It builds giant data banks that track where you go, what you buy, what you read and who you speak to. 
It links your identity to every checkpoint in daily life. 
One breach and your life is exposed. Look at Jaguar Land Rover and the airports in recent weeks. Now imagine that at national scale on an ID system tied to everything you need to live your daily life. Here is the risk that ministers will not admit. 
Ransomware seeded through a supplier or an insider: 
It lies quiet for months.
It rolls through the backups.
On trigger day the register and the recovery sets are both encrypted. 
Payments fail. Health and benefits stall. Borders slow. Citizens are frozen out until a ransom is paid or the state rebuilds from scratch. 
Centralise identity and you centralise failure. Do not fall for the pitch. Function creep is certain.
It starts as login. 
It becomes access to money, travel, speech and public services. 
It turns rights into permissions controlled by the state and its contractors. 
It creates a single point of failure for criminals, insiders and hostile states to target. 
It will punish the elderly, the poor and anyone who is not always online. 
It will centralise risk and outsource blame. 
It will not stop fraud. 
It will not stop illegal migration. 
It will build the machinery for a social credit system by stealth. If ministers cared about the border, they would enforce current laws, resource patrols and processing, close loopholes and remove those with no right to stay. 
You do not need a national ID to do any of that. We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason. 
Britain does not need a central register to prove age or status. 
Yes to privacy first proofs. No to a database state.