How Soon Before You’ll Need a Digital ID to Access Public Services?
The Biden administration is drafting an executive order for federal and state governments to speed up the adoption of digital ID — including mobile driver’s licenses — and for the development of a uniform, government-run online identity system to verify identity and age, and access public websites and services.
NOTUS, a nonprofit news outlet, obtained a draft of the executive order, which states: “It is the policy of the executive branch to strongly encourage the use of digital identity documents.”
According to NOTUS, the executive order “could reshape how Americans access government services, and potentially behave online.”
A digital ID system could operate with the use of biometric scans like facial recognition to “help better verify identity online,” NOTUS reported, noting the federal government is working with Apple and Google to build systems that would “allow Americans to carry identity documents on their smartphones and frictionlessly submit them to both government and private sector websites for verification.”
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda,” told The Defender that, as defined by the World Economic Forum (WEF), “digital identity is ‘the sum total of the growing and evolving mass of information about us, our profiles and the history of our activities online.’”
Rectenwald said:
“Digital identity is not merely a new, more handy, lightweight, digital form of identification. It refers to a collection of data that purportedly defines who we are, including what we do both online and offline … and not merely to a means by which we can be identified as such.”
Alexis Hancock, director of engineering for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Defender the Biden administration’s digital ID will disproportionately target the poor and underprivileged. She said:
“Digital Identity and the standards that dictate them are still very ‘new’ and yet the White House is expediting digital identity for the most vulnerable of populations: people on public benefits.
“Deploying various technologies on this population to access their benefits, such as facial recognition is not something I’d encourage or advise. Especially with facial recognition being fraught with issues of discrimination.”
Rectenwald also warned that digital ID can later be expanded to other functions.
“Even if a digital identity system only serves as identification at first, as the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice notes, digital identities are prone to ‘function creep’” — that is, “they are intended to be used for multiple purposes that are unforeseen when the system is first designed,” he said.
Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, cited vaccine passports as one such possibility.
“While the federal government wasn’t able to legally mandate vaccination to all U.S. citizens, it went ahead anyway and mandated it to federal employees, and the private sector followed suit. … The same can easily happen with digital identity,” Hinchliffe said.
The NOTUS report comes just days after revelations that the Social Security numbers and other personal information of practically all Americans stored by a private company, National Public Data, was breached in April 2024.
Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said, “Rather than apologize or take steps to make sure that our data is secure, the Biden administration is proposing to create even more centrally controlled databases pushing for a digital ID.”
‘Big Tech manages digital ID and is far more powerful than governments’
According to NOTUS, 13 states have rolled out “some kind of mobile driver’s license program” and more are working toward implementing a digital ID. “But federal action pushing the transition has been delayed” — creating a hodgepodge of state digital ID systems that are not coordinated at the federal level.
According to IDScan.net, the 13 states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Ohio and Utah. Ohio launched digital driver’s licenses and state IDs earlier this month.
Similar programs are “in progress” in an additional 14 states, while in two states — Louisiana and Mississippi — mobile ID can be used to vote.
At least seven countries have launched digital ID, according to Identity.com. These include Canada, Estonia, Germany, India, Japan, Singapore and Sweden. The European Union (EU) launched its digital ID and wallet earlier this year.
Each of the 27 EU member states “will offer at least one version of the EU Digital Identity Wallet,” which may include driver’s licenses, personal health data, travel documents, social security information, personal SIM cards, university diplomas and also may be connected to one’s bank accounts.
In Greece, ticketing via the government’s “digital wallet” is required to attend sporting events.
But despite the purported convenience “digital wallets” may offer, there are also potential risks.
“If you lose your laminated driver’s license, you can just get a new one,” attorney Greg Glaser said. “But if you lose your biometric ID, you cannot get a new thumb or new eyeball, so hacks are permanent.”
Experts also warned of Big Tech involvement in government digital ID schemes. “Big Tech manages digital ID and is far more powerful than governments,” Glaser said. “Big Tech has the patents, and they dictate both the standards and implementation.”
He added:
“Their long game in the cybersecurity industry is to centralize data processing so that our state and local governments become dependent on the cybersecurity industry to function day-to-day. This is called ‘digital public infrastructure,’ and it is no small thing, because it neutralizes local power and governance.”
For instance, several states, including Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland and Ohio, offer their digital ID cards and driver’s licenses via Apple Wallet. Earlier this month, Apple announced that California will soon offer these documents via Apple Wallet as well.
According to NOTUS, although the federal government has developed Login.gov as “the standard credential for accessing federal websites,” many such sites, including that of the IRS, use “the Virginia-based start-up ID.me,” a private company.
“Through public-private partnerships, digital identity can be very convenient for citizen interactions with governments and corporations, but it can also be a tool for total surveillance and control,” Hinchliffe said.
He added:
“Just like the jabs, digital identity doesn’t have to be forcibly mandated to make your life miserable, but without it, you may not be able to make financial transactions, acquire a driver’s license, go to school or even access the internet.”
According to NOTUS though, fraud involving the lack of a uniform age and identity verification system — including through state driver’s licenses that are relatively easy to forge — has cost the U.S. government billions of dollars and is a key driver of the Biden administration’s draft executive order.
“The draft order, if implemented, would ostensibly address a growing problem: The government has lost billions of dollars in fraudulent claims to benefit programs using forged identification cards.” Most state driver’s license systems do not connect to identity verification services that match faces to IDs.
“The result is growing interest in creating a form of digital ID to use on the web,” NOTUS reported. “Joe Biden first promised an executive order in his 2022 State of the Union address, but it has been stuck in a bureaucratic turf war over what it should include.”
According to the draft executive order, people will not be required to submit to automated facial recognition scans. The executive order also would prohibit the government and contractors from selling biometric data and using that kind of data for anything other than identity verification.
Hancock said that while she agrees with the proposal for “more account controls for people who are at risk for fraud, like requiring multi-factor authentication and ways to recover their benefits if their credentials are compromised,” she questioned whether the White House’s proposed executive order would sufficiently address data safety.
“While there are some statements in the White House’s plans that seem protective of privacy and consent in using digital identity mechanisms to combat fraud, I am wary that digital identity will lessen or mitigate fraud at scale … This would take more robust technical support with more human aid-like useful technical support call lines and translators,” she said.
Fitts said, “Digital IDs are the essential step to the WEF vision of ‘Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.’”
“I do hope that with this call for digital identity, is followed by strong and robust privacy protections for our data and not naiveté that digital identity itself is the solution,” Hancock said.
Establishment of CBDC the true goal of digital ID?
Experts also told The Defender that despite the Biden administration’s safety assurances, government-run digital ID programs launched in other countries have been prone to breaches.
In “the process of all the data centralization … citizens increasingly lose privacy while the authorities hypocritically claim digital wallets provide greater privacy because they are more secure against theft,” Glaser said.
“The authorities’ claim is at best untested and at worst outright false — as India’s recent Aadhaar security breach showed, with about 60% of India’s 1.3 billion population hacked and exposed on the dark web,” Glaser said.
Aadhaar, India’s national digital ID system, has been mired in controversy. Promoted by Bill Gates, Aadhaar was recently linked with India’s new digital health certificates.
“If you want to see how digital identity gets adopted on a massive scale, take a look at India’s Aadhaar digital identity system. For more than a decade, the government said that digital identity would be voluntary, but then banks and local governments started mandating its use,” Hinchliffe said.
This “made people’s lives difficult to live without the digital ID. Now, India boasts that around 1.2 billion citizens have ‘voluntarily’ signed up for digital ID,” Hinchliffe added.
Some experts argued that the Biden administration’s true goal with digital ID is to lay the groundwork for the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
“The reason that the Biden Administration wants a digital ID is so that the Federal Reserve and the banking system can move to an all-digital financial control system that will use ‘programmable money’ [which] will permit taxation without representation and negative interest rates,” Fitts said.
Similarly, Rectenwald said, “Digital identity is the lynchpin for instituting a CBDC, which the Biden administration has said in an executive order that it — and by extension, the Harris regime — intends to implement.”
CBDC could be used to shut people with non-establishment opinions out of public life, Rectenwald warned. “Linked with CBDC, digital identity could bar these ‘undesirables’ from the economy,” he said, citing people whose bank accounts were frozen for supporting or participating in the Canadian Freedom Convoy.
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Exclusive: HHS Funds AI Tool to ‘Inoculate’ Social Media Users Against HPV Vax ‘Misinformation’
University of Pennsylvania researchers — using U.S. taxpayer dollars — are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to “inoculate” social media users against “misinformation” about the HPV vaccine posted on social media, grant documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is funding the $4 million “Inoculate for HPV Vaccine” randomized controlled trial running from April 2022 through March 2027. The National Cancer Institute, part of HHS, is facilitating the funding. Funding for year three was released in April.
The study is headed up by Melanie L. Kornides, associate professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, whose research focuses on increasing vaccine uptake, and also on “strategies to combat misinformation.”
Kornides is joined by a team of digital health communication experts, software and program designers, social media analysts and machine learning systems experts who will help her run the “inoculation” experiment on 2,500 parents of children ages 8-12.
The team is collecting user data from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram where people talk about HPV and using natural language processing to train an AI tool to identify “HPV misinformation,” or posts that are critical of vaccination — whether or not the information in the post is true or false.
They will then develop and test their “inoculation tool,” exposing subjects in three study arms to different types of messaging meant to make them immune to such misinformation.
A control group will get no particular messaging and two test groups will be exposed either to messaging designed to inoculate viewers against content critical of of HPV vaccines and content critical of anti-vaccine arguments.
The subjects will get “booster” doses of messaging at three and six months after their first inoculation.
If successful, the researchers wrote, this novel approach to combating health “misinformation” can be used in “wide-scale social media campaigns” addressing pandemics, childhood vaccination and other health issues.
Misinformation about the HPV vaccine, they wrote, is a major cause of “vaccine hesitancy” that circulates widely among well-meaning people, but often comes from “anti-vaccine organizations.”
Mary Holland, co-author of “The HPV Vaccine on Trial: Seeking Justice for a Generation Betrayed” told The Defender that the University of Pennsylvania research on the part of the public health industry is “a sign of weakness.”
“When you are censoring information, labeling it misinformation and smearing us, this is a sign that they’ve lost the science and are now in a verbal food fight. It’s just a sign they are going to lose,” she said.
The funding for the grant is part of a broader project within HHS to increase HPV vaccine uptake by funding research to develop messaging for providers and trusted community leaders that will convince more parents to vaccinate children against HPV.
It is one of more than 50 grants totaling more than $40 million awarded by the HHS to universities, healthcare systems and departments of public health to increase HPV vaccine uptake that CHD identified were awarded through last year.
Since then, the number of such studies has grown, with 26 new grants totaling nearly $28 million awarded in 2024 alone.
It also aligns with a new initiative by the Biden administration to fund research on AI tools to identify and censor “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation” online, according to a U.S. House of Representatives interim report released in February. Those projects are funded through the National Science Foundation.
Tweet about son’s death after HPV shot marked ‘misinformation’
Nearly half of parents have heard stories of harm from HPV vaccination, according to the grant documents, and those parents were more likely to refuse vaccination for their children.
“Fueled by misinformation from the anti-vaccine movement through social media, parents’ concerns about side effects and safety may foster reluctance to vaccinate their children,” the documents said.
In response, they are training AI to identify misinformation using methods from Kornides’ previous work identifying HPV vaccine misinformation on Twitter. In that study, Kornides and colleagues identified tweets about the HPV vaccine using keywords and coded them for their misinformation content.
“During the open coding process, we determined that almost all posts that raised concerns about HPV vaccine contained some degree of misinformation,” they found.
The most common form of “misinformation” described adverse events from vaccines. Those tweets had greater engagement than pro-HPV vaccine tweets.
The researchers broke the misinformation down into several classes.
Overall, tweets that were deemed “misinformation” were tweets that raised concerns that: the vaccine was ineffective, unsafe or caused serious adverse events, there was inadequate or falsified safety monitoring, the pharmaceutical industry was profiteering, the government conspired with interested actors to support their profiting, children were too young for the vaccine, mandates were unjust, or there were generally issues with vaccines.
There was no discussion about the veracity of the tweeted claims.
Examples of misinformation included a family tweeting that their son died after receiving the Gardasil vaccine. The tweet read: “The gardasil/hpv vaccine destroyed our lives. #gardasillkilledmyson.”
Another tweet deemed “misinformation” for raising Pharma concerns said: “Amid questions about the safety of the #HPV #vaccine #Gardasil one of the lead researchers for the #Merck drug is speaking out about its risks, benefits and aggressive marketing #vaccines #SCAM.”
The language of this tweet is taken directly from a CBS News headline.
Another “misinformation” tweet included: “Chicago teen given #HPV #vaccine from nurse practitioner in mobile van without parental consent or knowledge.” This story was also verified by CBS News.
The researchers said they also coded for “legitimate concerns,” which were not misinformation. Those were tweets that mentioned reasons cited in academic literature explaining why some people might not get vaccinated — for example, because they don’t have a provider recommendation or because a vaccine is not required for school.
‘Truth is irrelevant’
They concluded that during their study period, nearly a quarter of the HPV-related content on Twitter was “misinformation” and three-quarters of it was “supportive.”
In other words, critiques of the vaccine were deemed misinformation and comments supporting the vaccine were deemed valid.
“This just proves yet again that anything that deviates from the orthodoxy in public health is considered misinformation,” Holland said. “Truth is irrelevant. That’s shocking and disturbing. And it can kill you, period. That’s the bottom line.”
Holland said extensive research has shown that the HPV shots can be dangerous, and there is no proof from the clinical trials or the real world that they prevent cancer, as their proponents — and the grant writers for this project — claim.
“Preventing cervical cancer 40 years in the future isn’t simply unknowable,” Holland said, “It’s total speculation.” In their book, she said, Holland and her co-authors detail the failures and dangers of the HPV vaccine.
There are clear examples, she said, from the clinical trials showing that people who already had an HPV infection or had antibodies experienced inflammation and an array of inflammatory illnesses as a result.
Merck, the company that makes the Gardasil vaccine, is facing over 200 lawsuits in federal court from people who suffered a range of serious injuries after taking Gardasil, including autoimmune disorders, premature ovarian failure and cancer. There are also over 200 Gardasil injury claims pending in the Vaccine Court.
Regardless of information from Gardasil’s clinical trials, case reports of vaccine injuries, mounting evidence from across the world that demonstrates plausible associations between HPV vaccination and autoimmune conditions, information made public in ongoing lawsuits against Merck or other publicly available factual information about the HPV vaccines, in this study the researchers will use the framework developed in their Twitter research.
They will train AI to differentiate between misinformation and supportive posts across all major social media platforms and, through surveys among their research subjects, they are identifying the top 15 and then top five misinformation messages that may make parents hesitant to vaccinate their children.
They also plan to periodically review the kinds of effective “misinformation” they want to undermine.
For example, they reported in documents from the third year of the grant that the discussion on HPV vaccination has become more personal in the past few years, with more parents questioning the HPV vaccine mandates for school children.
They “see more tweets sharing personal experiences and increasing parents’ reluctance towards the HPV vaccine for their children,” the researchers said.
‘Inoculating’ parents’ attitudes against future ‘persuasive attacks’
For each platform, the researchers will develop and test supportive inoculation messages, images and videos aimed at the concerns they determine are the most likely to stop people from vaccinating their children.
The premise behind the inoculation tool is a biological metaphor suggesting that people’s attitudes can be inoculated against future “persuasive attacks,” just like an immune system can be inoculated against a disease.
Like traditional vaccines, inoculation theory works by introducing people to the potentially dangerous argument in a weakened form — not strong enough to infect them — and providing them with a well-timed, strong and persuasive argument to counteract it.
The first part of the method — the threat — is designed to make people fear that their existing position is vulnerable, motivating them to seek a protective response. It is key, they wrote, to forewarn about future misinformation before that narrative has been accepted by a person.
If the inoculation is well-timed, it can offer protection against “misinformation” for weeks to months, depending on levels of exposure and behavior, according to the documents.
For example, they wrote, they forewarn about a “threat” with messaging that says, “You may read the HPV vaccine causes paralysis.” Then they refute it with a counterargument, presented in the image below.
Source: HHS, page 102.
Their “counterarguments” or “inoculation messages” don’t present any evidence to the user. It is simply a rhetorical strategy designed to give people specific content they can use to strengthen their attitudes against change.
This approach is innovative, they wrote, because while other studies have focused on effective provider communication and educational strategies, few studies address “misinformation generated by anti-vaccine movements on social media platforms,” which they say are a major source of information for parents, especially mothers.
The content they create will instead be geared toward “encouraging vaccination and conferring resistance to antivaccination materials.”
The researchers say that if successful, their tool can be adapted to “swiftly and efficiently” address “misinformation” regarding COVID-19, childhood vaccinations and cancer treatment.
To determine whether the inoculation worked, the primary outcome measured will be medical records showing children were vaccinated. Secondary outcomes measured will be self-reported vaccination and parents’ vaccination attitudes.
However, like the other HPV messaging trials The Defender has covered, informing parents about the risks associated with the HPV vaccine is not part of the informed consent process.
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New Covid Shots from Pfizer, Moderna to be Released as Early as This Month
(LifeSiteNews) — Updated mRNA COVID booster shots are slated for public release as soon as August, according to reports, despite the admission of doctors that COVID now causes “really mild” symptoms and the reportedly high injury and death toll from the jabs.
Following the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s recommendation for 2024-2025 fall and winter COVID booster “vaccines,” Moderna and Pfizer have prepared to create shots targeting the KP.2 strain of COVID, a descendant of JN.1, which itself stems from the omicron variant.
As of July, KP.2 and its offshoots are the predominant culprits behind COVID infections, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.
Moderna said its mRNA shot will be rolled out as soon as August, and Pfizer said its own mRNA jab “will be available as soon as it’s approved,” which could also occur this month, Forbes reported.
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