The Rise of Biodigital Surveillance

Aaron Kheriaty:

CLEAR isn’t the only enterprise working at the intersection of biometric and digital authentication. Plans for digital IDs have been in the works for several years, but they gained traction during the pandemic. ID2020 is a nonprofit alliance founded in 2016 with seed money from Microsoft, Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Rockefeller Foundation, Cisco, and Gavi (a vaccine alliance founded by the Gates Foundation). The stated mission of ID2020 is to provide digital identities for all people worldwide by 2030. Digital IDs will be tied to fingerprints and other biometric data like iris scans, demographic information, medical records, data on education, travel, financial transactions, and bank accounts.

Almost two years before Covid, ID2020 published an article titled “Immunization: An Entry Point of Digital Identity.” It argued that “immunization poses a huge opportunity to scale digital identity.” The article noted cumbersome inefficiencies with paper immunization records and delineated how health challenges in developing nations could be leveraged as the pretext for implementing digital IDs. The year before, Seth Berkeley, CEO of Gavi, published a piece in Nature making the same argument: To achieve 100 percent vaccination rates in underdeveloped nations, we need digital IDs. Gavi has promoted the same message at gatherings of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The ID2020 article attempted to frame the benefits of this system as follows: “Because immunization is conducted in infancy, providing children with a digital child health card would give them a unique, portable digital identity early in life.” It goes on to explain that “as children grow, their digital child health card can be used to access secondary services, such as primary school, or ease the process of obtaining alternative credentials. Effectively, the child health card becomes the first step in establishing a legal, broadly recognized identity.”

This may at first glance sound sensible. But consider: If an impoverished family doesn’t accept the health NGO’s preferred interventions for its children, these children may not be provided any other opportunity to establish a “legal, broadly recognized identity” necessary to access things like primary school. In other words, you are literally nobody until you are vaccinated.