On Friday, September 26, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced the UK’s new digital ID scheme during a speech at the Global Progress Action Summit in London. The digital ID is a form of “e-governance,” which has already been implemented in other European countries such as Denmark and Estonia. In the UK, a petition drive against the plan has garnered over two million signatures; the petition warns that “this would be a step towards mass surveillance and digital control.” Ironically, even the notorious data-mining firm Palantir, which has a “strategic partnership” with the Israel Defense Forces, has ruled out helping the UK implement the plan, over concerns that the legislation is “undemocratic.”
Humanity is presently undergoing a phase change; we are witnessing the self-destruction of the 500-year-old colonial system, ruled covertly by a parasitical oligarchy, and the emergence of a new paradigm, which China’s President Xi Jinping has dubbed the Community of Common Destiny. Barring the utter destruction of humanity in the course of a third world war, this transformation is inevitable, but the oligarchy seeks to delay it as long as possible. They have long dreamed of finding reliable measures to suppress the natural human tendency for creativity and progress, and they have sought the means to control the thoughts and emotions of humans on a mass scale, through social engineering.
Elite British courtiers of the early 20th Century discussed this openly, and even produced popular novels to encourage interest by the general public, such as George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. At that time, they were exploring the use of trauma-induced behavior modification and psychotropic drugs to mold large groups of humans to the desired servility.
But by the latter part of the century, the court intellectuals were already shifting their interest to computers, “cybernetics,” and “artificial intelligence” as a more efficient means of producing what Huxley had called “dictatorship without tears … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies.” In his 1970 opus, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote:
The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.
Fifty-five years later, Brezinski’s dream is becoming a reality.
‘The State in Your Smartphone’
A key laboratory for perfecting e-governance has been Ukraine, which, since [U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs] Victoria Nuland’s 2014 Maidan coup, does not tolerate any objections from civil libertarians, making its population essentially a collection of helpless guinea pigs. Ukraine’s program is called Diia, an acronym for Derzhava i Ya, “State and Me.” Launched in 2020, the Diia app allows Ukrainians to use digital documents on their smartphones instead of physical ones for identification and sharing purposes, and its portal allows access to over 130 government services, while also providing the security services with a handy record of each citizen’s digital transactions.
Rabid neocon Samantha Power was head of USAID in 2023 when she was quoted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, saying that the United States hopes to replicate the success of Diia in other countries—including in her own. In May 2023, Power hosted the first ever “Diia in D.C.” event, sponsored by USAID. In her keynote address to that meeting, Samantha Power thanked “those on our USAID teams, at UK Aid, at Eurasia Foundation, and in the Ukrainian government, who had the foresight to invest in Ukraine’s digital transformation beginning eight years ago,” as well as thanking Google and Visa for cosponsoring the event.
In Ukraine, Power’s collaborator Matthew Murray was designated “Project Leader on the USAID Ukraine Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Activity to develop a Strategy for Sustainable Technology Acquisition for the Government of Ukraine.” Murray, together with retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Greg Rattray, the former Director for Cybersecurity in U.S. President George W. Bush’s White House, had earlier helped Ukraine create its first national Cybersecurity Strategy on behalf of CRDF Global (Civilian Research and Development Foundation), a “quango” (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization) that was founded in 1995 and funded by a $5 million gift from “philanthropist” George Soros with a $5 million matching contribution from the Department of Defense.
The Diia project was celebrated at the “Kyiv International Cybersecurity Forum 2024: Resilience in Cyber Warfare” on February 7-8, which was attended by luminaries of the U.S. deep state, such as the U.S. State Department’s Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, Nathaniel C. Fick; the CEO of CRDF Global, Michael Dignam; and Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Jen Easterly, who gave a featured address. (More about Easterly and CISA below.)
CRDF Global sponsored some of the early “National Cyber Security Cluster” events, which began in 2021 and advanced the Diia concept, derived from the work of the Estonia-based “e-Governance Academy” (eGA), which in turn was established in 2002 as part of the e-governance initiatives launched by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. (More about this below.)
Diia’s website proclaims:
Diia is one of the flagship products of Ukraine in the digital world. Ever since its release in 2020, it has attained worldwide fame as a cutting-edge innovation in e-governance. In 2024 it was named one of the best inventions of the year by Time magazine. Today, it is the main project and instrument of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, aimed at preventing corruption, evolving government institutions, and quite simply—making life better for citizens and businesses.
All of this and much more is enabled by Diia in several clicks (or taps on your phone screen)….
We all have those moments of frantic searching for a paper document we rarely use, but our phone—it’s always in our pocket. Hence Diia’s motto: “the state in your pocket” or “the state in your smartphone.”
Does that sound reassuring? Wait until you hear about Larry Ellison.
Larry Ellison and Tony Blair
Ellison is co-founder of the CIA-linked Oracle software firm, and is popularly known as the second richest man in the world and the single biggest private donor of the Israel Defense Forces. He began calling for a digital ID system in the United States following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, writing in a 2002 New York Times op-ed, “The single greatest step we Americans could take to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was copied into a single, comprehensive national security database.” In 2024 he proposed that artificial intelligence systems could constantly monitor citizens through an extensive network of cameras and drones, saying, “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
The Larry Ellison Foundation has pledged over £257 million ($343.2 million) since 2021 to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), established in 2016 by merging several of Tony Blair’s previous organizations. Blair has carved for himself a niche in history due to his involvement in some of the most nakedly evil geopolitical schemes, such as his 1999 “Blair Doctrine” initiative which repudiated the concept of Westphalian sovereignty under the rubric of “Responsibility to Protect,” and his central role in providing a fake pretext for the Iraq war in 2003. TBI has launched a series of e-governance initiatives focused on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform government. As of 2025, the TBI has been actively advising the UK government on AI policy, including the development of a National Data Library (NDL) which will incorporate many of Ellison’s proposals.
In a January 31, 2025, interview with The Times of London titled “Bring in Digital IDs To Get Tough on Populism,” Blair argued: “There will be a big debate coming down the line—and this is the political argument people should have—which is: how much privacy are you prepared to trade for efficiency? That’s the real question around technology and public services. My view is that people are actually prepared to trade quite a lot.”
While TBI denies any conflict of interest, critics have raised concerns about the influence of Ellison’s Oracle company, which has secured substantial UK government contracts and is a key partner in the NDL project.
Ellison is not only interested in harvesting data—he is also eager to control what sort of information is available to the public. He is a leading player in a consortium put together by President Donald Trump’s administration to take over the popular social media platform TikTok, which had come under criticism for making information available about Israel’s carnage in Gaza which Israel sought to suppress.
The fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to preside over the Israeli regime, rather than languishing in a maximum-security prison, is a tribute to his proficiency as a propagandist. During his recent trip to the United States, where he addressed the handful of people who did not boycott his appearance at the United Nations General Assembly [Sept. 25], he also met at Israel’s Consulate General in New York with a group of social media “influencers.” During the latter meeting, Netanyahu described social media as “the most important weapon … to secure our base in the U.S.,” and identified TikTok as “the most important purchase going on right now,” announcing that its acquisition could be “consequential.”
Ellison’s son David now controls Paramount and CBS News, and has installed self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. Leaked emails show that the younger Ellison participated in a scheme to fund surveillance firms run by Israeli intelligence veterans, targeting American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Boiling the Frog
How did we get to this point? In 2013, EIR published a useful chronology of the development of the “intel community’s” domestic spying apparatus, under the title, “How Obama Expanded and Consolidated The Bush-Cheney Domestic Spy Dragnet.” It began in 1945 with Project SHAMROCK, where Western Union and ITT gave the Armed Forces Security Agency (ASFA), and other predecessors to the National Security Agency (NSA), microfilms of cable messages, and RCA provided them with complete copies of all cables. Later, under the NSA, when its operations were computerized, magnetic tapes were provided.
This scheme, along with kindred gambits such as Project MINARET (a watch list for surveillance of “individuals who may foment civil disturbance or otherwise undermine the national security of the United States”), were exposed to the public during the well-intentioned but ultimately ineffectual United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Starting in 1975, the Committee spent over a year investigating misconduct by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS. These hearings exposed a startling array of totalitarian projects, and efforts were made by political leaders, including President Gerald Ford, to keep these findings secret. In every case, the relevant agencies apologized, assured the public that the projects had been discontinued, then quietly relocated and renamed the projects, and continued with business as usual.
Congress did attempt to create some safeguards against this apparatus. In 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed into law, requiring the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting electronic surveillance or physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes. However, it was eroded by President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 that once again allowed for NSA’s “bulk collection” of data. Because EO 12333 was said to have not allowed for specific targeting of U.S. citizens, President George H.W. Bush signed National Security Directive 42 in order to bypass this, laying the groundwork for CISA, which was designed to effectively operate as a domestic branch of NSA’s information warfare unit.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 provided a remarkably convenient pretext for the expansion of domestic spying. Just six weeks after the attacks, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act with minimal debate, which relaxed previous requirements for individualized suspicion before surveillance, enabling broader data collection without proof of wrongdoing. President George W. Bush authorized the NSA to launch the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP), also known as Stellar Wind, which authorized warrantless domestic surveillance. NSA whistleblower William Binney believed this program used components of his proposed ThinThread data collection system, but stripped away the privacy safeguards, enabling mass collection of domestic communications. He resigned from the NSA in late 2001 in protest, stating, “I could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution.”
Stellar Wind operated in secret for years and was later retroactively legalized in 2008 through the FISA Amendments Act, which also granted immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the government by providing access to customer communications. This act also established the PRISM program, through which the NSA collected vast amounts of internet data—including emails, search histories, and live chats—directly from major tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook, starting in 2007. The government also began bulk collection of Americans’ phone metadata, such as call records of millions of Verizon customers, revealed in 2013 through leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
As journalist Matt Taibbi reminds us, it has been 13 years since then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper answered, “No, sir,” and “Not wittingly” when Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon asked, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?” This was, of course, a bald-faced lie, for which Clapper was punished by being given a lucrative job as a national security analyst at CNN. In a press release dated September 23 of this year, the House Judiciary Committee announced that Google had admitted to them that President Joe Biden’s administration pressured Google to censor Americans and remove content that did not violate YouTube’s policies. So, intrusive digital surveillance and censorship are not a new development.
Factoring in the Internet
With the advent of the internet, which appeared in embryonic form at the end of the 1960s, some people had the illusion that it provided a new and liberating form of information sharing that was free from manipulation by “the man.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The history of the internet is simply the latest chapter in the history of the military-industrial complex. In Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, Yasha Levine writes:
And Google is not alone. From Amazon to eBay to Facebook—most of the Internet companies we use every day have also grown into powerful corporations that track and profile their users while pursuing partnerships and business relationships with major U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Some parts of these companies are so thoroughly intertwined with America’s security services that it is hard to tell where they end and the U.S. government begins…. [T]he Internet was hardwired to be a surveillance tool from the start.
The thing to remember here is that every technology and tactic that is ostensibly developed to counter supposed foreign adversaries can, and will, be deployed for counterinsurgency purposes against unwelcome groups and opinions within the United States itself. Because of the extensive penetration of the U.S. defense/intelligence community by the British and their neocon disciples, under the aegis of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement among the Anglophile nations (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, U.S.), these cyberwarfare and e-governance institutions represent a key avenue for British manipulation of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. We’d like to remind the reader of the long-standing “swap” arrangement between the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), where the two spy services helpfully spy on each other’s populations and then exchange data, in order to evade any remaining laws against spying on their own populations.
One small ray of sunshine along the gloomy road to Tony Blair’s “dictatorship without tears” was the decision of U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to halt sharing of intelligence regarding Russia-Ukraine peace talks with the Five Eyes agencies by designating it “NOFORN” (no foreign dissemination).
Toward a ‘Full-Spectrum’ Digital Dictatorship
The oligarchy’s cyber warriors have maintained a relentless focus, over the past 30 years, on the attainment of two goals:
- Removing the “firewall” that separated foreign cyber operations against ostensible enemies, from domestic counterinsurgency and propaganda operations.
- Effecting the merger of government and private sector surveillance projects into one seamless “unified field.”
William B. Black, Jr. served as Special Assistant to the Director for Information Warfare at the NSA from 1996 to 1997, then returned to the NSA in 2000 to become deputy director. In the interim, he was employed in the private sector with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where the president and chief operating officer of its federal business segment was Duane P. Andrews, a long-time protégé of Dick Cheney.
In 1997, Andrews testified before Congress and warned that “unless the Pentagon and the national government at large is adequately prepared to deal with the information warfare threat, there is the prospect for an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor.’ ” These warnings were then used to create NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate (IAD)—described as the NSA’s principal outreach to Silicon Valley—and the President’s Commission on Critical Information Protection, out of which would come agencies that would culminate in CISA’s creation in 2018, to be operated out of the Department of Homeland Security.
In the interim, NSA’s Trailblazer Project would be involved in massive surveillance operations and information operations against U.S. citizens, as would later be exposed by Snowden. Beginning in 2002, Black had returned to NSA and was overseeing Trailblazer, which aimed at analyzing data on computer networks and at tracking cell phone and email communications. Trailblazer was awarded to a consortium led by SAIC (surprise!) in 2002 under a $280 million contract.
Anne Neuberger marched into NSA as a young woman in her early 30s, and led the establishment of the U.S. Cyber Command, which was created in 2009-2010, tasked with defending Department of Defense (DOD) information systems and supporting military commanders with cyberspace operations.
From there, her career was almost wholly devoted to the cause of integrating NSA and Silicon Valley, and she oversaw key programs to that aim: the Enduring Security Framework (ESF) and the Defense Industrial Base pilot programs. After these programs were exposed by Snowden, Neuberger became the NSA’s first Chief Risk Officer, a position created to prevent more embarrassing revelations.
But her crowning achievement would be her work on creating the Cybersecurity Directorate in 2019—effectively merging the information assurance and information warfare missions of IAD and CISA, the cherished goal of the information warriors who yearned to direct operations on U.S. soil. Ciaran Martin, chief of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), had lobbied for this, according to the Washington Post’s burner-phone-stalker Pulitzer Prize winner, Ellen Nakashima.
Martin’s NCSC worked hand in glove with Neuberger’s Cybersecurity Directorate and CISA in alleging Russian disinformation campaigns, and Martin even became a member of an advisory board for CISA. Neuberger’s Anglophile credentials were cemented by her becoming a Distinguished Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington.
Notably, Neuberger’s Cybersecurity Directorate was an outgrowth of the NSA’s Russia Small Group, formerly headed by herself. The Russia Small Group was an outgrowth of the fraudulent claims that the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers, and was later renamed the NSA-CYBERCOM Election Security Group for the 2018 midterms and beyond, which went on to spawn the China Outcomes Group.
Silicone Valley Joins the Party
Jen Easterly is the daughter of Noel Koch, a spooky government security expert credited with the revival of the United States Special Operations Forces (SOF), which conduct clandestine actions, often in hostile or politically sensitive environments. Easterly served as the Director of CISA in the Biden administration, and earlier had helped to establish the United States Cyber Command—part of the self-described “Four Horsemen” that also included Gen. (ret.) Paul Nakasone—and worked with Neuberger as team lead. She has played a significant role in the marriage of Silicon Valley to the U.S. military/intelligence machinery, and in 2021 she founded the public/private Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC), which includes as private partners Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Google Cloud, AT&T, Verizon, Fortinet, Lenovo, and Eclypsium. Easterly hoped to establish the “coolness” of totalitarian surveillance by crafting its name to make an acronym that sounds like the rock band AC/DC, and announcing it at a private sector cybersecurity conference, where she danced to AC/DC’s music, while wearing a “Free Britney” shirt and dragon-emblazoned jeans.
The latest wrinkle in this merging of the public and private sectors is the U.S. military’s embrace of Silicon Valley with the founding of Detachment 201. Covered more in depth here, this should be viewed in tandem with the domestic deployment of U.S. military troops. The U.S. Army describes the new grouping as “The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps, a new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation.” On June 13, 2025, the Army officially swore in four tech leaders with zero combined military experience as Army Reserve Lt. Colonels: Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI. Clearly our personal data is in good hands, because if you can’t trust nerdy hipster spies, tech billionaires, and neocon armchair commandos with the most intimate details of your personal life, who can you trust?
For further reading:
Michael Minnicino, “Drugs, sex, cybernetics, and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation,” EIR, July 2, 1999.
L. Wolfe, “Tavistock's imperial brainwashing project,” EIR, May 24, 1996.
David Christie, “INSNA: ‘Handmaidens of British Colonialism’,” EIR, December 7, 2007.
Critical Infrastructure Protection and the Endangerment of Civil Liberties: An Assessment of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP), Electronic Privacy Information Center, 1998.
Antonio Graceffo, “The ‘Reimagined State’: Tony Blair Institute’s Blueprint for a Global Techno-Dictatorship,” Gateway Pundit, Oct. 7, 2025.
