Government and Policy

WEF Agenda touts biometric digital identity, liveness detection to combat deepfakes

The same digital ID components were also used to keep people in lockdown with selfie check-in apps: perspective

The globalist agenda for every citizen to have a digital identity has yet another crisis to exploit — AI deepfakes, and the solution uses the same tech that kept people in lockdown with selfie check-in apps.

The push for digital identity and digital ID comes from a variety of fronts, for example:

  • Climate: To track individual carbon footprints and prove climate refugee statuses
  • COVID: To mandate vaccines passports leading to mass compliance while providing the digital framework to enact similar policies in the future
  • CBDC: To adopt identity verified solutions in order to eliminate anonymity and record every transaction
  • Cybersecurity: To exploit cyberattacks as a means to kickstart national identity systems and to create a passport to the metaverse
  • Convenience: To create an all encompassing, interoperable framework in order to enable all life situations

Now, the digital identity agenda is turning its head towards AI-generated deepfakes, with biometric digital identity and “liveness” detection as the solutions.

“Today’s organizations can fight fire with fire, defeating deepfake and AI technologies with rapidly advancing biometric technology”

Source: World Economic Forum

According to a World Economic Forum (WEF) Agenda blog post published on January 4, 2024:

“As AI technology continues to advance, organizations have to work harder to ensure their customers’ and employees’ data and identities are safe – and that they are remotely hiring actual people who match their IDs.

“Today’s organizations can fight fire with fire, defeating deepfake and AI technologies with rapidly advancing biometric technology.”

According to the author, Incode founder and CEO Ricardo Amper:

“Biometric technology offers a better way to verify identity and is becoming easier and better to use […] Attributes like your fingerprints or face become your password, and they’re unique to you”

For businesses and their customers, the author adds that:

“Biometric technology also offers a quick, seamless and affordable way for organizations to practice advanced identity verification. Their customers don’t need to remember complicated strings of numbers and letters, and verification can happen passively – think of how some people can unlock their cellphone with their face, for instance”

This face-scan solution may work if the bad actors are conducting illegal activities remotely while targeting companies and their customers, but how does opening your phone with your face fare in a face-to-face confrontation?

For example, in December 2023, a YouTuber with a channel called “Dr. Travel” recounted a horrendous ordeal about being drugged with scopolamine in Medellin, Colombia.

Using his face while he was blacked-out, the criminals were able to gain access to all his accounts and finances, including crypto, and the thieves were able to drain him of about $15,000.

So, while the WEF Agenda blog author says that “biometric ID verification is so secure” in remote settings, it can actually do the opposite and facilitate a robbery conducted in-person.

And this brings us to another biometric ID solution proposed in the WEF Agenda blog — something called “liveness detection” or “liveness verification,” which could off-set that risk.

According to Amper:

“If a security check requires a selfie for facial recognition, a criminal could try to present a photo or video instead of a real-time life selfie. Liveness detection can combat these efforts by helping to determine if it’s a real, live person in the selfie”

So, in this particular case, a liveness check could potentially be used to distinguish whether a person is conscious or not.

Either way, liveness detection was a key feature in a recent demonstration involving digital identity and air travel.

Last year, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), in partnership with Swiss-based digital identity solutions provider SICPA, demonstrated “the first fully integrated digital identity travel experience” that incorporated liveness detection in the process.

The demonstration took place at the IATA World Passenger Symposium in Chicago on October 25, showing how passengers could create a digital passport linked with their digital wallets by scanning their passport with a mobile device and verifying identity through a “biometric liveness check.”

According to the announcement, “The tamper-proof digital credential is stored in the digital wallet of the travelers and can be provided to third-party verifiers to have access to different types of services.”

While biometric digital identity is being touted for its convenience and cyber-resilience, it was also used by governments and corporations for population control and compliance during lockdowns.

For example, in 2021, South Australia launched its “Home Quarantine SA” app that “randomly alerts users to verify their location and send a selfie back to authorities within 15 minutes to prove they are at the home they have registered to quarantine at,” according to The Guardian.

The same happened in Poland even earlier. In March 2020, the Polish government launched its “Home Quarantine” app “for people undergoing the mandatory 14-day quarantine after returning from abroad,” according to France24.

At the time, a government spokesperson told AFP:

“People in quarantine have a choice: either receive unexpected visits from the police, or download this app”

Also in 2020, LiveMint reported that the Karnataka state government in India mandated that “All persons under order of home quarantine shall send their selfie to (the) government every one hour from home,” and that “Those who fail to send selfies every one hour (except sleeping time from 10pm to 7am) will be sent to mass quarantine centers.”

First came contact tracing and the selfie check-in apps, and then came vaccine passports.

Now, biometric digital identity is being touted as a way to combat AI-generated deepfakes, and this same technology has already been demonstrated to be proven useful in controlling people’s movements during government-mandated lockdowns.

Next comes programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) that cannot operate without digital identity, where all transactions are recorded on a single ledger, and restrictions can be placed on what you can buy, where you can buy it, and when.

It’s all part of an authoritarian agenda known as the great reset, which is leading society towards a system of social credit based on incentivizing, coercing, or otherwise manipulating people into giving up their anonymity, autonomy, and freedom under the guise of combatting any given crisis — real or invented.


Image by Freepik

Tim Hinchliffe

The Sociable editor Tim Hinchliffe covers tech and society, with perspectives on public and private policies proposed by governments, unelected globalists, think tanks, big tech companies, defense departments, and intelligence agencies. Previously, Tim was a reporter for the Ghanaian Chronicle in West Africa and an editor at Colombia Reports in South America. These days, he is only responsible for articles he writes and publishes in his own name. tim@sociable.co

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