by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
Internet age verification for adult web content is an international trend. Why? Because issuing digital IDs won’t help the government or its partners pursue their shared surveillance and control agenda unless people can be compelled to use them. And so laws to impose “age verification” for access to “adult” internet content are the current leading attempts to legislate ID requirements for internet access.
Age verification for adult content is a stalking horse for comprehensive content-based and personalised government control of internet access.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
What will the future bring for ID demands?
By Edward Hasbrouck as published by The Identity Project on 5 November 2024
There are elections today in the USA. But we don’t need to know their outcome to predict many of the issues that The Identity Project and our supporters and allies will continue to face in the coming years. For what it’s worth, everything that was on our agenda for the first Obama Administration, following the 2008 elections, remains on our agenda today.
At least since 11 September 2001, throughout both Republican and Democratic administrations in the White House, demands for “Your papers, please!” have been supported by: (1) a bipartisan consensus in Congress, (2) the lobbying power of an ever-growing homeland security-industrial complex, and (3) the malign convergence of interest between governments that want to identify us in order to track, profile, and control us for political purposes and corporations that want to identify us (or get the government to force us to identify ourselves) in order to track and profile us for commercial purposes.
It was in the post-9/11 state of panic and trauma-impaired judgment that a de facto “airport exception” to the US Constitution was put in place. The societal trauma of 9/11 remains largely undiagnosed, unacknowledged and untreated. To this day, it continues to interfere with rational policy-making on both air travel and ID requirements.
Airport exceptionalism, wrongly accepted at a moment of crisis, has yet to be seriously questioned in Congress. It has been normalised as part of the state of “forever war.“ It has enabled lawless demands for airline passengers to show ID so that (1) travel by each individual can be logged in a permanent lifetime travel history file maintained and shared between governments and their private partners, and (2) secret, arbitrary, extrajudicial blocklists and algorithms can be used to decide who is, and who is not, allowed to exercise their fundamental Constitutional and human right to freedom of movement.
These travel ID mandates and the travel tracking and control schemes they enable were first deployed in the US, largely without bothering to obtain Congressional approval (although also largely without Congressional objection). They have since been adopted by Canada, the European Union, and worldwide through the UN Security Council and the UN-affiliated International Civil Aviation Organisation (“ICAO”). Similar ID mandates and travel tracking and control schemes have been implemented simultaneously but somewhat independently (although for similarly malign reasons) in China – integrated with the Chinese government’s “social credit” scheme of surveillance, profiling, and control – and in other countries.
Authoritarian regimes from across the spectrum have been happy to collaborate with the US on global standards – disregarding and/or purporting to override human rights treaties – for mandatory surveillance of individuals’ activities and movements worldwide.
Travel has been the cutting edge of the post-9/11 attack on anonymity. We will continue to support legislation and litigation to protect our right to travel. We will continue to expose, oppose and encourage resistance to restrictions on our right to travel, including our right to travel without showing ID or obtaining permission from the government.
Key aspects of that struggle in the next few years – regardless of the outcome of today’s elections – are likely to be (1) the continued stalemate between popular resistance to the REAL-ID Act of 2005, which created a new national ID database, and Congressional unwillingness to admit its mistake, or admit defeat, by repealing the REAL-ID Act, and (2) the government’s continuing attempt to misrepresent the REAL-ID Act as having included a new requirement for airline passengers to show ID, even while thousands of people continue to fly without ID every day. The Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”) is still trying to evade or further postpone making any clear decision on this issue. But it could come to a head if and when the TSA tries to start blocking passage through checkpoints at airports to passengers without ID.
