By Bonnie Flaws

Read my four part investigative series One Register to Rule them All: Parts one, two, three and four, about Stats NZ’s Statistical Register and Persistent Unique Identifiers for every citizen.

ANALYSIS: So now you know what Stats NZ is planning behind closed doors, let’s talk about why we should push back against its work to build a statistical register.

I realise there is a lot of apathy out there, and many people may even think it’s a great idea. People want their lives to be easier, more convenient. I get that.

It’s frustrating when processes or service delivery don’t run smoothly, and refreshingly pleasant when things happen seamlessly with just a click. That’s why we have embraced technologies like PayWave. They make life easier.

But there is a reason why we are warned by digital watchdogs that convenience might come at the cost of our freedom. It’s true.

There is a reason why George Orwell wrote 1984: to warn us about the surveillance state. He coined the famous term Big Brother.

That’s what Stats NZ is doing: creating the foundation for an enormously powerful surveillance state that has the potential to want to oversee and enforce everything we do.

A very short history

For a long time, the very concept of an ID card was considered incompatible with countries that had legal systems based on common law, and certainly in peacetime.

World War II was the catalyst that initiated the modern era of ID cards. In 1938, British people were mandated to always carry them for the purposes of evacuation, food rationing and statistics. Germany also required them – for the purpose of religious discrimination.

But in Britain, courts later repealed the National Registry Act in 1952, in Churchill’s words, to “set the people free”. Learn more here.

Later, after 9/11 and during the daft and tragic War on Terror, Tony Blair tried to introduce them again, but the public resisted. He’s still banging on about them, fervently.

The point is, they have been used in times of political and economic upheaval or shock, or moral panic, and arguments for their use today range from the importance of transitioning to the digital economy, to stopping illegal immigration, to protecting kids online.

Surveillance creep

Surveillance has been creeping up on us for my whole lifetime, with most people either blissfully unaware of the danger, wilfully ignorant, addicted to convenience, used to it, or operating on a deeply naïve and ahistorical assumption that the authorities would never use it for nefarious purposes.

Well, let’s pause for just a moment and recall how, in our very recent history, we were segregated in public by having to identify our vaccination status.

The Department of Internal Affairs is working now to “build trust” in digital identity services, and legislation has been developed – the Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Act 2023.

In the UK, they have a virtually identical-sounding Digital Identity Framework, and we find this policy (like so many others) is being developed and implemented across the globe, including in some very disturbing ways.

Last year, Kuwait made it compulsory to hand over biometric data in an extreme push for Digital ID, to help the government build a national database to assist in streamlining access to public services.

Those who did not comply were prohibited from all electronic banking services: cash withdrawals, transfers, and account management. Eventually, the electronic bank cards of the non-compliant were deactivated, while Visa, MasterCard and others went along with these demands.

In fact, we’ve repeatedly seen the large payment service companies and banks cave to demands to block funds or de-bank non-compliant prolls over the years. The first victim that I recall was WikiLeaks. But it has been going on in banks quietly for longer, under the guise of Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) global standards.

The point being: we can’t rely on corporates to side with us against state overreach. They are far more likely to join forces in such scenarios, and even to form public–private partnerships to tackle whatever problem we’re being sold an authoritarian solution to.

Why stand against IDs?

Historically, the fight against digital IDs has been about preserving the presumption of innocence and avoiding government overreach. But the data behemoth has proved too tempting for governments, corporations and tech giants alike. Consider Google’s long-held motto Don’t be evil, and then consider its leaked film The Selfish Ledger, which turned the motto on its head.

Privacy law expert Gehan Gunasekara, who spoke to me for the series One Register to Rule Them All, shared another important historical anecdote.

In the Netherlands during World War II, when the Nazis arrived, most of the Dutch Jews perished. Due to a state-of-the-art population database and ID card that was nearly impossible to forge, they were easy to find – and kill.

“The Nazis accessed the database, a population register that had all sorts of information about people’s ethnicity and family history, which had originally been compiled for social welfare purposes and was regarded as world-leading at the time. But people couldn’t escape. So, there are real consequences, and that’s why privacy advocates are always very suspicious [of ID cards].”

Social media ban will likely necessitate Digital ID

Since the series was published, the Government has announced a Member’s Bill (likely to become a Government Bill with cross-party support) to ban social media for under-16s. If it follows the lead of Australia, this means everyone using designated social media sites will need to verify their identity. A backdoor to Digital ID.

The impact of social media on kids is the perfect argument, because it really is causing harm, and we really do need solutions for it. But I suspect that if this were Texas, the argument would be that we need Digital ID to deal with undocumented migrants. A solution for left or right, whatever plays best for the target audience.

One of the surest signs that this Bill is not what it seems is the creation of the ‘grassroots’ lobby B416, which magically debuted to the public the same week as the Bill was proposed.

Matua Kahurangi did some snooping and concluded:

“Given the swift formation of the group, the political affiliations of its members, and the striking proximity to Luxon’s social media Bill announcement, it seems far more likely that this is a well-crafted piece of political propaganda rather than an organic movement designed to tackle the very real issues of social media and youth.”

On the money. This phenomenon is well-trodden public relations craft known as astroturfing, or fake grassroots. This effort is barely hiding it, though.

And in an interview on ZB with Ryan Bridge this week, spokeswoman for B416 Malindi McLean made the pitch – not just for a RealMe-type access, but for facial recognition scanning plus an ID token. They are not messing around.

And finally: Israel’s cabinet has approved a controversial plan to make food aid conditional on submitting to facial recognition (arguably the most unique identifier of all) in special militarised hubs. Traditionally, food aid has been distributed by the UN or aid agencies.

Convergence: surveillance and enforcement

I could list many more examples of the increasing convergence of technology, surveillance and ultimately enforcement policy, at the local, national and global levels. It’s a one-way street currently. It’s around every corner and lurking behind every piece of digitisation. If you don’t believe me, subscribe to Reclaim the Net and read daily about the ongoing liberties taken by governments and corporations against our privacy and dignity.

It simply isn’t good enough to shrug and say, “I don’t care, I want my life to be easy.” That’s a cop-out that relieves people of the responsibility to uphold their freedoms, the flip side of the rights we possess. The responsibility piece.

Freedoms are fought for and won in every generation, and ours is no exception.

We can’t afford to assume – in a world where, in very recent memory, governments moved in lockstep to detain people in their homes, remove civil liberties, implement medical mandates of improperly tested products, enforce public segregation policies and close the borders – that abuses of our data privacy won’t occur.

We can’t afford to assume, in a world where the abilities of large language models are growing in power every day, that they won’t be used to turn our data into a tool for greater control over populations.

We can’t afford to assume, with increasingly normalised surveillance in our everyday life, that Stats NZ won’t eventually suck up any and all available information it can get on us into its Integrated Statistical Data System.

In fact, it behooves us now to take the time to imagine what excesses may come (are already coming) that we might prevent them.

Note to readers: Stats NZ has informed me today that they are extending the timeframe to answer questions I put to them for the One Register to Rule them All investigation, presumably for another 20 working days. They are treating them as an OIA request.

There were a lot of questions, but I do seriously query why the agency has not been able to quickly inform me of which clauses of the Privacy Act and Data & Statistics Act sanction the creation of a real-time statistical register and persistent unique identifier. In other words how are they legal. Why do they need 60 days for that?

I will keep readers posted.