Trust Deficit in Government Digital Initiatives

October 11, 2025

It's laughable when any government says "data safeguarding" is an unimpeachable virtuous task they are uniquely poised to handle. Especially when we talk about projects that consolidate vast amounts of private citizen sensitive information. Government is the worst group that should be initiating or managing these schemes. The recent introduction by UK's Labour administration of their cellphone app that validate work permissions – ostensibly targeting illegal immigration – provides a prime example. Opponents swiftly pointed out its limitations: such an application would not impact those it was designed to obstruct, and the real danger lies in its potential as a gateway towards creating a centralized national digital ID system.

The national ID system is not without precedent. Tony Blair's attempt to introduce a national identity card in 2006 was framed by the noble aims of combating terrorism, illegal immigration, and identity fraud. This project, much like the current proposed app, suffered from the same critique: it failed to effectively address the specific threats it purported to fight. The focus inevitably shifted towards its pricetag and concerns about centralization itself – a single point of failure ripe for catastrophic security breaches, rendering citizen data vulnerable to unprecedented risks.

Centralized government control over sensitive data is a bad idea because it is inherently fragile, concentrates risk that is beyond repair. A nation placing all its citizen information – tax records, medical files, work credentials – behind one digital gate creates an irresistible hacking target. If that central system suffers even one breach due to outdated software or a single insider error, the consequences are dire.

When it is my information they are collecting, I would expect it to be held in a Mission Impossible-esque fortress. Unfortunately, the best we can hope for is a COBOL server behind a vpn, that any government employee can freely access.

Beyond security flaws inherent in design, we must ask: who truly has our trust? The government's track record of data stewardship is littered with failure. They build ambitious digital systems promising enhanced security and control, yet lack the competence or commitment to secure them properly. The UK's Horizon Postmaster debacle was a system initially intended for efficiency, but became riddled with flaws that led to wrongful convictions against citizens.

Many politicians drafting cybersecurity legislation possess only superficial understanding of technology. Concepts they champion without fully grasping, carry immense risk when implemented by less-than-comprehensive institutions operating in a dangerously fast-paced landscape where attacks can happen in milliseconds while bureaucracy struggles for decades to adapt. But, their largest failure is one they repeat daily; government notoriously avoids accountability, preferring blame-shifting when problems occur. This is a pattern they will return to when digital systems inevitably fail.

Governments treat data merely as an asset – raw material for managing affairs – rather than as critical infrastructure demanding constant vigilance and investment. Maintaining robust security in large, complex central databases is expensive; it requires foresight and expertise that is often sacrificed for more visible political goals or neglected entirely amidst competing priorities.

These risks play out constantly when governments hold onto our data instead of protecting citizens from the misuse of technology. The potential for AI-driven surveillance based on centralized information is chilling. Data is power, and now AI can be used to connect dots in that data that normally would not be made. When citizens become transparent subjects within government systems while the state remains opaque in its operations – monitoring but unaccountable – democracy teeters towards authoritarianism. A government that cannot protect our data holds no moral right to demand so much of us.

We see this power vacuum and dangerous centralization manifested repeatedly in high-profile breaches:

• In 2017, supposed North Korean hackers crippled the UK's National Health Service using WannaCry ransomware, halting appointments and surgeries. Basic security precautions to keep their system secure were ignored.
• In 2014, alleged Chinese-linked hackers breached the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), stealing background check data for over 21 million federal employees – including sensitive information on intelligence agents themselves, exposing handlers to more risk in an already dangerous job.

Even before sophisticated cyberattacks dominated headlines, government IT systems were notoriously insecure:

• In 2006, an employee from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs took his secure laptop home – containing data on 26.5 million veterans – and it was subsequently stolen.

The UK must confront a harsh reality: over-reliance on computer systems without adequate security is perilous for its citizens. The Horizon scandal serves as a stark warning, leading to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds due to faulty software. This pattern repeats whenever government trusts its own flawed digital infrastructure with sensitive data – it inevitably fails, destroying lives in the process.

I suppose we can wonder why there is no private corporations that handle this type of protection. One failure would destroy the company and the liability would be tremendous. It could never be profitable. In fact, when you consider what kind of system it would take to secure data, you would have to consider an air-gapped database, which would not lend itself well to high availabilty applications.

The core issue isn't about convenience; it's about trust and legitimacy. A government demonstrably incapable of safeguarding information forfeits any right to collect or control citizens' private data in such a centralized fashion. The insistence on building national digital ID systems under thin pretexts like immigration control reveals an alarming prioritization: not citizen protection, but the illusion of enhanced state power, unconstrained by genuine security competence.

Zaarin -- Founder n·h·g