PM Sells Australia to Microsoft for $5B; Details at 10

The plan is to control everything Australians can see, say, and do online

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The hallmark of truly colossal government policy catastrophes is that they tend to be based on belief systems or ideologies, and not on observable reality.

The Aztecs, for example, slaughtered around 1% of their population every year because their leaders believed it was necessary to help the gods maintain the cosmos.

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Back here in the oh-so-modern 21st century, we have two examples of such belief system train wrecks: Zero Covid and Net Zero.

With Zero Covid we shut down entire states because we detected the presence of a 99.5% survivable virus in a single asymptomatic person.

And the orgy of spending to pay for that insane Zero Covid ideology has saddled us with the worst cost of living crisis in the country’s history.

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In the case of Net Zero (carbon emissions), the Left’s favourite billionaire Bill Gates wastes no time in absolutely skewering the entire idea.

So Net Zero is just our latest flavour of ritual societal sacrifice.

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But wait. There’s more.

Now the crazed priests who have control of your wallet have conjured up yet another ideological altar they want to sacrifice you on.

It’s called Digital ID.

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The ways that this is just as awful and stupid and impossible as Zero Covid and Net Zero could fill the known universe.

And like those other truly catastrophic and disastrous government policies, the fatal flaws are in the very foundational concepts.

The idea is that it would be really great and efficient if there was just one single way to prove who you are, and just one place where all of your digital information could be stored and accessed.

Translation: Let’s just build a huge line of fortresses and bolt all of the cannons down pointing at Germany.

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Since the IT industry began, two core concepts of cyber security have been this:

• Never store more data in one place than is absolutely necessary; and

• Never give access to data to someone who has no need to access that data.

  

  Australia’s Digital ID vision turns those basic cyber security principles on their heads.

1. It will functionally place all of the citizen’s data, everything from their I.D. details to their tax records to bank transactions to health, in one big centralised data store;

2. It will give huge numbers of government bureaucrats, private contractors, banks, and police access to that data store;

3. It aims to do so via an infinitely complex system of permissioning;

4. And (via changes in process to the Consumer Data Rights regime) it provides two-way digital Power of Attorney, so that third parties can take actions and make changes to your digital information (!!!)

   

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Premise = False

With every last egg in one single giant basket, the premise is that the basket can be successfully protected 100% of the time. A single failure represents total failure.

The following is a full and complete list of all of the IT providers, companies, organisations, states, and governments of the world that have successfully protected all of their data from hacking 100% of the time.

It cannot be done, even by the most sophisticated global IT organisations like Apple, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft.

And THAT is why you compartmentalise and limit, you do NOT centralise and distribute. D’oh.

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Cui bono? Let’s see

Online hackers get a single irresistible honey pot of every last detail about you. Once they’re in (and they will get in), you’re done.

A flunky at Service NSW renewing your boat licence gets a quick glance at your last mortgage payment or your health records.

Deloittes (the key implementation partner with Microsoft in the new deal announced by Albanese) get unlimited billing revenues trying to make *any* of it work properly.

YOU get to spend untold hours on government customer support phone lines trying to clean up the mess each and every time it fails.

Honest-to-God totalitarian fascists and censors get a field of dreams of citizen monitoring and control.

Bad in concept, even worse in practice

Here in Australia we are starting to specialise in implementing policies that have already failed spectacularly elsewhere in the world.

• Canberra is decriminalising hard drugs. Holland and Portugal tried that a decade ago and now have completely reversed those policies.

• Sweden, Germany, France, and the UK are backing off of their “climate change” measures, or have dropped Net Zero altogether.

• Sweden never did any Covid lockdowns, and had the lowest excess mortality in Europe.

India established a universal digital ID system based on biometric data (as Australia’s will be) called Aadhaar.

But a recent article lists the following:

“Aadhaar is being used for a wide range of fraudulent purposes – carrying out land transfers, procuring passports, getting loans, casting votes, obtaining other IDs, siphoning off welfare payments, even getting married.

Such instances are especially striking given that identity theft is precisely what Aadhaar was supposed to fix”.

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You are none of their business, anyway.

At the end of the day the top reason Digital ID is a terrible idea is this: your right to privacy.

As the government functionaries relentlessly white anting your personal privacy state, “Digital ID implementation will require continued reforms to the Privacy Act”.

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POSTSCRIPT, 5 November 2023

India’s Aadhaar system just experienced its largest breach in history, revealing the most valuable personally identifiable information of roughly 10% of the globe’s inhabitants.