Tomorrow 5G smart phones could be mandatory – a Digital ID tragedy for all

Written by Sean Alexander Carney for Safe Tech International • Image designed by Sean Alexander Carney

Disclaimer: Safe Tech International is comprised of a diverse group of people from various countries who have come together to advocate for safer digital technologies. We do not have a uniform stance on all global political issues, nor do we feel this is necessary in advocacy for safer internet and telecommunications technologies. We support diversity of thought, and feel that well-researched blogs and outreach materials that both awaken and inspire others to seek the greater good are essential in our times. In light of that, please note that all members of Safe Tech International do not necessarily agree with every political statement made in the following excellent and well-researched blog.

The world would be a different place without smart technology, which is personified by the ubiquitous smart phone. However, more than that, the world would be a different place if smart technology didn’t come first – in every political decision.

These technologies have helped to create the police state of today. It is nurtured by the political climate in which Digital ID is being sold to us. Governments are digitally dividing society into an “us and them” equation – through AI-driven smart technology. In that world, the smart phone – a data-mining surveillance tool for the police state – is made conveniently mandatory.

Digital surveillance and Digital ID

The potential of the smart phone to disempower society, piece by piece, is no secret – phones are being tracked and personal information is leaking via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It may shock people to realise that Wi-Fi “sensing” enables AI to see us through walls and monitor our movements in real time with 5G.

Our data, in a multiplicity of forms commonly derived from routine smart phone activity, is the prized possession of government agencies and, the corporations and organisations that profit from it, who are lobbying for Digital ID, which enables more intrusive data-mining. There are numerous consequences of this vast “data-mining”, proving that the smart phone is anything but an “empowering” device.

Some social groups more than others received a taste of this reality during the “pandemic” – notably activists, journalists and other campaigning professionals using social media and smart phones to raise political awareness when human rights were under assault. Reliance on smart phones exposed their data to increased scrutiny, left them open to international government, military and police efforts to target social media, control information, monitor persons of interest and deter protests. Society witnessed a hike in intrusive data-driven surveillance and algorithmic censorship, as well as calls for Digital ID in the form of digital “Vaccine Passports”, all of which could now be empowered by AI and 5G wireless infrastructure.

Climate of social and racial manipulation

Among the targets in the climate of social unrest was the “Woke” organisation Black Lives Matter (BLM), protesting in 2020, and invested in “smart phone activism”. However, soon BLM discovered that their smart phones were an “Achilles Heel”. Big Tech had been aiding the police, with social media surveillance and facial recognition technologies (FRTs), targeting protesters.

BLM had known social media surveillance for many years (targeted by police through the social media intelligence platform Geofeedia). However, they had never highlighted this technological side of “colonialism” in their midst.

In September 2020 – according to the BBC – officers at a [Black Lives Matter] protest in Washington’s Lafayette Square “…requested a “heat ray” weapon for possible use against protesters in a park next to the White House…The heat ray weapon [Active Denial System] uses a microwave beam [millimeter wave energy] to make human skin feel like it is burning.” That same month, Facial Recognition Technologies (FRTs) had also been deployed against the protesters.

BLM supporters toppling colonialist statues in recent times, have liberally targeted the past. However, they didn’t target the Big Tech companies, Big Tech figureheads or smart phones/smart surveillance technology, or microwave weapons of the present. An opportunity to highlight digital/electronic colonialism as the threat of contemporary Imperialism – exemplified by the symbiosis of Big Tech and the police to target and ID protesters with data-driven technologies – was ominously missed when unprecedented global attention was on the organisation in 2020.

BLM, it can be argued, avoided the technological “elephants in the room” and thus seemed to change very little for civil rights, because policing is inseparable from microwave and smart technologies.

A technological, data-gathering warzone

Predatory, data-driven policing is today at the heart of recent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, as are identity politics. The surveillance of and confrontations with protesters are portrayed as a crackdown on those in the US who may not have the necessary Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents that prove their identity.

Police brutality (with military tactics and manpower) aligned to “technological supremacism” characterises the “sweeps” on the streets of LA, which are fuelled by data from smart surveillance infrastructure and tools.

Biometric Update author Anthony Kimery, in the article “Police, federal video surveillance of anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles raise alarms”, observes that, “In the wake of escalating protests in Los Angeles over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and broader immigration enforcement policies, civil liberties advocates and technologists are sounding the alarm over the scale and scope of surveillance that’s been deployed against demonstrators…While aerial footage and law enforcement presence dominate the visible landscape of the protests, a quieter form of monitoring is unfolding in the digital realm where facial recognition tools, [Amazon] Ring camera footage, and social media surveillance intersect to create a sprawling matrix of protester identification.”

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has made significant investments in wireless Internet of Things (IoT) technologies – as admitted by Deputy Chief John McMahon who believes, “Virtual reality and technologies like the [wearable] Apple Vision Pro goggles, which double as a computer, offer endless possibilities for enhancing law enforcement operations.”

(The same has been said about smart glasses, wearables that are currently being used by law enforcement in China and the Middle East, and will be coming to a town near you, with facial recognition technology built in. According to Greenbot, “facial recognition in wearables may soon become common despite ethical concerns.” As Harvard Technology Review observes, “…while European regulations have restricted the use of real-time facial recognition, no such protections exist in the United States.”)

Smart technology automates much of policing, and supports the militarisation of the police, which has continued since 9/11 when “surplus combat equipment [was] procured and assigned to local police departments”. Source. The trend has seen units that “mimic Special Forces”. According to stopspying.org, in the US amidst anti-ICE demonstrations, “federal immigration enforcement have flown Predator drones, Black Hawk helicopters, and other military aircraft typically deployed in warzones overseas above the protests.”

Reports of “masked, unmarked agents” assigned to work with ICE that are targeting demonstrators and others reinforce the “Special Forces” dimension to the technologically assisted ICE policing. Arguably this is a terrorising tactic, and one that is challenging legal frameworks, undermining transparency and creating fear.

In a discussion in bylinetimes.com concerning the “militarisation of police departments, and the domestic deployments of armed units trained and staffed by Special Forces soldiers to our cities”, Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale – author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century – is quoted as saying, “This is a classic way that violence happens in authoritarian regimes… The people who are getting used to committing violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in the interior.” Source.

MSN reported that, “Some city and Police Commission leaders have called on the LAPD to do more to identify masked individuals who are taking part in immigration sweeps.” The streets are becoming a technological, data-gathering warzone.

Smart technology for health, or authenticating ID?

As this “militarised” climate of fear over “proving identity” is raised to fever pitch, I’m sure it won’t be long before the subject of Digital ID becomes centre stage issue the US – targeting Americans with smart phones. Digital ID in the US is sold as “more convenient, secure, privacy-protective, and usable than a physical ID”.

A centralised database built by Big Tech data-mining firm Palantir is already proving more than attractive to the Trump government – which would support a Digital ID framework, and, ICE deportations. As Vice observes, “In a CNBC interview at Davos, Palantir CEO Alex Karp admitted that his company “[finds] people in our country who are undocumented.” Source.

For Digital ID to be a success, biometrics are a key dataset. Currently, “Palantir gathers biometric and behavioral data for removal operations“. The function-creep of smart phones has ensured this dataset can be obtained with ease, “conveniently”, for biometrics capture is hardwired into the technology – as it is in fashionable smart “wearables”.

In the US, health secretary RFK Junior recommends that all citizens own wearables, “envisioning that every American will use them within four years“. Like smart phones, wearable devices are a desirable “data-mine” for the police, and governments – and such data would greatly assist Palantir. Wearables offer many opportunities for “tapping” rich sets of data.

The safety of sensitive, personal health data remains in question, however, when Big Tech is greedy for it and is prepared to breech data guidelines. Fines seem inconsequential. For example, facial recognition company Clearview AI “was fined just over €30M (close to $32M) by the Netherlands’ data protection authority in September 2024. In 2022 it was also fined the maximum possible (€20M or around $22M, based on its revenue at that time) a full three times by DPAs in Italy, Greece and France.” Source.

AI-driven smart technology: who wants your data?

Influencers who are outspoken on social issues, like RFKJnr and Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac (formerly of BLM), must see that smart technologies are invasive surveillance tools. However, RFKJnr believes that wearables are vital for health, which is questionable. Meanwhile, former Black Lives Matter (BLM) leader Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac helped empower a movement against colonialism in the 21st century yet the movement hasn’t spoken out against targeted smart phone surveillance, Facial Recognition Technologies (FRTs) Digital ID, or AI algorithms that can be inherently racist or disciminatory, (proven in study after study).

Failing to politically highlight the invasive data-driven surveillance underway courtesy of smart technology has consequences. A centralised database of Americans is now on the cards whether US citizens of any colour agree or not. Murals of 2020 supporting BLM are torn up and military installations are renamed in support of the Ku Klux Klan, as the Whitehouse makes deals with Big Tech and data-mining company, Palantir. Meanwhile, wearables for every American is promoted as a mantra.

There is a deep political desire to control the public’s data, and to keep mining it, intrusively though smart technologies – something the police are relying on more and more. The “terrorising” policing tactics and data-driven technologies being rolled out at demonstrations today take on a different dimension when we realise that the US and UK police alike are being trained in Israel, a country that reinforces apartheid through surveillance technologies, and is engaged in ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

According to Amnesty International, “Public or private funds spent to train our domestic police in Israel should concern all of us.” Yet how many of us know that the police are adopting Israeli tactics? Consider also, that Israeli technologies like those made by Israeli spytech company Cellebrite – a digital forensics company that sells tools to access and extract data from smartphones – which has “contracts with the British police” may access “police and security surveillance data”, because they are part of the “The 2030 roadmap for UK-Israel bilateral relations” signed off by the British Government.

Concerningly, Cellebrite has a “disastrous human rights record” and assists repressive regimes. For example, in 2021, as the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre reported, “Evidence of surveillance technology being used by the Myanmar state [formerly Burma]…was revealed when it surfaced that the military used phone-hacking technology from Israeli spyware firm Cellebrite to arrest two Reuters journalists for investigating a military massacre of ten Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State in 2017.”

Cellebrite is interested in more than access to and data from smart phones, however. According to Cellebrite, “Digital wearables, such as Fitbit, record seemingly mundane activities — the number of steps we take in a day, our heartbeats, sleep schedules, locations, and distance traveled. To the trained eyes of criminal investigators, the data from wearables can be used to document our daily lives, right down to the last footstep and heartbeat. This data can prove invaluable when investigating crimes….extraction of data from wearable devices [has] led to arrests and prosecutions.”

Techno-anarchy in the UK

Clearly smart phones and wearables enable a society governed by Digital ID, underpinned by AI. It’s the direction the US, and UK, is headed, with the tragedy of racial unrest continuing, driven by technology that promotes over-policing and racially biased targeting.

In the UK as in the US, Palantir are at the centre of data-mining activities. According to Liberty, the “…controversial US spy tech firm [Palantir] has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.”

In the UK, Digital ID is increasingly in the news. As the political dimensions around it are comparable with those of the US in so many ways, they deserve our attention.

The UK government launched “Gov.uk Wallet, a digital identity system that will consolidate government-issued credentials into a centralized mobile application. The initiative marks a significant advancement in the UK’s broader digitization strategy, following the country’s recent engagement with private sector stakeholders on digital identity solutions…The technical implementation will use facial recognition capabilities available on most contemporary smartphones for identity verification.” This offers clues as to how the UK’s vision of Digital ID will look.

The Digital ID initiative progresses as racial unrest in the form of Gaza protests and continuing immigration-related “troubles” spark police controntations where facial recognition technologies (FRTs) and smart phone surveillance are hastily rushed out (without ethical regulations) and serve to deter public demonstrations and “dissent”.

Regarding the Gaza demonstrations, these events are democratic rights that communicate to us all how unpopular Israel’s “genocidal” war is, and also show us that predominantly in the media, protesting against the killing of Palestinians and waving their flags in demonstrations is being sold as “anti-Israel” as if that type of protesting were “antisemitic”. UK Foreign Office “staff officials [questioning] the UK’s continued arms sales and what they called a “stark… disregard for international law” by Israel,” have been warned that they should consider resigning if they “disagree” over Gaza.

Citizens opposing Israel’s “genocide” can be labelled antisemitic for expressing alarm, or demonstrating – though when 100,000 Israelis take to the streets to oppose the war, the popular media either has no name for it, or avoids highlighting it. “Antisemitism” describes “bigotry, prejudice or discrimination against Jews“. “Bigotry, prejudice or discrimination against Palestinians” who are also “semitic” people is defended by the British State. In Israel the oppression of Palestinians has been progressed over decades of the authorities collecting biometric data on Palestinians (and even Jews) to control both populations, helped by growing smart phone use, and the rise of facial recognition technologies being developed in Israel.

Britcard: for silencing voices?

In the UK a Digital ID could equally be employed to silence criticism to the government line. “Government officials have suggested that digital IDs could be linked to facial recognition technology and biometric data, creating a system that closely monitors every citizen’s movements and interactions.”

In the context of this “autocratic” UK government stance, where political divides arise over Israel/Gaza and immigration-fuelled controversies, we’re seeing a biometric Digital ID emerge with the proposition of “Britcard”.

It is a proposition progressing from a speculative and “voluntary” status towards being pushed as mandatory – on the back of Britain’s infamous “Immigration” and protesting problems.

Immigration problems in the UK have fuelled protests and dissatisifaction for some time – but only after protests against wars (that have been causing the refugee crisis) failed, falling on the deaf ears of governments determined to support or wage them. Deterring protest with AI’s assistance has since become a priority of governments and the police. Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch (BBW), believes “…AI surveillance turns members of the public into walking ID cards, is dangerously inaccurate and has no explicit legal basis in the UK.” BBW found that “Over 60% of UK residents are concerned about the use of facial recognition in public spaces.”

Britcard should be viewed as an extension of this desire to control, for who would protest if their data could instantly be assigned to a “watch list” courtesy of an AI driven app and deprive one of essential services? It is an existential threat, along with the growing arsenal of FRTs and Drones to support the program.

“Britcard”, is presented as a proposition for a national Digital ID, and is being advertised a solution for “immigration out of control” though deserves closer scrutiny. As CCN reports, Britcard is touted as a way to “help Britain control illegal migration and secure its borders.”

“What else could Britcard be used for?” is a question everyone should be asking. What about backing a national conscription program? National ID cards introduced in 1939 assisted in conscription – the last time a mandatory ID system was introduced in the UK. Could that happen with Digital IDs? Its happening in Europe which seeks to conscript 300,000 troops as a deterrent to Russia.

Beyond the obvious and advertised

Talk of resuming UK conscription was in the air recently, concerning Vladimir Putin who is seen as a threat because “Britain sees its number of soldiers dwindling“. Europe also appears to be preparing populations for conflict aimed at Putin.

However, according to inews.co.uk, “Downing Street has dismissed a warning from the head of the British Army that members of the public could be called up to fight in the event of a war with Russia.” Governments have been known to U-turn. The UK government seems desperate to implement national Digital ID. Any war might help achieve that, from the “immigation war” to the world war three scenario suggested by the spectre of Putin.

War is spoken of a lot today, though some seek to create it casually through their influence. Big Tech attempted to fan the flames of immigration discontent in the guise of Elon Musk, partner in the techno-eugenecist rebrand of politics under President Donald Trump who is deliberately engineering a racially tense atmosphere in the US, in every way possible (while Elon promotes the idea of “Smart-people” enhanced by smart technology). “Sir Keir Starmer [became] embroiled in a war of words with Elon Musk, after the tech billionaire suggested that “civil war is inevitable” following violent unrest in the UK”, as the BBC reported in 2024.

Britcard remains a politically divisive “us and them” type of proposition. CITIZENS vs IMMIGRATION is currently the main narrative to convince people to accept a life where digital proof of ID permits access to private and public sector services digitally. Fear and “othering” are the UK government’s usual tried and tested ways of introducing more surveillance on the population, and biased AI algorithms ensure that will continue be the case.

No doubt “othering” comes into play in conscription as well, as it did in the UK in 1939 when ID Cards were forced on the population, and resisting conscription was frowned upon. In a similar way, Digital ID could be used as a coercive tool for purposes beyond the obvious and advertised, empowering governments in gaining the compliance of citizens for a multiplicity of political goals.

The UK and US governments are funding energy guzzling data centres and utilise Real Time Crime Centres (RTCC) (spearheaded by Fusus “the most widely used and trusted real-time crime center platform in US public safety”). Here police use all the latest bells and whistles of surveillance technology and data analytics, so we are seeing the foundations of a Digital ID being built.

The RTCC system brings together the smart technology platforms of Big Tech to policing to carry out the State’s divide and rule political and strategic tactics on society. Digital ID will be a critical data-driven tool linking to these systems. According to breechmedia, “While creating the centres, police forces have sought out advice and technology from major corporations like Motorola, IBM, and Palantir, many with controversial ties to military and spy agencies.”

The UK’s future – who is allowed to join it?

We’re at the threshold of the QR code society, which is a surveillance economy – where you are the product, giving your profitable data through every digital transaction with a smart phone Digital ID app. Like a product on a shelf, a human acquires an ID number and barcode (QR code), to be tracked anywhere like a pet or a prisoner with a GPS bracelet. Wearables can only assist in the “progressive” Digital ID world.

A think tank closely aligned with the government called Labour Together believes that “For a progressive society to work, it needs to be able to collectively agree who is allowed to join it. Because it will exclude those who cannot join it, it needs to give its members proof that they belong.” This is the logic behind the UK’s Digital ID scheme “Britcard”.

According to The Week, “Number 10 appears to be…rolling out [the] voluntary scheme that could become mandatory at a future date. Labour Together has estimated the BritCard system would cost up to £400 million to build and around £10 million a year to administer as a free-to-use app.”

State in a Smart Phone

A Digital ID is already being used in the UK-backed Ukraine as the country endeavours to achieve a state of technological supremacy, and guard against Russia. A Digital ID backed by a government app drives the Ukraine into deeper autocracy, and an “us and them” world. The “State in a Smartphone” project handled by the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation passed a Digital ID law and now all authorities and private business are equipped “to be able to scan the relevant QR-code of the New Digital IDs” to verify identities.

Ukraine, by adopting Digital ID places itself on a par with other repressive regimes that have imposed the same with the aid of profit hungry Big Tech companies like Palantir. “Currently, Diia, the national government’s app which is used by over 20 million people.

Today, nearly all of Kyiv’s adult population relies on the apps”. This ensures complete digital dependency, meaning that with immediacy, access to healthcare, resources, and vital services can be refused and withheld, on the basis of the political control of a person’s data. Victoria Itskovych, Chief Information Officer of Kyiv City (CIO) said: “For any emergency – be it floods, earthquakes, or pandemics –…cities need a trusted channel of communication that cannot be hijacked to spread fear and panic.” Clearly only the voice of the State matters, when State-driven apps come into town.

Digital ID, for the Ukraine, establishes a questionable form of technology for a questionable “democracy” that has faced massive protests over government corruption, and brought “draconian” anti-protest laws that curb protest rights, free speech and NGO involvement in these processes. Deterring protest is also an agenda in the UK and US, today, with governments employing Facial Recognition Technologies (FRTs) and social media surveillance to build watch lists and target protesters or “dissidents” – a police state gaining power.

Can a Digital ID promote “Humanness”?

This interpenetrating Digital ID surveillance system, wherever it is implemented, UK or Ukraine, requires sustaining fast wireless networks (5G for example) and massively expanding data-centres, a drain on earth’s resources – fundamentally in the name of mass surveillance – and, it means sacrificing our freedom and “humanness” to “belong”, when our existence is digitally organised by AI algorithms.

Firmin DeBrabander, the Cambridge University Press author of Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society, believes that, “In the digital net that envelops our everyday lives, it will become increasingly more difficult and rare to perform any task without revealing ourselves, and opening our lives to spying eyes. And our spies are not content to watch us from without; they will install sentinels in our very bodies, and monitor us from within.” Source.

This is the future being constructed. Digital ID is a political choice, and it advertises that a fascist surveillance state is the preferred existence, above all other possibilities. Where is that future going to lead us?

Moonshot R&D calls the intensely surveilled future we’re heading towards a new world of inspiration “where people, robots, and biological cyborgs collaborate and co-evolve”. It’s the so-called “fifth stage of human evolution”, a prospect Japan is embracing, where a “Super-smart” Society 5.0 (an agenda evolved since the advent of 5G in 2016) represents “a visionary roadmap for the future of human civilization”, as described by innovaromorir.com.

Sounds like the endgame of the “Great Reset” which advances the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and, dictates technological evolution. How does that work? Sociable.co asserts that, “…the unelected globalists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) are envisioning an “augmented society” ruled by digital identity and transhumanism via the Internet of Bodies….They want digital identity…embedded into every aspect of our lives — even under our skin…” where sensors on or inside the body “monitor, analyze, and even modify human bodies and behavior.”

Such views and observations no longer seem outlandish. Smart technology, and in particular wearables and implants, are posing many ethical questions, though Big Tech companies are banking on what Klaus Schwab calls “a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities” while no ethical oversight can prevent any movement in that direction.

Put in this light, we can see how an acceptance of Digital ID is like throwing “humanness” onto the trash heap in favour of inhabiting a “post-human society” (discussed by the Global Posthuman Network) where people are, through new markets like smart dust and implants, technologically augemented (which in today’s parlance means people are being “progressive”).

People accepting of a Digital ID are trading any other alternative life for a digitally “remastered” and reinforced “self” (as populations under repressive regimes have discovered) consenting to centralised surveillance, and technologically targeted control over individuals, using health data (digital health), and mental health status or any other data of strategic value that can set limits and reinforce Big Tech monopolies and government policies.

Digital ID is not about setting anyone free, but nudging the population to a place where AI comes to dominate life more. Government has a revolving door with Big Tech companies which accelerates the pace of digital surveillance transformations, which are about implementing AI for profit and control.

AI and the lens of repression

Keir Starmer of the UK Labour government said, with AI “…there are huge opportunities and risks, and we need to marry the two…We need to push it through”. Today, the UK like everywhere we know, is a surveillance economy, being pushed through, which can be measured in the sheer density of data-collecting CCTV cameras alone which are, to be clear, a technology invented by the Nazi regime.

CCTV cameras are now enhanced by AI, and are the eyes of the AI-data-driven State today, using facial recognition and other algorithmic surveilance tools – biased towards destroying dissent and activism, while proving inherently “racist”.

Speaking out on the issue of AI’s racist interpretations and language models, Timnit Gebru was fired by Google in 2020. She had been “supporting rigorous research on AI ethics and algorithmic auditing” while the company romanced Black Lives Matter (BLM), Diversity politics, and Civil Rights to bask in “political correctness”, to promote products to a wider audience. This is a road that Big Tech in general has walked profitably, though now distances itself from as the political climate changes towards one of technologically assisted intolerance, a climate which Big Tech arguably now exploits, and assists.

Google’s credibility to “Do No Evil” has waned immensely with the development of Project Nimbus, which is enabling data-driven AI surveillance for Israel. As Middle East Monitor explains, “Beyond the sphere of social media, Google and Amazon’s collaboration with the Israeli military under Project Nimbus casts an even darker shadow over the tech industry’s role in this conflict [the war in Gaza]. The $1.2 billion cloud computing contract…provides critical infrastructure to power Israel’s AI-driven Lavender and Gospel targeting systems – systems that are directly linked to the mass civilian casualties in Gaza [and use facial recognition].” It’s a lesson for us all, especially when it is clear that Israel has a grip on our police and governments, and seeks to influence strategies and technologies.

Israel’s grip on Western police forces

In April 2025, aoav.org.uk reported that “In a delayed response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request submitted by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV)”, Essex Police in the UK “…refused to confirm or deny whether any of their officers have met with representatives from Corsight AI, a controversial Israeli facial recognition technology company whose software has reportedly been used in IDF military operations in Gaza….a practice that human rights organisations have condemned as constituting “automated apartheid”.

This lack of transparency is similar to the US government refusing to be open about its facial recognition agenda, a policy of secrecy that raises concerns. The UK appears reliant on intrusive surveillance tactics and tools from Israel. It is worth asking, to what extent?

What power do Israeli tech firms have over police in the UK?

According to Inside Telecom, “Over 500 Israeli tech and non-tech companies operate in the United Kingdom (UK), and the UK Israel Tech Hub is located within the British Embassy in Israel…This raises multiple questions about the relationship between the UK and Israel. The main aim of the organization is to secure private and public sector contracts for Israeli technology companies in the UK. Earlier reports from Palestine have also suggested that several Israeli tech firms act as fronts for Zionist intelligence agencies.”

Further, “…NICE Systems, [is] another Israeli company with a contract with the British police to handle parts of their investigations. NICE Systems also holds a contract in Scotland for facial recognition in CCTV.”

A freedom of information request asking “Has the Met Police run training or exchange programmes with Israel’s police or military from 2020 to present?” received the following reply from the government:

“Confirming or denying that…information is held relating to the types of training, meetings and exchange programmes provided to other countries between The Metropolitan Police Service and the Israeli Police, Israeli Civil Administration or Israeli Defence Forces between 2014-present, would provide terrorists with a greater understanding of where specific training and exchange programmes are provided…In a partial answer to your first and third answer, On Wednesday 18 May 2022, the Met’s Central East Command Unit hosted an Israeli police delegation.”

Further information reveals that “The purpose of the visit from the Israeli Police delegation was so they could learn from the MPS about how we work with communities…Policing authorities rely on international co-operation when combatting crime, particularly that which is cross-border in scope.” A meeting was held at Stoke Newington Police Station. An official redacted PDF disclosed an agenda concerning the policing of “Faith and Hate Crime” and “Policing COVID” and centred on “Community Key stakeholders and partners”. Stoke Newington (an area in the northwest part of the London Borough of Hackney) has a high white demographic with black and other ethnic minorities, and a history of police brutality against minorities, suspicious deaths, and alleged police cover-ups. “Stoke Newington Police Station in Hackney, east London, was infamous in the 1980s and 1990s for police corruption and racism,..” according to Socialist Worker in a very revealing article where the behaviour London police forces echoes violent law enforcement tactics of Israel that for years has brutalised Jews and Palestinians.

Further involvements with Israel have been disclosed by aoav.org.uk. “The UK government has confirmed it is actively training Israeli soldiers on British soil…[casting] fresh light on Britain’s ongoing military relationship with Israel amid continued conflict in Gaza and military escalation in southern Lebanon….Dr Iain Overton, Executive Director of Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), said: “The UK’s training of Israeli forces during a period of alleged war crimes raises serious questions of moral complicity. The British public deserves transparency when our armed forces are directly engaged with a military accused of violations that have left thousands of civilians dead.”

Other links to Israel influencing UK police are reflected in a report by Global Research, concerning the policing of 7/7 bombings in London, which can be read here.

What power do Israeli tech firms have over police in the US?

According to Forbes, “If you’re in New York City today, there’s a very good chance your face will be captured by surveillance cameras and run through facial recognition software. If you’re in a predominantly Black, Asian or Hispanic community in New York City, that chance is even greater.” Forbes also highlights “…the NYPD’s purchase of more than $277 million in secret surveillance equipment that had previously been hidden from the public.” According to incarcernation.com, since 2012, the NYPD has a “strategic partnership” with Israel, “…focused on counterterrorism, urban warfare, and crowd control.”

truthlytics.com goes further, “The NYPD, one of the largest and most well-funded police departments in the world, has long faced criticism for its use of excessive force and discriminatory policing, particularly in communities of color. These patterns of behavior, critics argue, echo the tactics used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the occupied West Bank and Gaza—ranging from mass surveillance to brutal crowd control techniques.”

NYPD: employing Israeli technologies and approaches

In the US, policing approaches are influenced by Israel. We may recall that Israel’s NICE Systems has a contract with the British police to handle parts of their investigations and holds a contract in Scotland for facial recognition in CCTV. Supply Chain Market in 2007 reported that “NICE Systems Ltd., the global provider of advanced solutions that enable organizations to extract Insight from Interactions to drive performance, recently announced that it has won a $9M contract from the City of New York (NYC), on behalf of the New York Police Department (NYPD) for NICE Inform, multimedia incident information management solution for its next generation 9-1-1 emergency call centers…NICE Inform will enable the City to capture, manage, analyze and reconstruct multimedia incidents.”

According to haaretz.com, in 2023, “New York City Mayor Eric Adams lauded security technology developed by Israel Police…vowing to bring Israeli tech to the New York Police Department.” moguldom.com reported in 2022 that, “Crime has increased by 23.5 percent in New York City during New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ first year in office, and the former cop-turned-mayor — a fan of facial recognition technology — is promising to implement new policing technology that he said more accurately identifies common criminal patterns and develops profiles of perpetrators….Adams has promoted the use of cameras and championed facial recognition devices…“

Adams said in an interview with Politico. “…Big Brother is protecting you.” Albert Fox Cahn, head of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said, “The NYPD has a decade-long history of abusing its surveillance operations to target Black New Yorkers, Muslim New Yorkers, political protests and every aspect of dissent,” Cahn said. “These are technologies that would be chilling in anyone’s hands. But to give an agency with such a horrifying record of surveillance abuse even more power, at a time when they face dwindling oversight, is a recipe for disaster.” Source.

Howard syndrome and rejection of technological tyranny

It is interesting to hear a Jewish perspective concerning the brutality of Israel’s regime (now influencing our governments and police). In Israel as any society, there are those who are authoritarian and corrupt, and those who want peace and to denounce tyranny. The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand asks, “Is not the very fact of defining oneself as a Jew within the State of Israel an act of affiliation to a privileged caste which creates intolerable injustices around itself?” Source.

Sand’s observation of a “priveleged caste” that “creates intolerable injustices around itself” evokes the actions of our governments too, which are always employing deeper surveillance and eroding human rights, which can lead to brutality and racism.

In the UK, we are experiencing technological authoritarianism through the new Labour Party. It is almost a replay of the authoritarian zeal exhibited by the UK’s Home Office under Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard, an authoritarian figure who imposed expensive CCTV installations all over the UK, pursued a National ID card scheme, and established controversial DNA databases in the 1990’s.

Britain, under successive Labour governments, interestingly, has inherited that “vision”, which takes on a notable complexion through Starmer’s “vision” of “Putting AI into the veins of Britain“. What did Howard do that Starmer continues to ardently pursue? He pursues a CCTV, ID-based police state.

Howard believed in cutting edge CCTV surveillance technology, operating with racial biases, at the expense of eroding privacy and human rights for society at large, reinforcing the vulnerabilities of minorities in the process. He used technology as a solution, without tackling first the underlying problems influencing crime, like rising unemployment. Technology seemed to be the priority, as now.

Howard established, while neglectful of privacy concerns and consequences for human rights, an intrusive police state in the midst of soaring unemployment and social unrest, which spied on people and held as much information on guilty and innocent alike. Howard, like many progressive politicians and futurists felt human rights policies, an obstacle to his ideals.

Howard felt that the Human Rights Act (which passed in UK law in 1998) and the the Regulations of Investigating Power Act (RIPA) of 2000, (affecting powers of surveillance and communications interception) placed “inhibitions on the ability of the police to tackle crime effectively” and thought adjustments should be made.

The Home Secretary didn’t entirely get his own way, and some of his policies were successfully legally challenged by the public. An ID card was passionately advocated by Howard, though despite his campaigning, became voluntary, not mandatory.

National ID had faced immense public resistance (a wartime card was abolished in 1952). CCN reports that “In the past, when the government tried to centralize the U.K.’s national identity system, it was met with stiff opposition.” From 2006 to 2010 as more mandatory ID card schemes were being planned, thankfully, public resistance stopped them.

Resurfacing, over and over

The ID card idea constantly resurfaces. The government has been keen to calm fears concerning the Digital ID agenda. According to www.gov.uk, “No, there are no plans to introduce national digital ID cards…Using a digital identity will be voluntary. People will be in control of their data and who it is shared with…People will still be able to prove their identity using physical documents if they choose.”

However, according to enablingdigitalidentity.blog.gov.uk, “On 19 June [2025], the Data (Use and Access) Act received Royal Assent. As well as putting the National Underground Asset Register on a statutory footing and supporting the future of smart data schemes…The new UK legislation formalises the system that is currently operating as a pilot. This will pave the way for trusted digital identities to be used in more places.” According to thinkdigitalpartners.com, “and has set digital ID as a key focus area for 2024. It will be a critical part of the UK’s national infrastructure.”

Labour Together have stated, Britcard “could lay the foundations for a fully-functioning digital identity system…building on the existing One Login and Gov.UK Wallet. Our polling suggests it would be immensely popular; around 80% of the public support use of digital identity for a range of use cases.” The aim is to “…rebrand the Gov.UK App and Gov.UK Wallet as the “BritCard app””. That is, to make Britcard from an existing placeholder entity, the Gov.UK App and Gov.UK Wallet being the “Trojan Horse” that was always meant to bring in a mandatory Digital ID.

Criticism

“Britcard”, was criticised by David Frost (who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021) who believes, “A normal ID card, bad as it is, is proof of your identity and status. A digital ID is also an instrument of control – because it can shape-shift according to the government’s wishes. That’s why introducing digital ID is to cross a Rubicon. It changes forever the relationship between government and citizen….Think back.

Have we forgotten the lessons of the pandemic, when we all had to have proof of our Covid test status on our phone before we could go certain places or access certain buildings? Briefly, at the end of 2021 – the issue that finally forced me to resign from the Cabinet – we introduced a “vaccine passport” system, which actually denied you access to certain environments unless you had a full vaccination record. This was all done via an app – in effect a digital ID. The government could change the conditions at will and you had no choice but to comply.”

Frost has a point, and as the World Health Organisation and other “Stakeholders” in the smart future relish achieving more gains with more powers, from mining our data, including the police and governments dismissive of concerns over AI ethics and the insecurity of our data.

A stake in the heart of freedom and privacy

People must not forget how controlling governments can be, obsessively, ideologically. With xenophobic overtones, Britcard has been sold in the UK on the basis of an “us and them” proposition, reinforcing “discrimination” to help “sort out” a persistent problem, namely the UK’s problematic Immigration crisis, that feasibly could have been prevented or managed in other ways beyond the scope of a “Digital ID solution”. Certainly, all the CCTV money could buy wasn’t enough.

“Today, police surveillance cameras disproportionately installed in Black and Brown neighborhoods [in the US] keep a constant watch” just as do they in the UK. According to National News, the “United Kingdom has the dubious honour of having the most CCTV cameras per head of any country in the world; the British Security Industry Authority has claimed that there is one camera for every 11-14 people.”

According to Liberty, the UK is “most intrusive mass surveillance regime of any democratic country.” With smart phones requiring mandatory status to make a national, mandatory Digital ID function, one smart phone to every person linking them to their digital self, would spell a definitive blow against freedom.

Big Tech and countless other corporate entities want your data, more of it than you can imagine, and Digital ID would serve it up without any problems through every QR code scanned to prove you exist. This enhanced data grab will not solve immigration and will more likely exclude large swathes of the population who rightfully live here, as happens in repressive regimes where any individual, or minority, suspected of dissent or any not acting as the government demands can be digitally disempowered, or, disappeared.

As salzburgglobal.org observes, “…the developing world has seen the rise of….national digital identity systems, promoted by the World Bank…not enough is done to shield privacy, embed protection safeguards…The implementation of Digital ID is a high risk territory for human rights.” This article lists some excellent cases that describe why. It covers developing countries and Digital ID issues, but could the same “issues” happen in the UK? Or US?

Most likely, they will. Because, “Digital IDs, especially those that integrate biometric data, can be used to track individuals’ movements, purchases, and online activities without their knowledge or consent. Governments may also unduly target specific individuals, using Digital ID blockage or other methods as a weapon against political opponents or vulnerable groups such as migrants.” We know this is happening already.

Collecting information without limits

As the UK government becomes increasingly autocratic and presents technology as the solution for everything, UK citizens should thoroughly question the motivations behind any Digital ID proposition, especially as the government goes to great lengths to erode data privacy, and becomes more repressive.

The UK now has the “Snooper’s Charter” to assist in massive datamining. As Liberty asserts, the Snooper’s Charter allows “State authorities to collect information about everything we do and say online and order private companies to store it…[with] wide-ranging powers to scoop up and store all of our emails, texts, calls, location data and internet history. They can also hack into our phones and computers and create large ‘personal datasets’ on us – all without needing to suspect us of any criminal wrongdoing.” It has many implications for UK citizens, leaving nothing private.

A Digital ID system can only add to this concerted effort for government and corporate stakeholders to control and own data on the population. Clearly this goes well beyond any Immigration policies and drives a stake into the heart of freedom and privacy for all.

That our governments and police enlist the tactical help of Israel (viewed by many as an ideological, repressive regime) has been revealed and can’t be left out of the current political technological situation in which we find ourselves.

The Jewish historian Schlomo Sand is critical of that regime. Of it, he says Zionism, “…was an ideology deeply rooted in a European vision of the nation-state, one which had a racial dimension, required a demographic majority and was permeated by European colonialism and orientalist thinking.”

Arguably, Israel is marred by exlusionist politics, with colonialist baggage. Exclusionist politics reinforce the “digital colonialism” at work in Israel and across the world, which includes campaigns involving smart technologies and biometrics databases, moving towards achieving Digital ID. Politicians and the media so often highlighting border control and other immigration issues seek to drive support of Digital ID, often in divisive language. Keir Starmer, for instance, in relation to immigration issues warned of an “island of strangers“.

Digital ID is being implemented at scale in the EU “mandating compliance from Big Tech and member countries in supporting the EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet”) Source. “Many countries have already announced wallet project and pilots, and some have even rolled out production digital ID wallets at population scale.” Source.

Digital IDs can bring many risks worth noting. According to Reclaim the Net, “…these IDs are susceptible to hacking and identity theft, placing individuals at risk of financial and reputation damage. Often, citizens are coerced into participating without genuine consent, and the lack of transparency and oversight in these systems increases the risk of misuse.”

Digital colonialism

Michael Kwet, observing the strategies of domination waged through digital technologies, states, “…just as they did in 20th-century South Africa, today’s largest U.S.-based technology corporations see an opportunity to profit from Israeli apartheid—a by-product of U.S.-driven digital colonialism.”

Author Renata Avila, also recognises that we are living in times of “digital colonialism” “referring to the deployment of imperial power over a vast number of people, which takes the form of rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems serving the interests of dominant powers. In the past, empires expanded their power through the control of critical assets, from trade routes to precious metals.”

Big Tech has long been under scrutiny over its “conflict minerals” supply chains from oppressed, developing colonies in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia and Angola. Big Tech companies have regularly been accused of complicity in slavery and abuse of ethnic labour forces, as well as fuelling conflict, and assisting repressive regimes. This represents racial abuse in order to achieve infrastructure targets, and technological supremacy in global geopolitics.

Author Renata Avila, asserts that, “Today, it is not states but technology empires that dominate the world through the control of critical digital infrastructures, data and the ownership of computational power. By collecting the personal data of citizens on a scale unprecedented in human history, companies can serve as conduits of misinformation campaigns that can alter the flow of global geopolitics and even change the outcome of elections.”

According to www.europeandatajournalism.eu, “Far from the free and open platforms they were upon their inception, Big Tech companies and social networks have risen to an unprecedented level of power from which they play an active role in politics through vested financial and political motives, exerting influence through algorithmic alterations, subjective censorship and calls to action on their platforms.”

For control of everyone’s data

The “….emerging trend of data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) is of critical importance given the fundamental reliance of AI technologies on data, and because organizations gain access to, control data, and develop algorithms in ways which not only emphasize the digital divide but increase data inequality (Zheng & Walsham, 2021). Source.

“Data colonialism” according to Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry in their book Data Grab is “the continuation of colonialism’s inherited inequalities and colonialism’s acquisition of new tools that potentially affects human life in radically new ways…” This “toolset” which exploits data-driven surveillance enables the companies to “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.” As lawfaremedia.org highlights from Mejias and Couldry’s research, data colonialism facilitates “the [harmful] classification of people into disadvantageous categories”.

Today, the UK government is arguably advancing data colonialism’s harms by pushing ahead with a Digital ID “with major financial and tech companies, government agencies and regulators and the likes of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, among the prominent forces behind the push…”, according to Reclaim The Net.

The UK government sees digital identity as “one of the cornerstones of a modern digital economy [a surveillance economy]” and seeks to promote adoption of “these secure and trusted [data-mining] technologies.” Digital ID remains a controversial idea, for many reasons. As Rebecca Vincent of Big Brother Watch points out, “The debate about digital ID isn’t really about immigration; it’s about access to, and control of everyone’s data.” Source.

Case of digitally-assisted genocide

We know now that the UK’s ID initiative is called “Britcard”. Marketing an ID system to the public has always been a challenge of governments, and in recent times the public has become divided over immigration which relates to UK government inolvement in more overseas war efforts (colonialism) whicle the public reaps the refugee crisis (fuelling data-driven suerveillance at home).

With datamining becoming so expansive and intrusive, and, with governments and other agencies like the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and Big Tech pushing for Digital IDs in the UK (which can link together numerous datasets including biometric data), are any of these corporate political actors really acting in our best interests, and, if not, are they able to be held legally accountable if found aiding and abetting genocide, through abuse of our data, for example? Is a Big Tech company able to be held accountable if discovered complicit in the killing of citizens?

You might be shocked to know the answer…

Michael J. Kelly, Professor of Law at Creighton University School of Law states in “Prosecuting Corporations for Genocide”, that, “While corporations can realize enormous profits from such complicity [in genocide], they are immune from international prosecution in The Hague…As key participants in the world economy, corporations have been accorded tremendous latitude and granted extensive rights…If a state or a person commits genocide, they are punished. International law demands such. But corporate actors have successfully avoided this through an array of legal arguments…”



Kelly makes it clear that, “while multinational corporations have been complicit in genocides over many years, none have been prosecuted.” Source.

Today Big Tech companies, assisted by US and UK support, together are an asset to Israel supplying high-tech data driven systems and weapons. International condemnation grows over what is clearly a case of AI fuelled, biometrical oriented techno-genocide against the Palestinian people – demonstrating that this could, and most likely will, happen again.

There is plenty of historical precedence for utmost caution regarding National ID programs, and especially regarding trusting Big Tech with any data on the population.

Blast from the past

According to the British Medical Journal, “Eugenics is too frequently overlooked in histories of both the United States and Europe, even though the story is a fascinating and important one.” Social changes brought about by Eugenics and “Big Tech” in the US fascinated the Nazi regime which aquired IBM’s Hollerith Machines, (punch card computer systems) being used in America (which gave the US government important population data and assisted in evolving “the quantified self” (a being defined by computers and collected data)).

Collecting population data with Hollerith Machines, the US of the 1930s was steeped in eugenics (a “racist” pseudo-science). At this time Americans performed the “Bellamy salute” that inspired the Nazi salute, and sought to oppress black communities, (leading to discrimination and sterilisation programs inflicted on Blacks and minorities which ultimately gave rise to pushback and the civil rights movement years after the Second World War).

With IBM’s assistance, the fascist government of Nazi Germany exploited stratified datasets on the public sorting people into groups. According to historian Edwin Black, “IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.”

In Nazi Germany, segments of the populace simply had no right to live and were considered by the eugenicist technocracy as “life unworthy of life”. Nazism fuelled social divides, fanned flames of hate, and facilitated euthanasia programs like Aktion T4, organised round-ups of targeted populations, and “discretely” sterilising selected groups. All was the result of enforced structural racism by “supremacists” using eugenics and technology hand in hand to re-organise society along technocratic lines – with much of it financed by US corporations. Nothing has changed, today Big Tech still assists and profits from apartheid regimes and exploiting data in ways that create harmful discrimination, which conforms with a technocratic, eugenicist outlook.

Dehumanisation into data points

We may remember the Rwandan genocide, characterised by the use of data to eliminate people. As KTPress reports, Rwanda saw genocide facilitated by National ID data. Despite the “hard lesson”, today, as reported by Biometric Update, “The government of Rwanda is investing 12.2 billion Rwandan francs (approximately US$8.5 million) in the upcoming 2025-2026 fiscal year to advance the rollout of the nation’s digital identity program, including fingerprint and iris biometrics enrollment.” KTPress reports that, “At the World Economic Forum, Minister Ingabire announced that Rwanda expects AI to contribute up to 6% of GDP in the near future.” Turning people into data points is the future, in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), a system connecting everyone to an infrastructure of smart technology.

Anasuya Sengupta, Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy and co-director and co-founder of “Whose Knowledge?” addressing issues of power, privilege, and accessibility, states that, “…the Internet not only helps to promote solidarity and connect people in different places, but also reinforces existing injustice, discrimination, and violence. Technology and algorithms are not neutral, they are political. Technology follows a certain architecture, which is why it reinforces discrimination and prejudice – depending on who designs it…the majority of the world is not represented on the Internet…People have turned from consumers into data points – and therefore into products.”

Ulises A. Mejias and Professor Nick Couldry from the State University of New York in their book “Data Grab” show that little has really changed since the Nazis or Rwandan governments exploited machine data, as technological empires utlising the IoT “…explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate”. In an interview with the London School of Economics (LSE) Couldry explained that, “human experience, potentially every layer and aspect of it, is becoming the target of profitable extraction.”

Demand the end of Digital ID

From the UK to Ukraine, and from the past to the present, we can see what is becoming of our world. Through intrusive forms of smart surveillance allied to military-style policing, the streets of some cities are becoming technological, data-gathering warzones.

In this authoritarian atmosphere, of technological “supremacism” smart phones – as demanded by industry and governments, for Digital ID-based digital transformations – are gravitating towards becoming mandatory devices. This is to guarantee one’s very existence, and, extract the profitability of one’s identity, with AI algorithms that contain uncomfortable biases and are known to be highly discriminatory.

This trajectory, devoid of any ethical oversight, promotes the predatory data-mining environment of the Big Tech companies and other corporate “stakeholders” exploiting the unfettered digital monitoring of everyone’s lives. This is life in a “surveillance economy” powered by “Digital Colonialism” – which operates to the benefit of dominant powers while limiting individual autonomy.

This AI-driven digital colonialism amounts to unprecedented surveillance of the population, or “datafication” driven by profit, where corporations and governments claim ownership of data generated by individuals. Nobody owns their data, or knows for sure how it may ultimately affect their lives.

As I said at the start, the prospect of a national Digital ID should amplify myriad questions, highlighting, in addition to any notions of convenience, the inescapable darker sides, that we dismiss at our peril.

With wireless radiation still posing a threat to black and white communities alike – in terms of posing a health risk – as well as being the means by which data is conveyed to empower the AI-surveillance society we never wanted, we have every reason to challenge the erosion of our rights and demand the end of Digital ID which, if made mandatory, brings huge potential to disempower more of our freedoms, choices, and human rights, including activism and protest itself, which will push us further into darkness.