Identity Crisis
Four years ago, a medical emergency worker found me slumped over a sidewalk, bleeding from the mouth, and asked me who I was. I couldn’t answer him then, but if I had the ability to speak, I would have told him I was Trevor Mack, and I was Tsilhqot’in.
The word Tsilhqot’in means “people of the river,” an identity that embodies my peoples’ interconnection to the waters that give us life, the mountains that control our weather systems, and the lakes that replenish our beings. Our connection to place is an umbilical cord we share with the natural law of the universe, a connection that is billions of years old. In contrast, quite recently, people moved to our territories and tried to sell us ideas about who we are and what we should value, by force. Backed by Canada’s constitutional monarchy and a powerful institution known as the Roman Catholic Church, Indigenous Peoples faced attempted genocide of all we are and know to be true and suffered unfettered assimilation — a brand new identity for a brand new Indian. But we fought to protect who we are as people of the river, and today, we must fight again.
COVID-19, which has swept rapidly across the world, has made hundreds of millions of people question themselves within the colonial technocracies we operate in. We ask perhaps now more than ever: Am I my job? Am I the products I buy? Am I the sports team I cheer for? Who am I? It's scary to experience everything you have based your identity off of begin to disappear. However, several multi-trillion dollar companies think they know us better than we know ourselves, and they are about to make it harder for us to ever hold on to our tangible connections with Mother Earth — unless we do something about it.
Unprecedented measures are being made by governments and corporations who have a history violating laws, destroying entire economies, and genocide against Indigenous Peoples and enslavement of Afro American peoples. Everything these authority figures tell us during the COVID-19 pandemic warrants unprecedented skepticism and at least curiosity.
In early March, when Italy was in full lockdown, footage of flying drones patrolling the streets went viral. Accompanying loudspeakers from the police vans below ordered, “Citizens, the current state of emergency requires us not to move from home unless absolutely necessary. Do not cross the city and stay in your home. Give up what is not of primary necessity and make this sacrifice.”
A surveillance drone operated by Italian police. © REUTERS/Max Rossi/file photo.
In South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel, authorities use smartphone location data to enforce individual quarantines. Moscow police say they’ve already busted 200 quarantine violators caught via facial recognition-enabled cameras. NSA contractor and perennial privacy offender Palantir is helping Britain’s National Health Service track infections. Apps that leverage a smartphone’s bounty of built-in, highly accurate sensors to enforce social distancing or map the movements of the infected have been deployed in Singapore, Poland, and Kenya; MIT researchers are now pitching a similar, but more “privacy friendly,” app. In Mexico, Uber sent government authorities rider data to trace the route of an infected tourist, also banning 240 users who’d taken rides with the same driver.
To curtail the virus, countries around the world have now implemented unfettered, mass surveillance programs otherwise known as “contact tracing”. Contact tracing is the Orwellian phrase for the 24/7 monitoring and data-crunching of every aspect of our lives; our actions, people we converse with, places we shop, who we walked past on the street, can now be replayed by the government and even volunteers using metadata. Never before have we seen the implementation of so many overt surveillance programs around the world.
China, the epitome of technocratic totalitarian rule in the world, placed the most extreme measures on its own people in order to stop the spread of the virus. Home to the Black Mirror-like ‘Social Credit System’, facial recognition cameras that catch you jaywalking, and kidnappings and jailing by police if you criticize the government and police, many citizens of large cities in China have been softly conditioned to accept digital dystopian levels of societal control.
In a morbid twist of reality, these measures made it easier for China to quell the spread of COVID-19. Authorities in China not only orchestrated one of the largest mass mobilization efforts in history, they went so far as welding the doors of apartments buildings shut, essentially trapping residents inside.
However, Edward Snowden, the world famous whistleblower who exposed the NSA’s near global collection of metadata, warns government surveillance amid COVID-19 could be long lasting. The events are eerily similar to the ones following September 11th, 2001, when lawmakers in the United States introduced the 342-page Patriot Act only a month after the attack, changing general society in the western world forever. Gone were the days of unmolested travel between countries, meaningful debates about individual privacy, and barriers between government and corporations.
There are more than nineteen companies worldwide working on a potential vaccine or treatment for the novel coronavirus. Among them are pharmaceutical and biotech giants Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson. They are racing towards a finish line in which the winner will make an exorbitant amount of money.
By 2024, the global vaccines market is expected to be worth $58.4 billion, making it one of the most “rewarding” markets in the intangible economic ether. Just squeezing by the vaccine market is the biometric systems market, slated to be worth $65.5 billion by 2024. However, these numbers pale compared to the potential growth of surveillance capitalism as a whole, which involves companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Clearly there is big money in big data. In fact, data has become the most valuable commodity in the history of the human economic paradigm.
Combining vaccines, biometrics and the latest digital surveillance technology is an organization called ‘ID2020: The Alliance’. It is a conglomerate of multibillion dollar companies and legacy organizations coming together to rid the world of infectious diseases.
ID2020 was founded in 2017, with seed funding from Accenture, a global management consulting and professional services firm, GAVI, the Vaccination Alliance, a vaccination organization that brings together publicly funded organizations and for-profit-corporations to bring equal access to new vaccines to children living in countries ravaged by colonialism and capitalism, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which has sought to improve the well-being of humanity around the world through funding initiatives such as the Nazi eugenics program. In 2018, IDEO.org joined ID2020 as a partner. IDEO is an international design and consulting firm that designs products, services and experiences to improve the lives of people in “poor and vulnerable communities.” A trillion dollar member also joined in 2018: Microsoft became part of ID2020’s Technical and Program Delivery Advisory Commitees.
ID2020 Alliance and Governance board image © ID2020.
What is ID2020’s goal?
They are an allegiance of companies looking to create digital identities for every person on Earth. A digital identity given to you at birth that lasts until your death. From their digital identity page:
Private: Only you control your own identity
Portable: Accessible anywhere you happen to be through multiple methods
Persistent: Lives with you from life to death
Personal: Unique to you and you only
However, ID2020 isn’t doing this by themselves. On their submissions page, you can apply for funding to create a digital identity that “has the potential to improve individual’s lives.” In 2018, ID2020 partnered with iRespond and the International Rescue Committee to provide a digital identity platform to refugees in the Mae La Camp in Thailand. This was implemented by scanning an individual’s iris and generating a unique numeric ID (known as UniD). ID2020 writes, “through their digital identities, participants will be able to access improved health-care services but also securely store educational and professional credentials; educational attainment and professional skills to aid with employment and opportunities.”
On their homepage, large white text defiantly announces iRespond’s goal: “Digital identity for everyone on the planet.” In an interview with Sovrin, a funding partner, they state, “Trusted identity is lacking or non-existent in many parts of the world. Without verifiable identity, already exploited populations can struggle to have access to social services, banking, education or even basic human rights. iRespond is already protecting hundreds of thousands worldwide, bringing the invisible out of the shadows and allowing them to participate in the world and economy.” iRespond has worked with companies and organizations such as the WHO, Department of Global Health, CDC, Johns Hopkins, ID2020 and Microsoft.
iRespond’s homepage.
In an October 2018 blogpost on Medium, ID2020 notes: “In 2018, ID2020 also partnered with Everest, a blockchain software company, and The Indonesian National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) in the office of the Vice President of the Government of Indonesia. The pilot streamlined transfer of liquid petroleum gas (LPG) subsidies to beneficiaries by delivering them to a biometrically backed digital wallet, reducing financial leakage and modernizing subsidy delivery with a in the future financial inclusion by facilitating access to banking services.” ID2020 also claims, “the program team visited both the Thai and Indonesian sites and are proud to report that the projects are already having an impact, improving lives on the ground, “These projects are the first step towards scaling user-centric, privacy-protecting digital identity globally.””
In that same 2018 blogpost, ID2020 announced the addition of two members to their board of directors. Kim Cameron, a William Russell Kelly Professor of Management and Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and Blythe Masters, a former executive at JPMogan Chase and former CEO of, Digital Asset Holdings, a financial technology firm developing blockchain technology which can be used for mass implementation of digital identities. Masters is widely credited as the creator of the credit default swap as a financial instrument. In other words, she was one of the lead guitarists in a band hellbent on causing the 2008 global financial recession.
The seemingly innocent venture to help the “poorest and most vulnerable peoples” is quickly evaporated when you see the addition of business moguls, financiers, bankers, and criminals who are steering the colossal ship of ID2020. The 2018 Myanmar trials, which involve the potential to store educational and professional skills with biometric identities, and the Everest/TNP2K trial, which combines a biometrically backed digital wallet with potential to give banking services access to the transaction, all give an eerie picture of how the largest companies in the world will eventually steer the ship of human society; the complete digitization of human identity, which links your education attainments and business credentials to financial institutions and government databases.
Digital identification infrastructure as envisioned by Good ID. Credit: World Economic Forum
Surveillance Capitalism, a term coined by author Shoshona Zuboff, is the commodification of personal emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. In other words, to make money off of what makes us us. They do this by confining our identities to how we react within our technocratic, capitalistic society. The biggest players in extracting that data from us are Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. All of these companies have also had many run ins with the law. In 2018, the European Union slapped Google and Facebook with a whopping $8.8 billion fine for coercing users into sharing personal data. September 2019 saw a $170 million fine for Google and YouTube for allegedly violating New York’s children privacy laws. In December 2019, Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla were named as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington DC by human rights firm International Rights Advocates on behalf of 14 parents and children from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The lawsuit accuses the companies of aiding and abetting in the death and serious injury of children who they claim were working in cobalt mines in their supply chain. In fact, this piece will be nearly 20 pages long if I listed all of the lawsuits these companies have litigated for the past 25 years. If you’re still curious to explore their past, here are links to Apple Inc.’s litigation, Google’s litigation, Microsoft’s litigation, criticism's of Facebook, and criticism's of Amazon.
However, these massive corporations, who will clearly stop at nothing to mine as much data from our emotions, thoughts, travels, and relationships, have reached a physical barrier. After the plateau of the smartphone market, and the creation of a new Smart Home market, where our refrigerator, doorbell, vacuum cleaner, bed, and even toilet collect and share data of our everyday habits, now look to the “final frontier” of connection: our body.
With trillion dollar companies like Microsoft, and legacy organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation in pursuit to give digital identities to every person on earth, and the world at the perils of an emergency vaccination, ID2020 looks to be right where it was destined to be — even the name seems to know it. Just as a company needs a CEO; an initiative as big as this needs a trustee authority figure to convey its plan that to the world. And these companies have the perfect spokesperson. In a March 18, 2020 reddit AMA (ask me anything), Bill Gates declared, “eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”
Gates is referring to invisible ink “tattoos” developed by M.I.T. with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The “tattoos” are covertly embedded in the skin alongside the vaccine itself, and is only visible using a special smartphone camera app and filter. The project came about following a direct request from Gates himself. The team hope to add more information within the invisible ink, such as date of vaccination and insulin levels in diabetics, “this approach is likely to be one of many trying to solve the problem of storing individuals’ medical information,” says a biolab CEO interviewed in the linked article.
“M.I.T. engineers have developed a way to store medical information under the skin, using a quantum dot dye that is delivered, along with a vaccine, by a microneedle patch. The dye, which is invisible to the naked eye, can be read later using a specially adapted smartphone.” Credit: Second Bay Studios
Bill Gates, famous for becoming one of the richest people on the planet for violating anti-trust laws in the United States that led to the monumental presence of Microsoft in our lives, isn’t as squeaky clean as his vaccination TED talks makes him seem. In October 2019, The New York Times reported that he met with disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein at least three times — after Epstein was sentenced, in 2008, to 13 months in prison for procuring a child for prostitution. Gates also flew on Epstein’s jet from New Jersey to Palm Beach, Florida, according to a flight manifest. Gates’ spokeswoman claims Gates, who owns his own private jet, didn’t know it was Epstein’s plane. Though the relationship between Gates and Epstein apparently cooled off after 2014, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation remained in contact with Epstein through 2017.
Gates very much enjoys being the most famous philanthropist in the world. The advantage private philanthropy has over democratic leadership is the unregulated, unleashed programs they can create without voters and citizens to answer to. With assets of $46.8 billion, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest charitable foundation in the world. They are widely known for their efforts to eradicate polio and other diseases worldwide via vaccinations. However, just as Gates isn’t as squeaky clean as he seems, him and his wife’s foundation has also been under scrutiny. In a damning report by Global Justice Now, the authors claim the Gates Foundation “often appears to be a massive, vertically integrated multinational corporation, controlling every step in a supply chain that reaches from its Seattle-based boardroom to millions of end-users in the villages of Africa and south Asia.” The report also accuses the Gates Foundation of funding privatized health and promoting an increased role for private education providers. The danger, the report says, is that it “turns basic needs into commodities controlled by the market”; such services are likely to be accessed mainly by the rich. It is critical of emphasis on single diseases and points out that this is being done at the neglect of basic health care systems. It also points out that during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, basic healthcare collapsed completely in parts of the region.
At Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2011, from left: James E. Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers; Mr. Epstein; Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder; and Boris Nikolic, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s science adviser. Credit: The New York Times
In a March 17th, 2020 article, TheNation found the Gates Foundation donated nearly $2 billion to companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, AJ Vaccines AS, Janssen Vaccines & Prevention BV, LG Chem Ltd., Novavax Inc. — which includes companies the foundation held investments. The foundation explicitly marries its investing and charitable activities. Gates’ “strategic investment fund,” which the foundation says is designed to advance its philanthropic goals, not to generate investment income, includes a $7 million equity stake in the start-up company AgBiome, whose other investors include the agrochemical companies Monsanto, a company famous for causing cancer around the world with its products, and Syngenta, home to the largest agricultural litigation settlement in U.S. history. The foundation also gave the company $20 million in charitable grants to develop pesticides for African farmers.
Because Covid-19 has been taking up the 24/7 news cycle, Bill Gates (the former “computer guy”) has been justifiably featured with the same gravitas. He is constantly seen on U.S. corporate media such as CNN, NBC News, and CBS News advising what the public should expect and what governments and health authorities should be doing. Coincidentally, the news channels he is routinely featured on have seen nearly $6 billion in pharmaceutical ad spending a year. Other prominent figures around the globe are reiterated Gates’ talking points. The U.K, U.S., and other governments are stating they will hand out immunity certificates to their citizenry. Governments are also beginning trials for their ‘contact-tracing’ programs, which are 24/7 near-universal surveillance of the population. Some cities will even see their intersections infested with hovering drones equipped with thermal cameras.
Whether it’s invisible ink “tattoos”, bracelets, or certificates on our phones, soon we may have some type of physiological or digital proof what our health status is in order to take part in every day society. As I type this I look down into my wallet which holds my ‘Indian Status Card.’ A “proof of identity” forced upon millions of Indigenous people in Canada by the apartheid-level ‘Indian Act’. Enacted in 1876 by the Canadian government, identity built from tens of thousands of years tandem relation to animals, rivers, mountains, and lakes was confined into a series of numbers on a piece of plastic. Now, imagine a special card that you have to show authorities what your health status currently is whenever you have to board a plane, purchase a home, rent a car, apply for a job, enter a building or have a child. These ethically blurred suggestions of digital certificates by people such as Bill Gates, and the U.K. and U.S. health authorities has had absolutely zero public discussion and debate. The reason it hasn’t is, not only can this measure give governments a tighter container to hold their citizens within, there are trillions of dollars to be made from data that will be used to create a new cashless, digitized society – based upon our identities permanently imprinted in our bodies.
“Trevor Mack is an Indian within the meaning of the Indian Act.” Photo: Trevor Mack
Think it can’t happen? To travel within Shanghai, a city in China with a population of 25 million you may need a Shanghai Color Code. The Chinese city of Wuxi has the same program with their Wuxi Health QR Code. These apps connect to your citizen social credit profile and display your current health status. Green signifies free to travel throughout the city; you can freely travel to the train checkpoint, then you are free to scan your code to security guards so you can leave the train station, and make your way freely to taxi where you have to again scan your QR code. Finally, you are free to scan your QR code to sign into the building in which you’re visiting or residing in. A red QR code means you cannot access any modes of transportation and will be automatically placed into forced quarantine either at home or under medical supervision.
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedented decisions are now being made without public debate or discussion. Which means our questions need to be just as big. There is a large, multi-national, multi-front army working towards a new digitized society the world. Many of them receiving funding and support from the nearly $50 billion investment bank of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Do we believe these trillion dollar corporations and multi-billion dollar private charities wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to take advantage of the valiant efforts being made to find a cure and treatment of the Covid-19 virus? The ethical implications for the potential of a digital identification system forced upon the population via vaccine or iris scan are astronomical. Just like the Patriot Act of 2001, and the initial trials ID2020: The Alliance took in 2018, measures begin justified and sometimes even demanded per the situation, but what happens when security and technological measures taken to ensure our safety are tied to the fastest growing exploitative markets on the planet? And are, in fact, being led by the most powerful entities on the planet vying to penetrate the “final frontier” of capitalism – our bodies?
What about governments joining in on the business of monitoring biometric data? During the past few months, the amount of money governments have passed down to their citizenry has been unprecedented. The government of Canada announced a massive $107 billion relief package for citizens and businesses, the United States has pumped over $4 trillion into its economy with no avail and are currently debating about enacting another $2 trillion relief package, Spain, a country crippled by the virus, is now introducing a universal basic income (UBI). Supporters of socialist agendas like a UBI, nationalized hospitals, and pharmaceutical drugs have supported these measures in the face of a global pandemic. However, a UBI may be potentially dangerous if members of a society can only rely on a few points to earn other streams of income.
Many politicians are speaking about implementing a universal basic income (UBI) in the midst of Covid-19 pandemic.
The 2016-2017 operating costs of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (or D.I.A as my uncle still calls them, which stands for Department of Indian Affairs) was $9.1 billion. Monetary dependence through colonialism continues in more than 600 First Nations across Canada via compartmentalization, bureaucracy, and legislation. The only relationship the State of Canada has with 600 distinct Indigenous communities are epitomized into a dollar amount. A dollar amount that can change with a transition of government party, senate vote, and stroke of pen.
Just as ID2020: The Alliance’s trial looked at linking education attainment and business credentials to a biometric identification system, what happens if our new UBI and financial transactions are linked to either a vaccination tattoo, iris scan, or digital certificate? What happens when that system becomes more prominent within our daily life in society; we use our iris scans to pay for groceries, or we use our digital tattoo to take money out of the bank, or an employer scans our digital certificate to see our work history. Larger than life efforts are being made to stop Covid-19, so larger than life questions need to be asked – especially when so many technocratic governments in the western world have showed they have no problem using the heavy boot of totalitarianism.
Iris scanning system being used at Winthrop University. One of many universities in the United States that utilize digital identification systems by linking a person’s iris with their student ID. Credit: Winthrop University
Is it unrealistic to envision a scenario where you defy “social distancing” rules, join a mass gathering to protest policies made by a government, only to have your UBI revoked and your digital identity payments suspended, ceasing nearly all societal functions you can be apart of? What if you use your social media account to question the established narrative around efforts being made to create a vaccination or treatment for other viruses in the future? Will those words be attached to your digital identity, making you a certain threat level in the eyes of not only surveillance capitalists, but governments?
In this age of unlimited connection with the invisible waves that emit from our devices, we have to do some exploring. Exploration into dissolving a built up identity that, paradoxically, reveals what our ancestors still hold within us. An identity that isn’t reliant on our jobs, careers, favourite sports teams, or year-to-year consumer habits. An identity that isn’t even our sex or gender. What our ancestors still hold inside all of us is a tangible, reciprocal relationship with the land and waters in which we reside with. I can’t help but feel a stabbing of familiarity when I read ID2020 and iRespond’s goals of creating “a gateway to economic opportunity,” and “helping the poor and vulnerable become active members in the modern global economy.” Then, I look over at my lovely mother in front of me and I feel where that stabbing feeling comes from. I am the son of an Indigenous woman who survived a conspiracy by the Canadian government and the Catholic Church to kidnap hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children across the country and assimilate them into becoming “active members of the modern economy with their brand new Canadian identities.” Under the guise of helping the “poor and vulnerable”, thousands of Indigenous children were stripped away from their language, culture, and lifeways. Without their consent they were imprinted with the bruises of colonialism and stripped of something they had all along; their identity. And that identity was a tangible connection to the land and waters in which her culture was in relation with. An identity to our mother earth that cannot be measured, extracted, quantified, and predicted.