Fire! UK Legislation for Digital Gulag in Final Stages

Wesley Fryer – Creative commons licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

It has taken a mere 30 years for the majority of the Western World to herd itself into a prison that mimics the mind – the software of a parallel digital universe called the World Wide Web. Epochal technological developments or cultural evolutions are often both gifts and curses. Time is the final arbiter of which one wins – the gift or the curse. At this juncture, I would agree with the proposition that the invention of digital technology and the internet will turn out to be a great and sudden leap backward for humankind.

The images and thoughts that flicker through the screens of our minds are not always a representation of reality. For some unfortunate people, they rarely are. And very few people can or should be overly confident that they are in the fortunate camp. If you think you are one of the fortunate ones, always try not to be too sure of it. Our minds are flawed representations of reality, and the digital universe is a flawed representation of our flawed minds. The digital world is therefore a hall of mirrors which most of us are perfectly content to inhabit for lengthy periods. Has the digital world made Plato’s Cave darker or lighter? Time will tell, but it doesn’t feel as if we’re moving in the right direction.

The digital world’s success as an invention is that it is all things to all people. It is a fantasy land for escapism, a place where you can learn or laugh, a place where you will definitely be fooled, a place where you can live vicariously, a place that can elicit the full range of human emotions, and a bridge for concrete interactions. We are voluntary prisoners in this new digital world whose success in capturing us lies in its flexibility and generosity. It is portable, manipulable and manipulating. We love it so much that we pay for it, and carry it around with us wherever we go.

It is a prison because we can’t leave it. It alternates between a necessity and an asset. But we are still able to exercise some choices that make it agreeable, and we still have some control over how much time we spend inside it. It is not yet a gulag – a tool that will restrict our bodies, minds and choices in ways that suffocate life.

All that remains for ambitious totalitarian gaolers is to work out how to turn this comfortable prison into a gulag that works for them and not us. The balance of power in this comfortable prison is not yet fully in their favour. As readers of this blog are well aware, a blueprint for that digital gulag has been drawn up, and the plan is being executed with zeal. In the UK, a 268-page set of rules, innocuously titled the Data (Use and Access) Bill (the DUA Bill), has been drafted to shift the balance of power firmly in favour of our rulers; to dictate how UK subjects are to be trapped and governed in a digital gulag.

This Bill is essentially the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill that died in April 2024 and made no further progress owing to the proroguing of Parliament for the June 2024 general election. It’s been pruned a little, but it’s still a grenade sitting quietly in the corner of the room without a pin in it. And, having completed its second reading, there’s not a lot of time left to disarm it.

The puzzling thing about this bill is that, as far as I can tell, the sounding of alarm bells has been sparse. The only sufficiently strident town-crying I’ve heard was this video sent to me by a friend:

I watched that video, and then reached for my laptop to pen this urgent missive. I hunted for analyses by seasoned privacy watchdog organisations, like Big Brother Watch, to confirm whether this legal instrument was as bad as it seems for people who care about privacy and freedom. Opposing this bill is, strangely, not front and centre of Big Brother Watch’s campaigns. Although they have prepared a briefing on it, it’s not easy to find on their website. It seems to me as if all the groups you’d expect to be screaming “Fire!” at the top of their lungs are phlegmatically passing off a raging inferno as an exothermic reaction with potential to cause discomfort.

So, I will start with the bloody awful news – the far more sinister agenda in the bill that most privacy rights groups are listing last, not first, on their list of concerns. Some, like Open Rights Group, haven’t even mentioned the most lethal aspect of the bill in their news releases: Digital ID. I will then finish off with the not-so-good news from Big Brother Watch’s briefing. You can skip the second bit because all of it really doesn’t matter if the controllers get digital ID. Being worried about automated decision-making in a bill that legislates for digital ID is like receiving a gun-shot wound to the chest and worrying about the dry-cleaning bill.

The bloody awful news – Digital ID

As bold as brass, part 2 of the bill “contains provision to secure the reliability of digital verification services”. That’s digital ID, which will serve as a gateway for accessing online services – banking, commercial, health, you name it. No digital ID, no services. So, what’s the problem?, you ask. Just get your digital ID and get on with life in the digital world.

That is an option, but here’s my realist view of how it would pan out.

Think of a digital ID as a key to your safe. The safe contains two items. The first consists of services that you want or in some cases need. The second is the byproduct of navigating your online world – your digital footprint consisting of personal data and your online history. If that key worked in the way you wanted it to, it would grant you permission to use all the essential services you want and, equally importantly, it would prevent people you don’t know or trust from sneaking a peek at your digital footprint.

Combined with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the continuing erosion of data privacy and free speech created by this DUA Bill and other bills like the misnamed Online Censorship Safety Act, your digital ID will end up doing the exact opposite of what the Bill’s promoters say it will. Government departments and financial service providers will end up having access to your online footprint and personal data, and they will use it against you in order to control your behaviour. Based on an approved footprint, your online history and personal data will be used to grant you access to certain services, but, based on bad online behaviour, you will be barred from accessing other services. You will be nudged, coerced, cajoled, bullied and jailed into being an exemplary subject of the public-private partnership that has been forged between your government and the corporatocracy that owns it.

The development of CBDCs around the world continues apace, and the Bank of England (BoE), despite its softly-softly language, is firmly committed to its Digital Pound. The BoE takes its lead from the brain of central banks, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and the global digitalisation of finance is a top priority of the BIS.[i]

In a previous report on CBDCs, Big Brother Watch warned of the widely acknowledged risk of CBDCs, stating that: “In the worst case scenario, programmability features could enable complete government control over how money is spent. The process could begin innocuously…However, this functionality could open the door for a world in which governments dictate how CBDCs are spent”.

That report specifically warned of the lethal combination of CBDCs and Digital ID: “implementing CBDCs with a digital ID system would redefine individuals’ ability to access the economy, making it dependent on having both a digital identity and a CBDC […] It is possible that CBDCs could introduce new digital ID capabilities such as biometric checking”.

So it’s puzzling to me that Big Brother Watch have, in their latest briefing on the DUA Bill, failed to mention the Bill’s provision for financial services interfaces. Clause 14 of the Bill empowers the Treasury to make provision “enabling or requiring the Financial Conduct Authority […] to make rules requiring financial services providers described in the regulations to use a prescribed interface, comply with prescribed interface standards or participate in prescribed interface arrangements, when providing or receiving customer data or business data which is required to be provided by or to the financial services provider by data regulations.”

This is a clear signal that not only can banks and other financial services providers expect a lot more personal data to flow in their direction from sources other than their primary customer operations, but they will be expected to ensure that this data can be smoothly integrated into their systems for processing and decision-making. In other words, the government is paving the legal road for payment platforms like CBDCs to interface with third-party “customer data or business data”, thus enabling the programmability features that Big Brother Watch warned about in its CBDC report.

The not-so-good news

By increasing the latitude that data controllers have to determine their “legitimate interests” in processing data, the Bill weakens the individual’s right to prevent personal data from being processed. In effect, legitimate reasons an organisation might have for processing personal data have been greatly expanded and made more opaque at the same time. The list of recognised legitimate interests is also easily amendable in the future.

The objective is to make it easier for organisations, in particular those involved in building AI tools, to share data and feed the AI beast. For AI to rule over us, it must have an endless flow of data, and your need for privacy is getting in its way. The AI deity must also have the final say in decisions it makes about you, which is why the bill strengthens the automated decision-making (ADM) powers of tech operators.

Whereas currently there is a general prohibition on fully automated decision-making that has a legal or ‘similarly significant’ effect on individuals, the Bill seeks to completely reverse this by generally allowing ADM, subject to some safeguards. These safeguards are, needless to say, not exactly robust. When applied to law enforcement, ADM will have truly frightening consequences. The use of AI by police in the UK has already caused grief [ii] so giving it carte blanche in this fashion will not end well.

Bottom line

Here is a simple equation to sum up where we are heading with the DUA Bill:

Digital ID + ADM + CBDC = Digital Gulag

The DUA Bill provides the foundations for the first two elements of the equation. To stress: Part 2 of the Bill is all about creating the infrastructure for a digital identity system, so we must forget about bullshit statements in the Big Brother Watch report like: “[…] there is no immediate plan for the introduction of a UK-wide mandatory digital ID”. After all, I imagine the inventor of the gun uttered words along the lines of: “there is no immediate plan for the gun to be used to shoot anyone.”

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[i] 5 projects are listed under the heading “Provision of money”, 4 of which are centred on CBDCs.

[ii] https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Big-Brother-Watchs-Briefing-on-the-Data-Use-and-Access-Bill-for-Second-Reading-HoC-2025.pdf - paragraph 52.