Digital ID cards will put the UK on a dangerous path 🪪

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Hi Diogenes,

The UK government's proposed "Brit Card" digital ID scheme, billed as a tool to curb illegal immigration and streamline public services, could have devastating consequences for ordinary citizens.

Our Editor-in-Chief Aman Sethi, drawing on a decade of reporting from India, warns that the Brit Card could steer Britain into the same troubling reality as India's Aadhaar system, defined by mass surveillance, data leaks and the exclusion of society's most vulnerable.

FEATURED STORY

Digital ID cards will put the UK on a dangerous path – just ask India

Aman Sethi

To those who hope that the 'Brit Card' digital ID scheme will, as Keir Starmer promised, serve as a check on immigration, I bring bad news. We immigrants, documented and undocumented, will figure it out; it is the Brits who will suffer the most.

I say this as a journalist who spent close to a decade investigating the many drawbacks, data leaks, and mis-applications of Aadhar, India's vast and controversial biometric database, which Starmer's government approvingly and misleadingly endorsed in its press release announcing Brit Card.

The UK government claims that rolling out Aadhar has saved India's government over $10bn each year – an oft-repeated but never proven claim that has been endlessly criticised as incorrect. Its press release echoes the well-trodden fantasies of those who support unified identity schemes, stating that Brit Cards will save time, reduce reliance on messy paper documents, simplify access to government services and digital wallets, offer state-of-the-art security and encryption, strengthen borders and help to crack down on illegal migration.

When Tony Blair's New Labour administration announced a similar (albeit, not digital) ID cards scheme in 2003, its challengers had the upper hand in public debates as the counterfactual was simply the inefficiencies of existing systems.

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Two decades later, India's Aadhar scheme – which holds the names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, retinal and finger-print scans of over a billion people – offers a worrying case study of what awaits those in the UK: mass surveillance; a denial of services to the elderly, the impoverished and the infirm; compromised safety and security, and a fundamentally altered the relationship between citizen and state.

Aadhar began as an ostensibly innocuous scheme to ensure India's most vulnerable citizens received their due share of welfare benefits and entitlements by introducing biometric verification of beneficiaries of government schemes.

It was based on an again unproven assumption that welfare benefits were being siphoned off by mysterious "middle men". It's true that India's public food distribution system was inefficient and wasteful, but the root of this inefficiency was how grain was stored and transported. The "middle-men" of Indian public discourse are much like Starmer's "criminal gangs" – shadowy bogey-men routinely trotted out in the utterances of senior ministers to justify the latest draconian crackdown on personal liberty.

The Indian scheme ran into trouble almost immediately: leprosy patients were denied pensions, a visually impaired school boy was denied enrollment to the system, families in rural India were pushed into starvation as system glitches left them unable to access food rations. Ironically, it created middle men, who asked for bribes just to enrol people onto a system that now held inordinate power over every aspect of their lives.

Assigning each individual a unique, biometric-linked id allowed a vast number of government agencies to compile and store enormous amounts of personal data that was routinely leaked by IT systems that weren't fit for purpose.

As editor-in-chief of HuffPost India, my team and I reported on how the entire system had been compromised by a malicious software patch, how a botched attempt to link Aadhar numbers and voter IDs had disenfranchised millions of Indians, how a public-facing database allowed anyone with an internet connection to identify the caste and religion of over five million families and to geolocate their homes with pin-point accuracy. And then there was the case of the gentleman who bought a packet of generic viagra and anti-nausea drops on 13 June 2018 from a state-run dispensary. We found his name, address, phone number and a list of his purchases on a public dashboard that the authorities took down after we reached out to them.

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Each time, our findings were dismissed as edge cases, localised lapses that affected a miniscule percentage of users. But these percentages add up over time and result in millions of individual miscarriages of justice when scaled up to 1.4 billion people.

In 2020, we reported on how the Indian government was using Aadhar as the starting point to build an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to provide a "360 degree view" of the lives of every Indian citizen. The capabilities of such a database, which is not yet complete, are so terrifying that even the Indian bureaucrat who first proposed it told our reporter that he feared its misuse.

Our investigations into Aadhar revealed that once such a system is implemented, it is almost impossible to prevent its proliferation into every interaction between the state and the resident, which turns each failed transaction into a potential criminal breach.

This is what happened in India with Aadhar, and this is the idealised state of Brit Card. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood said as much at a Fringe event at the Labour conference.

Once the scheme is rolled out, pressure will build to link your Brit Card to your other IDs such as your NHS number, and when your ID glitches at the pharmacy, it is a relatively trivial task to build a system that flags this transaction to the Home Office to open an inquiry into your resident status. Imagine the postmaster scandal, except where every one of us is a few failed biometrics away from being postmastered.

Politicians know that national IDs are hugely unpopular, which is why they invariably start with a scape-goat to sell the system to a sceptical public. These scapegoats offer a glimpse into the insecurities hidden in the national psyche. In India, Aadhar was sold to middle-class India as a technological balm to the widespread perception of corruption.

In the UK, the Starmer government has tapped into the well-trodden myth that migrants are drawn to the UK in search of work to roll out compulsory work IDs as the first step to a national ID card. The Brit Card press release claims: "This will stop those with no right to be here from being able to find work, curbing their prospect of earning money, one of the key "pull factors" for people who come to the UK illegally". A wide body of work finds no evidence to support this claim.

As a documented immigrant, I already have a digital work ID. Those who employ undocumented workers will simply continue to do so, but will now have an excuse to pay them even less. The people who will struggle are ordinary citizens of the UK who will suddenly find that a chance bureaucratic lapse has meant they are undocumented aliens in their own country.