There will never be a mandatory British digital ID or 'Britcard' - if millions of us say NO.

It's that simple.

If you're with me:

1) Join Big Brother Watch: bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/join/now/

2) Sign the petition: no2digitalID.co.uk

We will fight this tooth + nail - and we'll win. Starmer's plans for a mandatory digital ID would make us all reliant on a digital pass to go about our daily lives, turning us into a checkpoint society that is wholly unBritish.

Digital IDs would do absolutely nothing to deter small boats but would make Britain less free

I hate saying ‘I told you so’ about the Online Safety Act, but I really DID - I also gave evidence to parliament

It’s mad I was made to feel somehow subversive for defending free speech 🫠

The Act is a total disaster… We need to revive free speech in British culture ASAP

https://twitter.com/bigbrotherwatch/status/1451165792242999297

It is completely and utterly UNHINGED that citizens of a democracy now have to show their passports or undergo biometric checks just to eg listen to music on Spotify 🫠🫠🫠

The vast majority of parliament is to blame for this travesty

https://twitter.com/boogusangoos/status/1950015652430741749

URGENT🚨 Me + Londoner Shaun Thompson are fighting a legal battle to roll back police live facial recognition

We’re trying to stop Britain becoming an AI open prison..

But a new court order means we desperately need people to chip in for us to do this⬇️

crowdfunder.co.uk/p/stop-facial-… A court ordered that if we lose we’d have to pay the police a whopping £70k

This shock forces us to consider dropping out

But if we do it’d be a green light to the state to monitor the public with live facial recognition cameras

So whatever it takes I believe we MUST fight on

🚨The UK Government has issued a *secret order* to have constant access to ALL of our iPhone data.

Not just for UK citizens, but the world 😱

If Apple has been given this (TCN*) order, I expect WhatsApp, Meta etc will have been as well…

2025 is the new 1984?!

https://twitter.com/bigbrotherwatch/status/1887848176985534553

It is completely unprecedented for a Government in any democracy to take our ability to have a private conversation, without the state listening in, away from millions of its own citizens - let alone the world.

It is sinister in the extreme.

They are saying the quiet bit out loud now…

Tony Blair calls for mandatory digital IDs in the UK - this time, to “get tough on populism” 🥴 This whole interview reads like an insane, anti-human sales pitch from a washed up warlord-turned-AI salesman who randomly generates buzzwords to shill for whichever monster pays him the most on the day (oh, hang on…)

If you can bother/bear to read it thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

🚨There is an ENORMOUS power grab today with Govt publishing a new law to

- take money directly out of our bank accounts

- revoke our driving licenses (!)

- constantly monitor the population’s bank statements

- search houses + devices

Unprecedented and outrageous - a🧵 Labour (!) ministers are selling this on the premise of ‘the biggest fraud crackdown in a generation’ - it’s actually one of the biggest assaults on the welfare system in a generation.

It’s part of a wider plan that is turning British welfare into a digital surveillance system.

Our response to Starmer’s bank spying plans in “Fraud, Error and Debt Bill” in full:

I also want to give context & explain why this is *exactly the same* so far as the Tory Govt’s benefits bank spying powers Labour criticised & we defeated just 3m ago🧵bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/bankspying/big… Labour’s bank spying plan, published today, is set out here:

Everyone wants fraud to be dealt with, and the government already has strong powers to investigate the bank statements of suspects. BUTgov.uk/government/new…

🚨 Government has rebooted the Counter Disinformation Unit to monitor lawful online speech.

Isn’t it curious how almost every problem this country faces seems to have a ready-made solution rooted in digital authoritarianism?

I’m ✍️ in @Telegraph today:

telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/0…
If the history of chaos that threatens democracy teaches us anything, it is to protect our democratic rights with more vigour, not less, when they are under threat.

Criminal activity and inciting violence online should be prosecuted.

But lawful speech should be out of bounds.

💥We have new docs showing multiple arms of British military have monitored *domestic* social media under the banner of countering “mis/disinformation”

They even factored the “presentational risk” of “spying” & doing “PSYOPS” in UK - but thought it “unlikely” they’d be found out For the 1st time, docs show it didn’t only involve the information warfare army unit 77 Brigade, but the RAF!

And that they weren’t only spying for the Cabinet Office but also for DCMS (now @SciTechgovuk) Counter Disinformation Unit - & checking for terms of service violations🙄

💥HUGE NEWS

We’ve got documentary evidence that UK MoD 77th Brigade monitored British politicians inc @CarolineLucas & press inc @BBCPolitics under the guise of “countering disinformation” - if they (I kid you not) “questioned government decision making”

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… It’s also evidence of a cover up.

Because the British Army previously claimed that the 77th Brigade “do not, and have never, conducted any kind of action against British citizens” and that “all work is internationally focused.”

That was a lie.

The UK’s becoming the data dumpster of Europe where our sensitive data can be harvested like nowhere else.

Facial recognition surveillance is soon to be routinely used by police + increasingly in shops.

Only China/Russia routinely use face rec like this

StopFacialRecognition.org This is in no small part due to weak, ineffective regulators.

We made a 45pg complaint to @ICOnews with all the ways facial recognition company Facewatch is breaking the law. A year later, they sent a 1pg reply that didn’t address the facts + said they’d take no further action.

🚨NEWS: UK Govnt announce steps towards potentially introducing a CBDC - centralised bank digital currency.

Resharing my opinion piece from last year on the civil liberties risks of an increasingly cashless society…

Use it or lose it! 💷

telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2022/0… The consultation starts Tuesday.

Parliament’s Economics Affairs Committee analysed CBDCs last year and concluded there was *no case* for a UK CBDC - but serious risks of state surveillance and a “centralised point of failure”.

CBDCs also go in hand with digital IDs.

https://twitter.com/silkiecarlo/status/1533750011346944000

It has been 1 week since we published the #MinistryOfTruth - it had a spread, column + leader in the UK’s most read paper; 1.4mil people saw the Twitter thread(!); hundreds of thousands are watching reporting/discussion about it online.

Unfortunately, the BBC hasn’t covered it.

https://twitter.com/bigbrotherwatch/status/1619625886009131008

Despite teams of “disinformation specialists”.

Even if they think UK govt depts hosting McCarthyite enclaves of truth admins who collate reports on MPs & academics is A ok, don’t they think there’s a public interest in military power being deployed at our own population online?

Whilst we welcome this probe, and that the Defence Secretary is clearly concerned by the #MinistryOfTruth exposé… he seems to admit the role of 77th Brigade in domestic monitoring?! Which they had *always* denied.

“It uses (…) social media to assess UK disinformation trends”

https://twitter.com/bigbrotherwatch/status/1620477251664879634

This is a significant departure (as found in our investigation) from claims in previous statements - eg Gen. Nick Carter in 2020:

“The 77th Brigade are not currently supporting in the Cabinet Office with any projects that would involve interactions with British Citizens” and

“I haven’t read the #MinistryOfTruth report but it’s nonsense” says MP @JamesSunderl

It took huge courage from the whistleblower, who is a patriot, and a huge amount of work by my team and the Mail on Sunday to publish this important information. I’ll post key passages for you.

https://twitter.com/TalkTV/status/1620019233353506819

This is the whistleblower’s testimony.

Everyone agrees the army had more important things to do. That’s not why the truth is “nonsense”, it’s why it’s a scandal.

77x was poorly resourced and badly directed. The outcome was undemocratic.

Full report: bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

Today we released a complex investigation - I want to clarify something that some have misunderstood.

The prolific monitoring/reporting of critics was government’s Counter Disinformation Unit in the Culture Department. Attention must be focused there - it needs to be shut down

https://twitter.com/silkiecarlo/status/1619642460925476866

The 77th Brigade did schoolboy key word Twitter searches & effectively sentiment analysis. They didn’t have clearance to repeatedly view individual accounts & they had very poor resources. Please read the whistleblower’s testimony carefully in our report bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

Take it from someone who works day in day out to defend free speech *and* privacy - this is dangerous, headline-chasing nonsense from @DominicRaab that will in fact emaciate the greatest constitutional protections for citizens’ liberties in Britain - rights Churchill fought for. If you’re worried about “cancel culture”, as I am, you’ll be worried about a) Dominic Raab trying to cancel our human rights and b) the Online Safety Bill he presides over, which poses one of the greatest threats to free speech of any law in living memory - a censor’s charter.

An unexpected visitor to the Met police deployment of facial recognition today, Commissioner Cressida Dick. And we left her with nothing to say..! #StopFacialRecognition Transcript:

Me: (..) 95% of the flags are misidentifications

CD: I’m sorry, we’re not going to agree on this

Me: No we won’t because these are the facts

CD: Nobody’s privacy was intruded on was it? (smiles 🥴)

Me: Absolutely it was

SOLIDARITY with Freedom Convoys against vaccine mandates, against the wave of anti-working class authoritarianism, from Canada to France to New Zealand ✌️

“Fears it may affect the Super Bowl” 🤪 you can’t make this stuff up… give your head a wobble @Newsweek

The end of Covid passes in England is a MONUMENTAL victory for civil liberties & equality 🎉

What separates us from much of the covid-ID-managed West is the principled courage of every Brit who stood up when it mattered, against the odds, & our uniquely strong civil society 👊 Not many countries have had active + impactful civil liberties organisations during the pandemic, & it shows.

Here’s a run down of just *some* of the work we’ve done, thanks to incredible public support, to push back on covid IDs over the past 20 months!

crowdfunder.co.uk/p/join-the-cha…

Buckle up 😬

This afternoon, the government’s anti-democracy agenda dominates parliament, with Bills being progressed to criminalise just about any protest, entrench pandemic anti-protest laws that banned the Clapham vigil, and impose mandatory voter ID - a leap to national ID. This is despite the fact we already have *extensive* laws to deal with protest actions like road blocking, and there are vanishingly few cases of ballot box fraud.

Yet millions stand to be silenced and disenfranchised after this power grab.