US Digital ID System Proceeds to Senate for Debate

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democrat and now an Independent, speaks at a news conference after the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act at the Capitol Building in Washington on Nov. 29, 2022. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

A digital identity verification system could be soon set up in the United States, with the legislation behind the initiative now progressing to the Senate for debate.

Introduced by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), the S.884 bill is known as the “Improving Digital Identity Act of 2023” and was introduced in the Senate on March 21 after getting passed by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“The lack of an easy, affordable, reliable, and secure way for organizations, businesses, and government agencies to identify whether an individual is who they claim to be online creates an attack vector that is widely exploited by adversaries in cyberspace and precludes many high-value transactions from being available online,” said the bill text. “Incidents of identity theft and identity fraud continue to rise in the United States, where more than 293,000,000 people were impacted by data breaches in 2021.

“Since 2017, losses resulting from identity fraud have increased by 333 percent, and, in 2020, those losses totaled $56,000,000,000.”

The bill calls for an interagency task force to head a combined public-private collaboration, which will “help all citizens more easily and securely engage in transactions online” and “prove who they are online.”

European ID Solution

A digital ID solution is increasingly sought by many governments around the world. In the Western world, the push toward adopting a digital ID is led by members of the European Union. The European Parliament confirmed, last month, with a majority 418 votes to 103, a new digital identity framework that seeks to provide EU citizens with digital access to key public services across EU borders.

According to the press release, the digital access initiative “would also give users full control of their data and let them decide what information to share and with whom.”

James Melville, a political commentator, said that it would be better for citizens to monitor governments. “Instead of a digital ID app that allows governments to snoop on us, what about having a digital ID app that allows us to track government spending, MPs expenses, second jobs & who they meet with? Because they work for us rather than us working for them,” Melville said in an April 11 tweet.

Melville said in another tweet that digital IDs are “a giant con-trick to manipulate people into surveillance, government control and loss of freedoms and human dignity.”

Canadian Privacy Report

Many critics of the proposal have denounced the move by international governments, with the Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms releasing a report on financial surveillance and privacy concerns of a digital ID system.

“Information technologies with data-tracking and/or user-profiling capabilities generate significant privacy concerns,” said part one of the report (pdf) released April 4. “Proposals for Canadian digital identification frameworks often make accommodations for those frameworks to have data-tracking and user-profiling capabilities and do, therefore, generate privacy concerns.

“Furthermore, technologies with such capabilities may generate additional concerns surrounding freedom, mobility, security, equality, access, autonomy, consent, and human dignity. These concerns sometimes engage the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to which Canadians should appeal in any contest between privacy rights and government intrusions into properly private spheres of human life.”

The report points out a “tension between protecting private spheres from government surveillance and providing Canadians with convenient and secure access to goods and services.”

However, some aspects of the digital ID enhance privacy, in that, digital ID users can exchange only that information about themselves, which is necessary for transactions to occur, unlike a physical transaction where the whole document containing all details is exchanged. Irrelevant information like residence address could be bypassed in a digital system.

Some of the most intrusive aspects of ID technologies include functionalities that allow governments and partnering agencies to track user behaviors across time and to develop “complex profiles of their identities.” These behaviors are then “rewarded” or “punished” by the governments like the social credit system used in China.

The report calls on Canadians to prevent governments from scrutinizing their “intimate identities” and “invade every remaining private domain,” while adding that governments may try to sell digital IDs as a “mere digital counterpart” to already-available physical identification documents.