Human rights expert, Radha Stirling, warns Digital ID will erode privacy, justice and due process while empowering authoritarian regimes
LONDON: Radha Stirling, founder of Detained in Dubai and Due Process International, has issued an urgent warning over global Digital ID and surveillance initiatives, calling them “the final step toward total digital control.”
Stirling, who has represented countless clients prosecuted for social media posts, cybercrime charges and politically motivated Interpol notices, said governments are building a system that will link every aspect of citizens’ lives, from speech to spending, and share that data internationally.
“Over the past two decades, I have represented people who have been jailed, tortured or financially destroyed because governments misused information systems without restraint or accountability,” said Stirling. “We have seen what happens when states are handed unchecked power, from Interpol abuse to cybercrime prosecutions used as political weapons, to the capture of Princess Latifa when US intelligence data was shared with the UAE to locate and seize her. Where states have authority, citizens suffer. There is no care for the human consequences, no responsibility and no compensation, only power exercised without restraint.
“Now governments want to fuse all that authority into a single Digital ID system. Once your identity, finances, location and communications are linked, it becomes effortless to silence critics, freeze accounts or destroy livelihoods with a keystroke. That is not progress; it is an authoritarian dream wrapped in the language of safety and convenience. This would require a trust in government that they have never been able to earn.”
Digital ID schemes are being sold to the public as innovations in security, fraud prevention and climate policy, but Stirling warns they are in fact the infrastructure of global surveillance.
“These systems will not stop at national borders,” she said. “Under the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and countless bilateral data-sharing agreements, your personal data will flow to foreign governments, including authoritarian states with horrific human-rights records. Once shared, that data will be repurposed and misused, just as it was in the Princess Latifa case. This puts people’s very lives at risk.”
Stirling pointed to how technology has already been weaponised against ordinary citizens. In Canada, peaceful demonstrators during the 2022 truckers’ protest had their bank accounts frozen under emergency powers, a test run for programmable finance. In the Middle East and the UK, thousands have been jailed for tweets or private messages under sweeping cybercrime laws, while in the UK and EU, Online Safety Acts are enabling governments to mandate identity verification for social media use, effectively ending anonymity.
“Digital ID will fuse all these powers together,” Stirling said. “It is the bridge between censorship, financial coercion and physical control.”
As a legal expert who has defended journalists, entrepreneurs and cryptocurrency innovators targeted by politicised prosecutions, Stirling said Digital ID will obliterate confidentiality and fairness in legal proceedings.
“Governments will be able to monitor communications between lawyers and clients in real time, retrieve data years later and build cases against opponents retroactively. Once every keystroke and transaction is stored under your ID, the presumption of innocence disappears. Justice depends on privacy, and privacy cannot survive Digital ID.”
Stirling warns that new legislation will gradually make Digital ID mandatory across public and private sectors. Banks, telecoms and social media platforms will be required to demand it for registration or service access.
“Once the system becomes essential to live and work, suspension or denial of your ID means civil death,” she said. “You will not be able to travel, run a business, buy food or even speak online. The infrastructure for this already exists; governments just have not connected the final wires.”
“I have seen how easily governments weaponise technology against the people they are meant to protect,” Stirling concluded. “Digital ID will place democratic nations in the same surveillance ecosystem as dictatorships. Once introduced, there will be no way back. You cannot vote your way out of a digital cage once it is built.”
