Digital Identity Proposals By French Politicians Raise Concerns For Privacy Advocates. Fearing A China Style Social Credit System.

Just days after President Emmanuel Macron’s victory, the French government announced the establishment of a new digital identification app that would allow users to access both public and private services.

According to a translated announcement posted on the French government’s website, Prime Minister Jean Castex and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin signed a decree establishing the “Digital Identity Guarantee Service.” It will provide French residents access to a digital ID card, which is also in line with the European Union’s Digital Identity package.

According to French news site BFMTV, customers would be able to scan their actual identity card to gain access to services. The digital identification software will not save fingerprints, but it will store information such as a photo, email and physical addresses, birth dates, and names.

According to the French government order, the app “allows the user, in particular, to produce electronic certificates including just the identifying features that he feels relevant for transmission to third parties of his choice.”

Although the government has made certain aspects of the order public, it is unclear how widely the app will be utilized in France. France was one of the first European nations to implement a vaccination passport system during the COVID-19 epidemic, which affected restaurants, salons, and several kinds of public transportation.

The head of the Les Patriotes, Florian Philippot, called on French voters to reject the decree when it was signed this week. According to Philippot, the approach is akin to the Chinese Communist Party’s use of a social credit system to track and punish individuals.

He stated on Twitter, “Just after the election, the administration announces the launch of ‘a digital identification application.'” “The idea is to implement social credit in a Chinese-style manner. Company that provides security and monitoring!

Digital identity opponents, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, have claimed that such plans would jeopardize users’ privacy.

“Second, a shoddy digital identification system might be a privacy nightmare.” Such a system might make it so simple to ask for people’s IDs that these requests become so common that we’re forced to share our ID at every opportunity, including online. Without adequate privacy safeguards, digital IDs might allow for “centralized surveillance of every place (both online and offline) where we display our ID,” according to a statement released by the ACLU last year.

Meanwhile, voters in France will go to the polls again in June for legislative elections, where Macron’s party may lose its majority.

According to a declaration made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last year, the European Union will implement a digital identification application in 2022.

“It will enable everyone in the EU to control their online identity and connect with governments and companies,” von der Leyen added.

As technology continues to innovate, it will become progressively more difficult to fend off this agenda to track and trace citizens and strip people of their rights to privacy. You can see it now, how every single thing you interact with on the internet stick to your computer like a bee carries pollen. Digital exploration is sticky. Reason for concern begins when you take this technological tracking framework, and implement it into society. It would only serve to add boundaries and restrictions that will only strengthen as time goes on.

No one man can make sense of this elaborate illusion cast over the common man of society, but collectively we can point out each limitation forced upon us and bring it forward as an injustice to the public. In Matthew 10:34 Jesus says: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” We’re meant to go down preaching the gospel and guiding others to salvation. This could be considered the bravest task a man or woman of faith could undertake, but make no mistake it will bear fruit in the kingdom of heaven. Stay inquisitive in the word of God, and the world around you.

In a crime billed as “one of the biggest hacks in history,” hackers stole more than $600 million in cryptocurrency from a gaming-focused blockchain.

The hackers got off with millions of dollars in Ethereum and USD Coin from Ronin, the blockchain that underpins Sky Mavis’ popular crypto game Axie Infinity.

Axie Infinity employs “cutting edge technology called Blockchain to reward players for their engagement,” according to its website, and the totally player-owned economy allows users to “seamlessly sell and trade their game assets for digital cash.”

Axie Infinity’s Ronin network announced in a blog post on March 29 that it had lost 173,600 ethers (Ethereum tokens) worth $589 million, as well as $25.5 million in USD coin, a “stablecoin” that is pegged to the US dollar.

Ronin’s finances are being tracked by the blockchain data platform Chainalysis.

Ronin stated that it is working with law enforcement, forensic cryptographers, and investors to retrieve or compensate all of the stolen monies, and that “all of the AXS, RON, and SLP on Ronin are safe right now,” referring to the game’s other tokens.

The validator nodes for Sky Mavis, Ronin’s and Axie Infinity’s operator, and Axie DAO (a decentralized autonomous organization), according to Ronin’s March 29 blog post, were compromised on March 23.

The attacker “used compromised private keys to fabricate fake withdrawals,” according to Ronin, who detected the problem on March 29 after a user reported being unable to withdraw Ethereum coins from the bridge, which connects Axie Infinity to other blockchains like Ethereum.

The validator nodes in Sky Mavis’ Ronin chain are nine, according to Ronin.

“Five out of the nine validator signatures are required to acknowledge a deposit event or a withdrawal event.” Sky Mavis’ four Ronin validators, as well as a third-party validator run by Axie DAO, were all taken over by the attacker,” Ronin claimed.

The attacker “discovered a backdoor using our gas-free RPC node, which they leveraged to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator,” Ronin added.

As part of the ongoing inquiry, the Ronin bridge and Katana Dex, the Ronin decentralized exchange, have been disabled.

The attack was aided in part by a move taken by the company in November 2021, when “Sky Mavis requested help from the Axie DAO to distribute free transactions owing to a significant user load,” according to Ronin.

“The Axie DAO gave Sky Mavis permission to sign transactions on its behalf.” The allowlist access was not revoked when the service was stopped in December 2021, according to the firm.

Ronin is now in talks with stakeholders from Axie Infinity and Sky Mavis about the next steps and how to “guarantee no users’ monies are wasted.”

Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin said “it is one of the bigger hacks in history” during a keynote talk at the NFT LA conference in Los Angeles on March 29, according to CNN.

The sum taken in the most recent attack is similar to that taken in August 2021 in a significant hack of decentralized finance platform Poly Network, which was one of the largest ever digital coin heists at the time. The monies stolen by the hacker were later refunded.

This is only the beginning of a tsunami of cyber infrastructure being prodded at as people inevitably test their skills behind a computer in light of global political unrest. The truth is, cyber security is a cat and mouse game. Vulnerabilities are inherent in these complex systems because they’re built for the end user, and not to prevent people from snooping around in the back end. Most of the cyber infrastructure currently in place could be considered practically naked in terms of cyber security because there are so many ways to exploit data. Why else would China go crazy for data like the leprechaun hoarding lucky charms in the old commercials? It’s valuable and its available; There’s a market for it, and you’re the product. Our complex way of life as a civilization has inadvertently created multiple back doors to be exploited by people more tech savvy than the rest of us. Technology related vulnerabilities can be expected to be magnified and exploited in the coming years for various reasons; political or criminally motivated.