US Nearing Digital Identity For All Americans

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

WASHINGTON (Worthy News) – Legislative preparations are underway to establish a U.S. government-backed task force to create a digital identity for all Americans.

The controversial bill behind the initiative, known as the “Improving Digital Identity Act of 2023,” already passed the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

It has now been introduced to the entire U.S. Senate for debate, and critics fear the bill will be adopted soon.

Experts say some of the most intrusive aspects of the proposed technologies would allow governments and partnering agencies to track user behaviors across time and to develop “complex profiles of their identities.”

These behaviors are then “rewarded” or “punished” by the governments, like the social credit system used in Communist-run China, critics say.

Yet Senators Kyrsten Sinema, an Independent from Arizona, and Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming, introduced the bill anyway, saying it would improve security.

Their legislation calls for “an interagency task force” to head a combined public-private collaboration, which will “help all citizens more easily and securely engage in transactions online” and “prove who they are online.”

‘SECURE WAY’

The bill also claims that the “Lack of an easy, affordable, reliable, and secure way for organizations, businesses, and government agencies to identify whether an individual is who they claim to be online creates an attack vector that is widely exploited by adversaries in cyberspace and precludes many high-value transactions from being available online.”

The law notes that “Incidents of identity theft and identity fraud continue to rise in the United States, where more than 293,000,000 people were impacted by data breaches in 2021.”

Additionally, “Since 2017, losses resulting from identity fraud have increased by 333 percent, and, in 2020, those losses totaled $56,000,000,000,” according to the bill text.

The proposed introduction of digital identity comes shortly after European Union’s legislature agreed on similar measures.

The European Parliament voted last month, with a majority of 418 votes to 103, for “a new digital identity framework” to provide EU citizens with digital access to critical public services across EU borders.

Yet in published remarks, political commentator James Melville criticized the proposed mobile applications, or apps, saying that it would be better for citizens to monitor governments.

“Instead of a digital ID app that allows governments to snoop on us, what about having a digital ID app that allows us to track government spending, MPs’ expenses, second jobs, and who they meet with?” he wondered.

“Because they work for us rather than us working for them,” Melville wrote on social networking site Twitter.

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