JD Vance to Meet UK Foreign Secretary as He Arrives for Holiday in England
In a statement to the BBC on Aug. 7, the White House said that 'the vice president and foreign secretary will discuss a variety of topics pertaining to the US-UK relationship.'
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European leaders share concerns while meeting with Vance in UK
The meeting between VP JD Vance, European allies and Ukrainian officials in the U.K. comes just a day after President Trump announced a summit with Russian President Putin set for Aug. 15 in Alaska.
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Our Aluminium Is a Boon to American Workers
Mark Duffy writes that 'Canada's Aluminum Subsidies Hurt the U.S.' (Letters, July 28). But let's review the numbers. Each year, Canada exports 2.7 million tons of aluminium to the U.S., a process that consumes 40 million megawatt-hours of electricity, equivalent to the output of at least four Hoover Dams. With the U.S.'s deregulated energy market, producing the same volume domestically would be prohibitively expensive—especially today, as data centers compete for the same power supply. That only four of the original 23 U.S. aluminium smelters remain has little to do with Canada and everything to do with the effects of energy deregulation in the 1980s. Canada remains the U.S.'s most secure and reliable source of aluminium because our industry reinvests hundreds of millions annually into world-class operations powered by low-cost hydroelectricity, a strategic advantage that U.S. industrialists have recognized for decades.
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Whatever You Think About Tony Blair, He Is Right About Digital ID
There was a very interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4 last week, part of the excellent 'Briefing Room' series hosted by David Aaronovitch, on the subject of national identity cards. While the subject of a national identity scheme for the UK has been bubbling for years, the topic of illegal migration has reignited the debate. However, the debate itself needs to change: It should no longer be about whether people should be made to carry a card or not! We are now in an age of digital identity and that provides an entirely different model that can advance both security and privacy in the modern age. National Digital ID? The debate is timely, which is why I agree with former British Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair on one thing at least: We have to do something about identity, despite the failure of the previous attempt at a national identity scheme introduced in 2007 under *checks notes* Sir Tony Blair. Sir Tony wrote recently that 'our present system isn't working,' which true, and that it is 'this is a time for shaking up' which is also true. And despite what the media insist on calling 'Electronic Identity Cards' or similar, he is right to ignore the old tropes about identity cards and say that 'digital ID is a good place to start." Sir Tony is right. It really is time to have sensible national discussion about digital identity and stop the simplistic black-and-white tropes about identity cards. Blair and the former British Foreign Secretary, William Hague (now Baron Hague of Richmond), issued a report a while back calling for a digital identity infrastructure in the UK. In a report, the former Labour leader and former Conservative leader argued that government records "are still based in a different era'. What their report actually called for was not for a 'digital ID card', as was widely reported in the press along with hysterical nonsense about how having an identity card leads to tyranny (as in France, presumably?), but for a "secure, privacy-preserving digital identity for citizens" that allows them to interact more efficiently and effectively with government services. Media commentators have started to talk about the efficiencies that might accrue through the deployment of a digital ID, while continuously confusing authorisation with identification, while expressing concerns about government's disastrous track record with major IT projects and expressing perfectly reasonable concerns about the security of systems that might function as honeypots: while at the same time noting that Ukraine, which is under continuous cyberattacks, has managed to deploy a working national digital ID in less time that it takes will take us Brits to get round to even discussing how such a scheme might work. These are serious issues, but they are issue that can be managed and can managed more effectively now, using tried and tested technology from the crypto world as well a tried and tested technology from defence, finance and other sectors. There is no need for a honeypot. In the UK we now have a framework in place and the government has said it will support economic growth through the creation of trusted digital identity products and services from certified providers. The necessary Data (Use and Access) Act received Royal Assent in June. When the legislation is 'commenced' (as they say here), the government will have new powers and responsibilities which will include maintaining a statutory register of digital verification service (DVS), consulting on the UK trust framework, issuing an official UK digital identity trust mark (rather pointlessly, in my opinion) so that people can see which services can be trusted and enabling public authorities to share information with providers of registered services. However, just to reiterate, what the government is not planning to do is to create a digital identity. The government 'super app" currently under development will be used only to log in to government services and will not provide a portable digital identity for more general use. The beta version of the app launched for iPhones and Android devices in June but is currently just bookmarks for the existing government website. The government expect the private sector create the identity schemes within their framework, and are indifferent as to whether it is the banks or media companies or social media or brands or anyone else who will deliver it. My own view is that is should be banks who lead the way, but perhaps it will be the crypto world that will rise to meet this challenge by using new technology to bring a new approach to the problem of identity in the new economy.. National Digital Identity? No, Entitlement With new age verification laws coming into place on (and with the Supreme Court upholding a Texas age-verification law) and with plenty of other examples where credentials are required for offline use (you cannot rent an e-scooter, for example, without submitting ID), the New York Times puts forward a typical response and saying that 'a comprehensively different internet is coming into view: one where, before you can do much of anything, you need to reveal who you are'. But this simply is not true: you do not have to reveal who you are to prove that you are old enough to look at pornography or that you are old enough to rent an e-scooter and that you have a driver's licence issued by a recognised authority. Let us rethink digital identity from this privacy-enhancing perspective. A digital identity infrastructure is vital national infrastructure that is desperately needed to support our transition to a new economy, not one that stutters along digitising the relics of the post-industrial revolution bureaucratic response to urban anonymity. We have all of the technologies that we need to build the new kind of digital identity that we need for the 21st century — zero-knowledge proofs, verifiable credentials, strong authentication — and now we need to put them to work to deliver not a National Identity Scheme (NIS) as previously envisaged but a National Entitlement Scheme (NES). The crucial difference between the two is that an identity scheme is about who people are, whereas an entitlement scheme is about what people are: that is, over 18 and entitled to drive, or a parent and a lawyer or whatever. By shifting the essence of the infrastructure from establishing someone's identity, which is then used as a key into some other database in order to obtain the actual credential required. To take a simplest example, when buying a drink in the pub, the bartender should be asking for proof that I am over 18, not proof that I am David Birch. This is easily achieved now that Open ID for Verifiable Presentations 9OID4VP is a standard. This is a protocol for requesting and presenting verifiable credentials and it delivers interoperability across wallet types, credential formats and trust frameworks. OID4VP powers EUDI Wallet pilots, cross-border digital ID systems and real-world deployments like the California DMV's mDL login service. A comprehensive and convenient digital identity infrastructure transforms the prospects for fintechs, simply because dealing with the identity demands on financial services organisations is so complex and expensive. Know-your-customer (KYC) and associated issues such as know your buisness, employee, agent, business partner and so on have served as a moat around the incumbents. If startups were able to use an infrastructure that takes care of these things, they could concerate their resources on developing products and services to compete more effectively to make financial services better for the rest of the economy.
