A revolution under the cloak of normalcy
On gummy regulators & Hon David Clark's crappy Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Bill. Summarising an indepth Brownstone article on digital identity & power & hoping you might also read it.
Yes. It is normal that firstly, governments would seek to take steps to adopt the latest technologies to streamline governance processes; and secondly, that large institutional interests would seek to aggregate assets and expand their power.
When legacy media don’t and won’t do this – don’t discuss this stuff – it becomes taboo.
Yest as humans this is what we do. We seek resources. We pull together with institutions for mutual benefit. Historically, the institutions that allied with emperors, kings or governments have profited. Whether as 14th century stonemasons and livery (and weapons) suppliers to the King. Or as or suppliers of pharmaceutical drugs and digital identity services to governments.
In similar fashion, governing bodies like to know that they will retain power and won’t lose status. This is ordinary.
When laws are constructed that ignore the potential for the abuse of political or financial power, this is bad.
In a recent Brownstone Institute article, I drew upon these simple truths, demonstrating how sociological research has shown how this works. It is hard to read – because when I discuss power, if I don’t draw on the published literature, I risk the wrath of Les Trolls.
The title: A revolution under the cloak of normalcy - is drawn from Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society.
Science and technology – and the claims of safety - course through government policy. Massively more than a century ago because our technology has exponentially accelerated.
WHEN THE APOLITICAL BECOMES POLITICAL
Our governments are co-partners in providing access to corporations - to get their tech onto the market and into daily use. Inevitably, the information the company supplies to claim a technology works or is safe - is an instrument to access a given market.
We think of science and data as being apolitical. But when it’s produced and provided in order to provide access for an institution – hey – that’s political!
If the product ends up on the market – the corporation financially benefits. But we can’t complain because – well – hashtag! #science and #technology.
If the product is used in accessing the information of citizens – and can be used strategically to shepherd behaviour – a government can politically benefit. But we can’t complain because – well – hashtag! #science and #technology.
So, in this way, Beck stated in Risk Society, the political becomes apolitical and the apolitical becomes political. A journalist is too terrified to discuss an ethical issue because they might end up looking biased. Against the corporation.
What we end up with - is a revolution under the cloak of normality.
Civil society – you and I - can’t challenge the broad (technocratic) institutional power that uses science and technology to sweep in and decapitate traditional democratic principles and norms – because we’re criticising science and technology. Our government and legacy media would tell us - hey, that’s not political - that’s science!
We must look it directly in its’ eye and find the words to describe this phenomenon.
BENT SCIENCE
What we have in front of us are repeated patterns that steer government officials away from broader policy principles that promote transparency and accountability.
It’s as if a new legal language has been constructed over the past 20 years to privilege corporations, while dually catastrophically failing to understand that our soils, our freshwater and our bodies are open ended systems with manifold exposures and experiences, manifold resiliencies – and weaknesses.
In such a culture, public interest precaution simply can’t be embedded into the system. (See great discussion (p.67-69) of Type I & Type II errors).
An important instrument is the habitual blackboxing industry science – ensuring that technologies are regulated using secret industry science and data. It’s a shift to valorising offshore global pacts – which fundamentally and perpetually ignore that making decisions about what is harmed and who is harmed is a process of negotiation.
Because what we value and how we value a biological entity will always be based on where we think risk starts and stops. That’s complex, ambiguous, and uncertain.
No WEF, UN or WHO official in isolation can ever decide – using corporate science – that a technological thing is safe. They haven’t ever tried without primarily relying on corporate data.
What we have is bent science. Whether for the authorisation of pesticides, of personal care products, biotechnology and medicine.
And now the bent science will justify rollout of digital identity systems.
But. What we value and how we value democracy will always be based on where our cultural and political values starts and stops. That’s complex, ambiguous, and uncertain
DUAL PURPOSE TECH - BACKEND TOGGLING OF PERMISSIONS
Why is this so much worse when it comes to digital identity frameworks? This tech can be toggled – switched to enable permissions for what we can or cannot access, based on our behaviour. As I wrote in the Brownstone piece:
When tied to central bank digital currency, access to resources (through digital currency and/or tokens) can be time-specified and for a limited purpose. Permissions can be shaped to restrict access to narrowly approved goods and services, and/or alter consumption patterns.
There is a massive acceleration in biotechnology and digital technology occurring right now. The data is conventionally hidden in commercial in confidence agreements (CICAs).
Democracy is dependent on transparency and accountability of the governors – to us, the governed.
But there is an acceleration in CICAs, an acceleration in government–private contracts as service providers in the government digital environment.
But with digital identity networks and webs, private companies have more access to our data than ever before. If I’m being crude (and I am), the Fintech industry already have a veritable stiffy over the informational smorgasboard before them.
Democracy is unhinged – it is corrupted – if industry data is privileged over citizen access to that information. It is unhinged if the potential billions of dollars to be made - don’t also involve allocating millions to meaningful regulation at arms length from Ministers and Cabinet.
It is the back-end, hidden stuff that produces a broad web of relations that gives our governments the opportunity to permit access to social support, health care or education, dependent on our acquiescence to other policies, like vaccination. The weaponization of WeChat, in China, shows how far this can go.
‘Everyone’ is signing onto RealMe. But it is the RealMe backend that I am concerned about. As I discussed in depth in Brownstone, our ‘verified personal information’ is held by the Department of Internal Affairs. The Privacy Act enables a heap of government agencies to share this information across government (agreements called ASIA’s). Like a big web of data transfer. Inside the New Zealand government, particularly once signed onto Realme, we effectively have no privacy.
Currently, the Hon David Clark is the Minister in Charge of the Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Bill.
The crappy Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Bill establishes an ‘accreditation team’ who will accredit big business into our digital identity landscape. Of course – as well… it’s opt in. So if big business don’t have to, they’re not required to.
The DIA already has a bundle of contracts with corporate providers.
The accreditation team will be overseen by a governing board. But the board is also crappy by design. The governing board is meant to naturally (mystically) know what is wrong and do stuff but there are no investigative or inquisitorial powers built in. There’s no money, no requirement that the governing board actively review international court decisions and review the social and scientific literature to target and address potential weak spots and limit institutional abuse of power.
The government knows this new world is going to make a tonne of money for corporations – maybe $9 billion. But the crappy Trust Framework is self-funding.
We all know what happens to regulators that depend on the rich institutions that they regulate for their bread and butter – they think like the regulated industries. They end up being more like partners – serving them, in order to get their applications, their technologies over the line and onto the market. This is capture, cultural capture.
The toothless regulators ensure that the Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Bill is fundamentally flawed. It’s crappy. It’s designed to provide a framework for New Zealand’s digital environment. It’s meant to steward the companies and government agencies that operate and co-partner in services that involve access to our information and digital identities and prevent bad stuff happening. It can’t.
Inevitably the Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Bill ensures that governing board and the accreditors can sit in a room be earnest and diligent. But they are toothless. Because they lack a formal directive and the money to anticipate and/or prevent abuse of power by our government and by partner firms.
Even the public consultation failed – the government Select Committee did not really take any of the public considerations seriously. They dismissed 4,000 of the 4,500 submitters. Power and abuse of power is, well, outside the scope.
They reckon that they consulted with the public beforehand. But they only want to talk about human rights to digital media – not democratic and human rights that can be disrupted by digital media (i.e. access to private information).
LOOKING AT THE INDIVIDUAL – NOT AT THE SYSTEM
I believe we have before us a card shuffling trick - sleight of hand - in the privacy rhetoric of government. All the laws and policy focus on privacy between the individual - to ensure one person’s privacy is protected from abuse by a corporation or some person.
Trust rhetoric is wrapped around ostensibly protecting an individual. An individual can’t easily see behind the closed door, into the digital architecture.
In addition, the government has used technical claims to get the job done, not higher-level principles of public law. The technical approach to the Bill set aside broader principles that might acknowledge that there could be an abuse of power. By construct narrow policies and Bills, that are not principled the officials who work under them become technical and less likely to identify broader problems.
But this is big. The government has access to our biometric data, corporations come in as co-partners.
There is no demand to look at globalist power – how financially and politically intertwined corporates and governments might exploit private citizen information.
What makes this - frightening – is that this prevents introspection when it comes to the authoritarian tendencies of Ministers and officials in the New Zealand government. As I’ve repeated often quoting Sir Geoffrey and Andrew Butler – the New Zealand style of government is authoritarian.
We’ve observed throughout 2020-2022, endless shenanigans that privilege and entrench private clinical data of Pfizer (as a political instrument) over the scientific literature. As I wrote in Brownstone:
Through the privileging of the corporation and the corporate science, ethical norms, where health, fairness and freedom converge, so as to navigate difference – were stripped from public debate. Also jettisoned was the capacity to act precautionarily in pervasively complex and uncertain environments, in order to prevent off-target harms.
The secret vaccine data, the idea that a coronavirus could be contained by interventions, produced more secrets. The introduction of passports, the implicit permission across populations that surveillance was appropriate and possible and the gagging of doctors. Passport acceptance locked in a novel precedent. Populations would accept a drug, justified by secret industry data – even though it could permit or deny them access to taken-for-granted services and places of community, dependent on their medical status.
It's pretty evident. Our government operates in terms of delivering on policies that are driven by industry sectors and the advice of offshore owned management consultant firms. Getting policy on industrial, urban and agricultural pollution; junk food; or nutrition for mental health or school lunches is impossible.
But policy for tech? Madly urgently driven at speed. This is the contradiction. Where power sits.
Digital identity systems are fundamentally black boxed. We can’t see what is happening and from what we see with the ‘Trust Framework’ rhetoric – the Hon David Clark is not fundamentally inclined to give us a digital identity governing board with claws and teeth that can protect the public interest. Yet:
Opaque digital identity systems and the coexisting governmental and private sector frameworks can be repurposed – some might say weaponised – to shape behaviour. The digital instrumentation, the system architecture, the evidence around the safety of the imagined biotechnologies and technical policy fixes, lies in the arms of the companies, their lobbyist affiliates, outsourced grunt work and the government relationships. If algorithms can create bellwethers for economic changes, what else can they do?
The word ‘trust’ wouldn’t be in the ‘trust framework’ if the Hon Dr David Clark didn’t absolutely know that the entire networked architecture was riddled with ethical and public law holes. It’s impossible to steward when there are no broader ethical principles to steward it at high level – and when the regulators are toothless and impotent.
His hope – is that the rhetorical use of the word trust will be just fine.
When we chafe against the dismissing by the Select Committee of 4,000 submitters to a bill set to become an Act of Parliament, we’re potentially conspiracy theorists.
If we contend the massive supranational shift towards a society that becomes effectively digitally captured like China with WeChat – we’re seen as – well, Luddites who might prevent equity of access to digital services.
Yes, Sir Geoffrey western democracy is in considerable peril.
NB: I co-developed the PSGR’s submission to the Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Bill. To access that submission, do not click on this link but cut and paste the URL. https://psgr.org.nz/component/jdownloads/send/1-root/86-digidentity
I emphasise that this Substack is my own personal opinion and the use of the term crappy is my personal belief.