Digital Identity and Freedom

Digital Identity is not just about smart technology: it is mostly about freedom.
It is the most sweeping reform of civil liberties since the habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights.
It is not about e-commerce with the Public Administration.
If we would wire a democratic state into the internet, then we would have the state catering services to the websites of the citizen (those who bother to have one).
But the citizen with a one-fit-for-all password to access from one portal all public services in a system supported by a centralized national registrar of the population, is an orwellian scenario, a gigantic Warsaw Getto for cooperationists.
The last Italian Prime Minister that reduced civil liberties in the name of modernity and state efficiency, was Benito Mussolini.
Not a crook. An idealist, convinced that the end justifies the means.
Mussolini, the only Italian Prime Minister in charge for 22 years, also introduced the identity card, following the German example, that came in handy for genocide. Think about it: make a genocide without personal id’s… It’s messy, like in Serbia. You have to pick up people from the streets, in front of witnesses. The Germans didn’t know about genocide; most of them, at least, really didn’t.
Most jews consigned themselves to the nazionalsocialists, because they new they were all filed and labelled. There was no escape.
Digital Identity is one such piece of tricky technology.
We all know now about NSA’s disturbing practices, and it is finally official that commercial cryptography has backdoors imposed by secret services (the Freak bug)

FREAK: Security Rollback Attack Against SSL This week, we learned about an attack called “FREAK”—”Factoring Attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys”—that can break the encryption of many websites. Basically, some sites’ implementations of secure sockets layer technology, or SSL, contain both strong encryption algorithms and weak encryption algorithms. Connections are supposed to use the strong algorithms, but in many cases an attacker can force the website to use the weaker encryption algorithms and then decrypt the traffic. From Ars Technica: In recent days, a scan of more than 14 million websites that support the secure sockets layer or transport layer security protocols found that more than 36 percent of them were vulnerable to the decryption attacks. The exploit takes about seven hours to carry out and costs as little as $100 per site… Schneier on Security Comments

Digital passports, extensive use of biometry to tag us unmistakably and now… digital identities!

Is this a new kind of freedom?

I am not so sure. It looks to me as some kind of oppressive protection: like a too anxious mommy… but also like the pervasive eavesdropping and snooping of some communist “democracies”.
What I see, is that Italians, again (as in the ’20s) are ready to trade in freedom for a bit of “security”.
Is it a coincidence, that this happens again, when the generation that experienced the horrors of fascism, war and genocide is dying out?
The financial meltdown of 2009 happened 80 years after the great depression.
What price are we prepared to pay for Europe 2020? http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/europe-2020-in-a-nutshell/index_en.htm