WATCH: Digital ID: Freedom-As-A-Service. The Lure of Entitlement as the Method for Entrapment.

November 18, 2021

 

“Our identity is, literally, who we are, and as the digital technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution advance, our identity is increasingly digital. This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.”

 

– September 2018, World Economic Forum insight report, Identity in a Digital World, A new chapter in the social contract

 

November 1, 2018: “If Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion is correct, identity is the new money.” [Source]

 

 

2016: Yesterday’s ID2020 is today’s Good Health Pass, is tomorrows Digital Identity for All. Freedom-As-A-Service [Source]

Digital ID. The commodification of freedom of movement.

From the roll-out of vaccine credentials/accreditations, to obtain health passes (under ID2020 Good Health Pass framework) in order to access services – experimental jabs are the portal to achieving a digital identification global infrastructure – an imperative for a seamless functioning of “ecosystems” (digital finance/wallets, data economy, smart cities, etc.) within the fourth industrial revolution digital architecture. Via framing, marketing, and the branding of bourgeois access, what was formerly recognized as freedom of movement, “the most indelible of rights” (Steppling), is now being repacked as an entitlement in exchange for compliance, within an unfolding fourth industrial revolution economic caste system.

“By 2030, our goal is to enable access to digital identity for every person on the planet.” — ID2020 2017 Summit  

“Figure 1. Screenshots of the proposed digital solution.” – This screenshot is from the 2016 paper Travel Vaccines Enter the Digital Age: Creating a Virtual Immunization Record, by *Kumanan Wilson, Katherine M. Atkinson, and Cameron P. Bell. [*Kumanan Wilson is a physician at The Ottawa Hospital and member of the University of Ottawa Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics. Consultant to the World Health Organization on the IHR (2005). Wilson is CEO of CANImmunize Inc., Canada’s national immunization app. CANImmunize is identified as a leading achievement of the Federal Health Minister in 2014; recommended by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC); Recognized by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and Deloitte Global, as a model for consumer-facing immunization solutions; Certified by the World Health Organization’s VaccineSafetyNet.]

Event 50 – Webinar | Vaccination Passports, March 29, 2021

Consult Hyperion: “Considerable attention is being paid to the topic of vaccination passports… In this webinar our COO, Steve Pannifer, and our Global Ambassador, Dave Birch spoke to Frank Joshi from MVine and Andrew Bud from iProov, who’ve developed one such solution in the UK.”

Consult Hyperion Global Ambassador, David Birch, is an author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services. An internationally recognized and renowned thought leader in digital identity and digital money, he holds a number of board and advisory roles across these fields. He is a Forbes contributor and a columnist for Financial World and has just been ranked one of the top 100 global fintech influencers for 2021. Previously named one of the global top 15 favourite sources of business information by Wired magazine and identified as one of the top ten most influential voices in banking by Financial Brand, he created one of the top 25 “must read” financial IT blogs and was found by PR Daily to be one of the top ten Twitter accounts followed by innovators. [Full bio] Birch is a venture partner in 1414 Ventures – a “digital identity space which supports functions such as payments, cybersecurity, and data privacy & trust.” On Nov. 12, 2020, “One World Identity” announced the formation of their senior advisory board to which David Birch was appointed.

Transcript/excerpt:

Consult Hyperion director Dave Birch: “In the past, and certainly in our webinars, you know, and I’ll lump you and I together for this kind of thing, we sort of assumed it would be the government, or the banks, or whatever,  that would get it together and you know, roll out digital [ID]. I don’t know why we thought this, I don’t know, there’s not the slightest evidence they would ever do this, but we sort of thought that would happen. I wonder if what we’re seeing here is the emergence of a different identity infrastructure that’s going to come out in a much more bells and braces way, but ultimately be more effective.

And the reason I think that is, because, if you say to me “Well Dave, you know, you’re going to have a British identity card and prove who you are, well of course, I’ll riot in the streets and complain. You know, its continental tyranny and the podionic imposition and all this sort of thing. Well you say, “Well Dave, if you want to go to the Spoons, so I’m using the democratic andro, trying to be a man of the people here, the spoons, that is where the Wookey [theatre] is … so if I want to go up the Spoons or if I want to see [the] Wookey play, if I’m just told I have to have your vaccines, then I’ll do it. I don’t care. Right? And actually 99% of people in the country wouldn’t care whether that certificate, I mean this is my yellow fever certificate, which is a highly anti-counterfeitable yellow, but you can’t get this yellow paper anywhere. North Korean super note  forgers thrown down their pens in frustration (much laughter from panel). And most people wouldn’t care. I mean we have a responsibility as an industry to make sure that infrastructure is privacy enhancing,  and to make sure that peoples personal information isn’t spewed all over the internet. But actually I don’t think most people would care.

It’s like if you want to get into the Spoons you have to have one of the passports, they’ll do it. Now to your point about the shared infrastructure, I wonder if this isn’t opening up an amazing opportunity for us. Because if I’ve got, let’s do that as a thought experiment. Wetherspoons  have already got the Wetherspoons  app, it already exists. They already got people signed up to it. So Wetherspoons come and say, ‘ well we want to connect into your infrastructure to do this’, and so we tell them ‘well okay’, these guys have got grade 12 education and all this kind of thing, where are we going to get the test data from? Oh God, I don’t know, I know. I answer. ‘They’ve got the test centers and the British Airways app has got the API so why don’t we just use… and why can’t we use…’

I’m just curious if you can see this sort of Lego building up and all of a sudden, where we were going to have a national identity card, which nobody wants, and is a catastrophe and they’ll waste billions on it and all this sort of thing, instead we have kind of a national entitlement card. Which comes out, you know, we have a way of carrying these credentials around. I’m allowed in to see Wookey, I’m allowed in to the Spoons, I’m allowed to book a table at this restaurant. Just growing, and I’m sort of excited about the possibility that you guys are just growing an alternative to the kind of identity infrastructure that’s been talked about for years. And I’m just, I’m really curious about how you see your stuff evolving.”

Founder & CEO of iProov, Andrew Bud: “Dave, I think you put your finger on it.”

 

[Full webinar: https://chyp.com/webinars/span-classwebinar-vaccination-passport-prefix-event-50-span-webinar-vaccination-passports/]

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For those who have received the jabs, they may feel this does not affect them. They could not be more wrong. A “health pass” will no longer grant one entry – as soon as the next injection is dictated (by the pharmaceutical industry), or whatever other requirement “to keep us safe” comes along. Until one acquiesces with the new measure (booster or what have you), this person too will be cast out of society – grouped (and shunned) with the “unvaxxed”.

“The pernicious new selling of virtual travel is potentially a way to kill off the dream center of children, to kill their imagination. To move freely, even within the area from which you were born, is in my opinion the most indelible of rights. What is going on is a ruling class soft coup, a less overtly violent coup and their vision of a digital feudal planet is terrifying, if only because it is cannot possibly work. It is delusion.”

 

— A Solution Without a Solution, September 18, 2021, John Steppling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WATCH: Zero Days [U.S. & Israel Attack on Iran via Cyberwarefare, 2016 Documentary]

November 28, 2020

 

 

“What does it mean to be anti-imperialist? It means supporting nations under attack by empire even when or if it is opportunistically inconvenient. It means to stand with all nations under attack, without prejudice, without wavering, and to never serve interests of empire – even if it means you sacrifice popularity or lose social media followers.”

 

– Alexandra Valiente, Internationalist360

 

Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This cowardice—with serious indications of Israeli role—shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators

Iran calls on int'l community—and especially EU—to end their shameful double standards & condemn this act of state terror.

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) November 27, 2020

 

“A black ops cyber-attack launched by the U.S. and Israel on an Iranian nuclear facility unleashed malware with unforeseen consequences. The Stuxnet virus infiltrated its pre-determined target only to spread its infection outward, ultimately exposing systemic vulnerabilities that threatened the very safety of the planet. Delve deep into the burgeoning world of digital warfare in this documentary thriller from Academy Award® winning filmmaker Alex Gibney.

 

[Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Alex Gibney are those of the filmmaker’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of WKOG. Any thoughts in the following interview contrary to WKOG’s expressed opinions are not intended to malign any region, group, country or people.]

 

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT – ALEX GIBNEY

What do you do when your government launches a global war and keeps it a secret?

That’s the question that haunted me when making “Zero Days,” a film about the spectre of a new generation of classified cyber weapons.

I started out making a small film investigating “Stuxnet,” the self-replicating computer virus invented by the US and Israel to infiltrate and sabotage the Iranian nuclear centrifuges at Natanz.   What I discovered was a massive clandestine operation involving the CIA, the NSA, the US military and Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad to build and launch secret cyber “bombs” that could plunge the world into a devastating series of criss-crossing attacks on critical infrastructure, shutting down electricity, poisoning water supplies and turning cars, trains and planes into deadly weapons.  Even more terrifying, this science fiction scenario, possibly resulting in the loss of millions of lives, could happen without anyone – including our own government – knowing who is responsible.

In the words of David Byrne, “You may ask yourself: How did we get here?”  

When I started, I knew that the Stuxnet worm (a self-replicating virus) had spread all over the world.  The secrecy of the operation was blown.  But every US official I asked about the operation either refused to talk about it or even admit that it happened.

Everyone justified their silence with claims of national security.  As Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and the NSA, told me, a covert operation “automatically goes into the do-not-talk-about-it box.”

But Stuxnet wasn’t just another covert op.  It represented a fundamental change in the threat landscape.  For the first time in history, a computer virus crossed the threshold from the virtual reality of 1s and 0s to the physical world.  Stuxnet took control of machines and commanded them to destroy themselves.  Then the code leaked all over the world so that it could be re-purposed by other nations, criminals and terrorists.

Keeping that secret was like saying, after Hiroshima, “what bomb?”

And it reached the height of absurdity when I learned that the Department of Homeland Security triggered a high alert to protect the US from Stuxnet, since the NSA never let the other branches of government know that the weapon we launched was now attacking the homeland.  We had met the enemy and it was us.

Since government officials were trying to hide the dangers they had caused, my team and I reached out to others.  We first contacted the cyber detectives, Liam O’Murchu and Eric Chien, from the anti-virus company Symantec, who were the first ones to discover the purpose of Stuxnet.  They took apart the weapon for us so that we could understand both its delivery system and payload.

Then we traveled to Moscow – the capital of cyber crime and headquarters for Russia’s cyber weapons units – and to Israel, the key partner for the US in the development of Stuxnet.  What we discovered in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, by talking to politicians, journalists and – on background – agents for Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, was that “Stuxnet” was not a technical computer story at all.  Rather, it was part of a much larger operation which involved the Mossad, the CIA, the US military unit, Cyber Command, and included covert operations – sometimes directed at American companies, like Microsoft – the assassination of Iranian scientists, and weapons of cyber mass destruction that made “Stuxnet” look like a computer game.

Armed with this level of detail, we returned to the United States and were able to persuade some people inside the NSA and the CIA to talk to us provided we kept their identities a secret.  By now, it’s well known that the Obama Administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.  So we had to take careful precautions to protect our sources.

We recorded interviews on audio recorders with no wifi capability, transcribed them on electric typewriters and then destroyed the data cards.  We used a system of codes to identify the sources and then integrated their testimony in a “script” that was factually accurate but which masked phrases that could lead investigators to identify our witnesses.   Then we used a system called “Depthkit,” to photograph our “essential source” via a 3-D video capture device that allowed us to break down a human face into separate fields of flesh, dots and lines.  In final post, we recombined those elements with new computer tilts and pans to portray a cyber whistleblower whose “hacked” look harmonized with the film’s animation of the actual Stuxnet code.

(Note: in the code animation sequences we only used excerpts of the Stuxnet code, which would not allow anyone reconstitute the weapon.  That said, our co-producer, Javier Botero, didn’t have much difficulty obtaining the entire code, something that makes the government secrecy about it all the more absurd.)

Our whistleblowers were able to give us an entirely new perspective on the Stuxnet operation, known inside the government as “Olympic Games,” and the new world of cyber weapons.   Among the key elements of information in “Zero Days” that have been revealed in the popular media for the first time are:

-The US, as a matter of policy, has not dedicated sufficient resources to cyber defense. Instead, it is focusing on cyber offense, and hoping that the threat of counterattack will prevent our enemies from launching cyber weapons against us.  So far, that strategy has failed.  Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have all launched limited cyber attacks against us and likely hidden thousands of backdoors to computer networks that have the potential of damaging key portions of our critical infrastructure: power grids, water filtration plants, transportation systems, heat, air conditioning, etc

-While “Olympic Games” was a joint operation between the US and Israel, each country had the ability to modify and deploy the OG cyber weapons in ways they wished. This caused animosity and tension, when the Mossad – pressured by an impatient Bibi Netanyahu – launched, without consultation with the US, a virulent version of the virus that spread all over the world.  This raises very difficult questions about the nature of our relationship with Israel.

-Following “Olympic Games,” the NSA developed far more powerful cyber weapons. One operation involving those weapons, named “Nitro Zeus” (disclosed for the first time in “Zero Days”) had the capacity to jam all of Iran’s air defenses and to shut down many of the key power grids in Iran.  As one of our sources told us, “the science fiction cyber war scenario is here.”

-Department of Defense officials in US Cyber Command showed a remarkable lack of sophistication or concern about the amount of destruction that these weapons could cause. As one source noted, when key power plants are shut down, they don’t just “pop back up.  It’s more like Humpty Dumpty…lots of people die.”  In discussing targets in Iran, State Department lawyers objected to the fact that US cyber attacks would shut down hospitals causing large numbers of fatalities.  The Department of Defense overruled those objections.

-“Olympic Games” was a CIA-led operation. For every attack, an officer from the CIA had to stand behind NSA computer operators and give them attack commands.

-When Iran, in retaliation for Stuxnet, launched a cyber attack on US banks, the US government was aware that the attacks were coming from Iran but did not counterattack because the the computers controlling the “botnet” (a network of private computers infected with malicious software)was in another country and the US State Department was concerned that a US attack might involve a friendly nation in a growing cyber conflict.  This highlights one of the dilemmas of cyber war: attribution is very difficult, raising the spectre of “false flags” and mistaken counterattacks that could lead to a cyber world war.

-The “Stuxnet” virus was autonomous. No operator commanded it to attack.  Once Stuxnet found its target inside Natanz, it was programmed to launch its attack on its own, without human intervention.  An increasing number of  cyber weapons share this characteristic.

-The secrecy over offensive cyberweapons and their capability is not only impeding democratic debate but also making us less safe. Indeed, our sources came forward because they believe that secrecy itself is putting us all at enormous, possibly existential, risk.

-The revelation of “Nitro Zeus” sheds new light on the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran on nuclear weapons. While many critics have suggested that Obama was negotiating from a position of weakness, it is likely – given “Nitro Zeus” – that he was negotiating from a position of strength, knowing that the US could virtually shut down the entire country in the event that Iran cheated on the deal.

-Our sources have confirmed that, since the launch of Stuxnet, offensive cyber operations – conducted by nation states – are an every day occurrence. (O’Muchu and Chien from Symantec have confirmed that the number of nation state attacks have increased exponentially in the last few years.) Government secrecy and the inability of the media to report on this story is the only reason we don’t know more about cyberweapons. They are being launched – by and against us – every day.

 

Alex Gibney, April 2016 – New York City

 

WATCH: Ontario Doctors Warn of Rising Health Care Costs after 5G Roll Out [Women’s College Hospital]