An Estonian ID card inserted into a digital ID reader. Estonia has been using digital ID since 2018. Photo courtesy of Flickr.

1,121 words

How time flies, said Fred with scintillating originality. When I was a young lad in rural Virginia in the mid-Sixties, the only thing digital was the local drive-in movie, known colloquially as the Finger Bowl. Now the world runneth over with bits and bytes and screens and all. Regarding which:

Much of the unpleasantness of life springs from the need to identify ourselves. To this end we have driver’s licenses, passports, ID , and credit cards.

None of this is really necessary. Let us assume hypothetically that face recognition is infallible. It isn’t, quite, but let us pretend. We would then not need a driver’s license: The cop would scan your face and your license, if any, would pop up on his screen. No passport, either: Coming into America the camera would scan your face and all your passport info would pop up.  To fly, you would not need a ticket or need to check in: The system would scan your face and know you had a ticket for UAL 3325 to Chengdu.

Actually, face recognition is not quite perfect, so to get admission to the CIA’s  murder records you might need an additional scan of iris or fingerprints, which would leave no doubt. This latter is now used at airports: “Put your fingers on the glass . . .”

All of these technologies are well known and work in practice. China uses face recognition, in which it is the world leader, for practically everything.

Making ID-less life run smoothly and efficiently would require considerable programming, but no new technology. Government could have a record for every citizen with everything from passport to medical records, each being accessible only to entities needing them. For example, a hospital could see your medical records but not your driver’s license or credit-card transactions. Things of this sort are already done in various countries. They just haven’t been glued together, except largely in China.

You can buy Christopher Pankhurst’s essay collection Numinous Machines here.

The convenience would make this a fairly easy sell to the public. No fumbling with cards,  proof of insurance, redundant medical tests. In principle people fear surveillance, but in practice they will go with convenience every time.

Now, the digital dollar. It is coming. Officials of the government and of the Federal Reserve seem to talk out of both sides of their mouths, but they are considering it, as are the central banks of over a hundred countries. It will probably be introduced gradually, maybe first for transactions between banks, then as an option for the public. But it is coming. Watch. The aim, probably not stated, will be to go cashless, as China has said it wants to do, with transactions made by cell phone, as is already almost universal in China. It will be convenient.

The digidollar software necessarily will also make a record of every transaction: time, place, amount, and to whom made. This sounds shocking, but isn’t much different from records made by credit card companies and banks. Somehow this sounds less ominous than the feds having them, though it can get them if it wants.

Some interesting effects will flow from cashlessness. Robbery will become difficult. If I put a gun to your head and demand your money, you will probably give me your dough, phone to phone, rather than have your head blown off. But the system will make a record of who I am, the time, place, and amount, which is not optimal for those in the robbery business. When you report the crime, the system will take the money back out of my phone, give it to you, and close my account. I will not be able to open a new account, because doing so involves face recognition and I will be blacklisted — and therefore unable, in any way, to get money in a cashless world.

The drug problem would end in about three days. Artificial intelligence routines would have no problem noticing multiple sales in known drug markets of 50 dollars, or whatever a hit of coke or fentanyl costs. It would be easy to check the identity of the recipients with police records of known dealers. There would be no need to arrest them. Just block their accounts and put a note on their screens telling them that if they want access to money again, they need to come into the police station.

All in good fun. But government could — would — use the same techniques to track and control people it didn’t like, such as people named Fred who say not nice things about said government.

There is little doubt that Washington would use the digidollar for purposes of social control, potentially absolute. “Washington” of course means Google, Facebook, the media, Wikipedia, and all the other de facto parts of government. Already people and websites that say bad things have their credit cards cancelled, find themselves delisted by  Google, banned by Facebook, erased from the Wikipedia, and ejected from YouTube. There is much of this, though I suspect that most of the public is unaware of it.

The digidollar would provide a censoric meat axe that would — will — strike fear into dissidents. What remedy would there be? The victim would have to depend on friends even to eat while any drawn-out appeal went on. This sounds, I know, like Right-wing paranoia. How it would be used and to what extent I don’t know, but recent history is not encouraging, and the mere possibility would argue for obedience.

Note that we live in a wired world. We all have cell phones. Mine is an iPhone, which has Siri as digital assistant. She is a good listener. She can be half a room away, or in my pocket, or in a noisy restaurant, but when I say, “Hey Siri, what time is it?” she almost always understands. Those who have iPhones but do not use Siri have no way of knowing whether the microphone is on. Presumably, likewise with Android.

The Alexa boxes in our house understand both English and Spanish well and sometimes rooms away. I don’t know what policies Apple and Amazon have toward eavesdropping, whether they do this when the feds want it, but they assuredly can.  The bottom line is that millions of homes host high-grade listening devices inserted with the best of motives — such as making music available — just as password managers, also with the best of motives, extract our passwords.  In grade school I was taught that sharing is a good thing. I wonder.

Okay, that’s it for today. A tentacle is coming out of my Alexa box and seems to be reaching for my throat. Maybe it was something I said.