The Mask-Off Moment for Digital Identity

For more than 18 months, we've been researching the hidden fragility of digital societies, tracing how digital identity creates brittle systems that enable exploitation, exclusion, and social engineering. Drawing on eight global case studies, dozens of expert interviews, and hundreds of citations, this is our most significant research endeavour to since NDC's founding at the turn of the decade.

It is also, without exaggeration, the most alarming body of work we have ever produced.

If you work in digital identity, you may already be feeling a little defensive. That’s a good thing, it means you’re still reachable. While The Digital Identity Event Horizon is urgent and furious, it is far from a condemnation. Rather, we publish as an appeal to those willing to confront the situation we collectively must grapple with. If you choose to continue down this trajectory after reading what follows, then yes, the condemnation is directed at you. And you will deserve it.

In this foreword, I want to explain why.

“There has been no fraud in 12 years. Estonia is the only country in the world where all IDs have the same legal value. This is a powerful incentive for use.”^[1]

The quote above from 2014 was one of the first political statements we analysed at the start of this project. At the time, we approached it with a healthy and bemused scepticism; our hypothesis, that digital identity creates brittle societies, was shaped by our ongoing institutional work around social engineering, coercive design, and infrastructural failure. Still, we were not prepared for what we found: when we investigated Laasik’s claim seriously, we were stunned by the sheer scale of its denial.

At the time Helar Laasik made this statement, Estonia’s financial regulator uncovered extensive money laundering activities^[2] at Danske Bank’s Estonian branch, processing billions in suspicious transactions^[3] while the ID card system contained an exploitable vulnerability^[4] that compromised over 750,000 active cards^[5].

Today, even despite this contradiction, the legend of the Estonian eID success persists as a global poster-child for the digital identity movement. But in 2023 alone, Estonia’s citizens endured an ongoing 25% year-on-year growth in fraud cases^[6], with losses of €21.5 million to cyber and payment fraud^[7]. These figures are just a fraction of what we document in our forthcoming Estonian case study^[8]. Together, this quote and the reality of Estonia’s situation is a visceral encapsulation of the threat that faces us: digital identity as a structural fraud-permissive ecosystem misrepresented as secure, precise, progressive, and, perhaps most egregiously, empowering.

We begin here because it sets the tone for what’s to come. This quote — and the reality it concealed — foreshadowed the structural permissiveness we now document at every level of the global digital identity movement. From Laasik’s claim as our starting point, and over the course of our research, we have watched the optimism of digital identity’s proponents be erased by opportunists, vandals, and vulgar, second-rate power in real time. Now, as we prepare to publish, the polite façade of digital identity has shattered; every principal threat model we outlined in 2024 can now be observed in operation; some at pilot scale, others nationwide.

In other words, all of the threats described in this report have materialised. Every single one.

In my 12-year career, I have never, ever seen anything like it.

Under the reinstalled Trump administration, the United States is conducting an unprecedented programme^[9] of mass detention and deportation^[10]. Digital identity is central to this scheme, weaponised across borders^[11], communities^[12], and institutions^[13]. These are only a few of the many avenues this hyper-violent regime exploits. The daily stories are horrific and enraging. It is clear this punitive, discriminatory, malevolent operation is lubricated by digital identity.

Meanwhile, Trump’s newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)^[14] has executed a hostile takeover of the U.S. civil-identity stack^[15]. In late June 2025, the agency unveiled a searchable national citizenship database^[16] built with DHS and Palantir. Civil-liberties groups describe it as “a surveillance nightmare” — yet it now sits live behind voter-roll checks, benefit eligibility and deportation orders.

For over two decades, the proponents of digital identity, including Estonia and its global supporters, insisted that accountability was its safeguard. What DOGE reveals is just how meaningless that guardrail always was. The billionaire Musk and his acolytes walked in the front door at the exact moment the U.S. administration began rounding up non-citizens and openly threatening to send its own citizens to overseas black sites. No one stopped him^[17].

The US does not act alone. Israel’s IDF employs digital identities crafted from SIM card metadata and arbitrary digital footprints to execute indiscriminate drone strikes, stripping away human complexity in favour of algorithmic assassination^[18]. These tactics are built on the one-user-one-device assumption that dominates Western software and security design, a premise already unstable in the Global North^[19], and entirely delusional when exported to occupied or precarious regions. For Palestinians, as for much of the world, smartphones are shared objects passed between siblings, between lovers, lent to neighbours, shared within households. This collective relationship to technology is the norm^[20].

In the face of communal data intimacy, the IDF’s targeting infrastructure becomes not only inaccurate, but unfathomably cruel: a fire-and-forget strategy of serialised murder masquerading as precision. It is a system of violence built on pseudo-scientific operational laziness, in which the intimate logistics of survival are flattened into unaccountable to-kill spreadsheets and .CSVs.

In Ukraine, digital identities are repurposed as existential weapons^[21] in the conflict with Russia. The country is paralysed, its ability to govern is fractured by the ongoing war, which includes the targeted sabotage of its digitised infrastructure. Core identity systems, once touted as enablers of governance, now serve as liabilities that are compromised and weaponised.

Digitisation has come at great cost. Across the wider conflict, leaked identity records are dumped online by hostile actors, forming the substrate of a multi-domain asymmetrical war. Personal records are weaponised to psychologically destabilise civilians, to impersonate, to mislead, and to fracture trust in every domain of daily life. In occupied territories, the strategy reaches a brutal coda: seized databases are mined to identify and assassinate civilians based on demographics, affiliations, or past activity, converting the entire premise of civil registry into a tool for literal algorithmic execution.

From the examples listed, to the brutal information-fuelled war in Sudan^[22], to India’s multi-decade struggle with digitised election infrastructure^[23], to the suicides of Australia’s most vulnerable welfare recipients under former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Robodebt scheme^[24], the failures of digital identity are like an oil slick over a shared human condition that is poisoned by screaming, financially incentivised bots; crude assemblages designed to endlessly extract and earn for their operators, an information network saturated with noise. I am not talking about disinformation. It doesn’t matter what they say. What matters is that they exist to trick users that they are real people. What matters is that they exist at all, and that systems that were meant to connect us now nakedly “lean in” — to borrow a term from one of this situation’s chief architects, Sheryl Sandberg — to the opportunity to facilitate total information decline.

Against the backdrop of such naked, vicious, identity-enabled atrocities, the United Nations has announced a global plan to eliminate boarding passes and airport check-ins, replacing them with facial recognition and “digital journey passes” stored on travellers’ phones^[25]. The press frames it as a leap forward in convenience and security. But there is no possible reconciliation between this vision and the world as it exists. It is simply not possible to hold the reality of 2025 alongside promises like these. Whether journalist, politician, or technologist, to perform such a denial is to participate in future atrocity.

If you come away from what I’ve described here wholly indignant of my condemnation of any of my examples, I’m sorry to say, you are being fooled. No matter your perspective on any of these examples, I’m not here to debate your side. The sides don’t matter. Here’s what does: our digitised society was designed and built in a childlike “End of History”^[26] bet, an unquestioning belief in an ideological fiction popularised after the Cold War, and on an assumption that liberal capitalist democracy had triumphed as the final form of human government. This is a system built on hopium, a fingers-crossed wish for stability, integration, and progress. Digital identity systems were architected inside this delusion, as if geopolitics, collapse, or technological misuse were things of the past. This is colossally wrong. The architecture of digital identity is indifferent to your ideology. It does not care which ’side’ you think you are on. I cannot stress this enough: you are vulnerable, and this will be used against you.

Today’s status quo allows for the design and implementation of dangerous digital identity systems without consequence. This is indefensible, and if you’re reading this report, you likely agree. We reject a future dictated by digital tyranny or the ugliness of electronic chaos. This report and the case studies that follow are designed to force a reckoning; do not look away. Digest these findings. Print them. Translate them. Leak them upstream. This is the end of the End of History, and we are living through volumes unfolding all at once. The choices you make today are not just your own. They are the conditions others will inherit.

If you do one thing after reading The Digital Identity Event Horizon, let it be this: put this report in front of someone who still believes in digital identity as it exists today, so that we may start to recognise and respond to the threat together. But even if we fail, this work exists so that, regardless of what atrocities await us, those who enabled the infrastructure of harm cannot one day claim ignorance.

The most tragic outcome would be for the very architects of digital identity to one day shrug and say, “We had no idea.” This report exists so they never can.

Cade Diehm
July 2025

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A groundbreaking report from New Design Congress exposing how digital identity creates brittle societies, and how social engineering remains an unsolved threat. In 2025, the stakes are urgent: who is seen, who is excluded, and who controls our future depends on the choices made today.

Over the next 10 weeks, New Design Congress will release this report chapter by chapter, documenting fully digital identity's central role in tearing the very fabric of society. Become a free NDC member and get every chapter in your inbox.

Cade Diehm & Benjamin Royer