Am I being cynic here or is this just another attempt at total surveillance? It solves a problem that does not exist, will likely be mandatory at some point and is executed by a defense company.
Some context: I'm French, I live in Belgium. I have two e-IDs cards: one french, one belgian. When I need to identify myself, depending on the government I have to deal with, I have to use either my "FranceConnect" credentials, or my Belgian e-ID card.
When using my Belgian eID, there is a government login called CSAM, but a lot of people here use a private company called "itsme" (https://www.itsme-id.com/). ItsMe does not support Linux. CSAM does, but not every service that supports or even requires eID login here supports CSAM.
FranceConnect is even more of a mess. French government has a plethora of online services, several with their own logins and not all support FranceConnect.
Making a digital wallet won't increase surveillance... surveillance is already possible on all of this, quite easily so. What it will do is greatly simplify life for people dealing with these systems; especially for expats and new arrivals into a country, who might get stuck in the loop of "You need a bank account to get your ID" "You need an ID to open a bank account"
Not to mention all the services that do their own shitty KYC and would be better served by using automated ID checking instead. Unless you think it's better and "more private" to email a photocopy of your ID and passport to somebody who will forward it three times, save it on their computer, and share it on Slack with the tech team because there's a problem with their shitty KYC system.
Sure, because a little minority of people has "the burden" of managing multiple IDs, lets tear down one firewall between citizenry and big-brother for the rest of us.
Is the brokenness the firewall?
Labeling it "broken" - we all are using the same password for every account anyways, aren't we?
From Berlin xHainers to Parissienne Bobos, from Munich Schwabing to Noord Amsterdam, there isn't a single citizen in the EU with discomfort of his vote becoming dilluted from a x-millionth to an x-hundredmillionth.
That's why Ursula von der Leyen is so popular.
Are you just unhappy the electorate is so large? What would the appropriate size be? Mayoral? Households? That'd really maximize the power of your vote.
But then, how would we organize at the level beyond that? Warring tribes? Go back to when Germany and France were constantly at war?
I don't love vdL either. I think the EU is in need of reform. But I still think it's fundamentally a good idea and I think vote dilution is just inherent to a large democracy.
I'm only surprised they haven't got rid of the ability of countries to secede the union yet. I'm guessing all these pushes for further integration are an attempt at de facto making it impossible to secede, even if not legally.
[citation needed]. Please don't just throw out wild claims without any proof. As far as I'm aware, every single element of the EU is democratically legitimized in one way or another. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
> I'm only surprised they haven't got rid of the ability of countries to secede the union yet.
Why would they? If you don't want to be on our boat, feel free to sink on your own. We don't need the dead weight.
And that design is there to keep sovereignty of membership countries - so it is strange that you are surprised that there is still the ability of countries to secede the union. Most powerful entities in EU are national governments of countries. Who is appointing Commissioners? Member states. Similar like national governments are appointing its ministers. Then there is veto and of course, who has last word in everything? Heads of states / prime ministers.
This said, majority-rule can only increase in European mechanisms, because a continent cannot be paralized by the needs of a tiny minority on every possible choice. Does the US Senate (effectively the equivalent of EuroCouncil, with almost-equal representation for each US state) require unanimity on every choice? Obviously not, or it would never get anything done (and even like that, it struggles massively to approve anything these days).
Vote with your money, don't dictate the rest of the country with your wants.
In other words, it's antidemocratic.
Democracy is a scam, it's just an oligarchy.
The wealthiest will do media campaigns to manipulate the public into electing their people and then these people will do whatever the elite want.
That was my point above.
"Democracy is a scam" = trolling, please refer to the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"The wealthiest will do media campaigns to manipulate the public" => that I agree with, but this is really old and has always been like that, not only in democracies. I'd even say that democracies are the places where this is happening the least, compares to state-owned news like Russia or China.
We need Swiss-style referendums-on-everything. Now it feels like oligarchy managed by lobby groups no matter what you vote for.
Ah, yes, nothing like asking 450M people for their opinion on something they know nothing about.
This is how Brexit happened, isn't it?
Obviously democracy needs educated citizens who don't take the responsibility lightly. That's why citizenship shall be a big privilege with even bigger responsibilities. We have to have a lively discussion. Otherwise it's people who cry loudest win.
I love Brexit as a democratical move. People voteds and government followed through. Now citizens will live out consequences, for better or worse. And they can make next decision accordingly. That's so much better than enlightened oligarchy guarding the masses from their own wrong feelings.
That's like raising kids. If you guard kids from their own painful decisions, they'll never learn. Eventually they'll be adults and they'll keep doing dumb decisions. You have to let them experience some pain to teach them a lesson.
It is an association of democracies, led by an undemocratic executive that is increasingly out of control. At the moment it is busily destroying its own economy in a way that is baffling to many of its citizens.
If it doesn't evolve into something more democratic it probably hasn't long to go.
The US president campaigns before a democratic election. The people know who they can choose before they vote. Same with the UK.
There is no democratic vote, with or without proxy, before the appointment of the Commission.
Why the downvote btw? This isn't reddit.
Err, yes there is. The directly-elected European Parliament first elects the President of the European Commission, and then has to vote to appoint the entire Commission.[0]
And before they do they they hold hearings with each of the different commissioner-nominees to evaluate their suitability for the role, demanding that people are replaced or given different portfolios if they are not suitable.
Nominations for the role of President must take in to account the results of the election,[0] and the European Council nominates somebody from the largest party in Parliament. I wish that Parliament had stuck to its guns in 2014/2019 and rejected the nominees that weren't spitzenkandidaten but hopefully the new proposals tabled by Parliament creating transnational lists for Parliament will change this.[1]
[0] Article 17(7) of the Treaty on European Union
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220429IP...
Of course there is. The commission is chosen by the countries elected representatives (and confirmed by the directly elected EU Parliament)
The downvotes are justified
The chances of it happening are low, but the vote of the people might not be upheld.
At least in national elections there are parties campaigning with a platform and then I can decide which platform I like best. How often the platforms of the elected parties get translated into reality is another question, but it can at least plausibly be described as demos kratos. Maybe the EU is "democracy" in some modern sense of the word, but in the original sense of the word it is not. (I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. Maybe it is in fact better to have elites deciding.)
I fail to see how you cannot do that in European Parliament elections. If anything, EUP elections are more democratic than average, by way of using a proportional-representation system that matches voters' preferences more closely than almost any European voting system.
And if you're saying, "but it's the Commission proposing laws!", they don't pull stuff out of thin air: the Commission effectively tries to implement an agenda that European Council members agree together. And who is EuroCouncil? National governments, whom you vote for. Also, the Commission doesn't work alone - directives are effectively drafted in concert with Parliament committees, because in the end they have to be approved by such Parliament.
Greece is a democracy, the EU is a bureaucracy.
However, it's not a good situation that a private company gets such a central role. In fact, Belgian government yesterday announced they're going to make their own implementation. Surely there's already eID login, but that's too cumbersome compared to itsme because it's from the pre-smartphone days.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/246070/federal-governm...
The Belgian government already has an implementation: https://www.csam.be/en/egov-profile.html
I don't use itsme, only CSAM, because itsme does not support Linux: I can't log in with Firefox or Chrome on Linux with my eID. But CSAM is not universally supported. Example of a site that does not support it: https://www.proximus.be/ - Major ISP in Belgium)
You can login to CSAM protected websites on Linux with Firefox or Chromium and with Itsme token running on Android or iPhone.
You can also login on Linux with Firefox or Chromium and with your eID card inserted in a properly configured card reader such as ACR-38U.
P.S. If you use a JB device, you should also use Magisk and be ready to troubleshoot.
That you can’t even think of using it if, like me, you are not using a phone operator or one of the few banks which are part of the consortium.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about, although brusselstimes seems to report it weirdly (sounds like they want to extend itsme). https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20220627_97617861 -> They want to replace itsme with something build by the government.
> The Belgian government already has an implementation: https://www.csam.be/en/egov-profile.html
You're confusing a couple of things here. CSAM isn't an identity provider. It's like a gateway/umbrella to multiple identity providers like eID and itsme. You can have eID authentication without CSAM and vice-versa.
It doesn't make sense to claim itsme doesn't support linux. It's only a phone app, you dont need desktop software. I can login to proximus.be using itsme on linux.
It is now handled by Digicert, a US company.
Example for Belgium Root CA2 in [0]
Certificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number: 3098404661496965511 (0x2affbe9fa2f0e987) Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption Issuer: C=BE, CN=Belgium Root CA2 Validity Not Before: Oct 4 10:00:00 2007 GMT Not After : Dec 15 08:00:00 2021 GMT Subject: C=BE, CN=Belgium Root CA2
The Belgium Root CA2 in Mozilla discussion is different.
Certificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number: 04:00:00:00:00:01:41:a1:e1:34:ba Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption Issuer: O=Cybertrust, Inc, CN=Cybertrust Global Root Validity Not Before: Oct 10 11:00:00 2013 GMT Not After : May 12 22:59:00 2025 GMT Subject: C=BE, CN=Belgium Root CA2
[0] https://repository.eid.belgium.be/certificates.php?cert=Root...
Is there a Belgium Root CA in Mozilla, Windows, Android or iPhone trust stores now?
You said DigiCert owns those root CAs and I wanted more information about this.
I think you're seriously confused. It's perfectly reasonable to claim that itsme doesn't support Linux. Phone have operating systems too, you know - and some phones run a Linux userspace (e.g. the Pinephone and Purism).
"Does not support Linux" means "itsme can't run on a Linux userspace" (as opposed to a Linux kernel but Google userspace, which is what Android is).
The author explicitly says this: "I don't use itsme, only CSAM, because itsme does not support Linux: I can't log in with Firefox or Chrome on Linux with my eID."
It probably doesn't help that the CSAM term has an overlap with another english abbreviation.
That you even have to identify yourself as often as you do in the EU is a problem the EU countries created. So basically they create a problem (people needing to identify for basically everything: vaccine, going to the restaurant, going to nightclubs, maybe going to the toilet in the future, etc.) and then come up with a solution: "Look, it's going to get easier to identify yourself!" and everybody applauds.
But, wait, why do I need to be identified all the time yet?
I have no idea what you’re on and I’d love to know where I can get some.
There is no reason to believe that. You are installing a government app on a gps device with a constant internet connection. Even if it doesn't send such data initially, there is no way for a regular user to know that some forced update in the future wont introduce it. At least before they would have to go through the courts to get a warrant to get it from google or apple.
What this would add is a more comprehensive log of where proof of identity has been used. In my case, the last non-digital, non-already-trackable request to display proof of identity was last summer, when I was trying to buy a case of beer with a mask, sunglasses and a hat completely obscuring my face. Guess the police will now know I visit grocery stores.
What's more, that's already been sort of centralised, with a single identity broker latvija.lv being run by the government, that then relies on other "blessed" identity sources such as banks or digital signature providers. The logs on who requested the identity verification and who got verified are surely there. If they cut the banks out of the loop, I see that as a net positive.
As for me, I'm not overly bothered by this. I trust the government to not wilfully abuse the data far, far more than I trust any for-profit entity.
If unclear why no one in the U.S. trusts federal, state, or local governments:
* The U.S. federal government now mostly acting in service of for-profit entities, due to legalized bribery of elected officials (Citizens United) and inadequate representation (the Judiciary Act of 1869 for the Supreme Court and the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 for the House).
* History defeating the most powerful empire in world history, emerging as the first nation to ever overthrow a colonial oppressor.
* U.S. law enforcement officers extrajudicially killing more Americans than mass shooters in 2019 and police departments across the country taking in billions USD every year in unconstitutionally seized assets.
* More Black Americans in the "justice" system in the 2020s than were enslaved in the 1860s.
What do you mean by in the system? I would have guessed it means incarcerated, but there were around 3.9 million slaves in 1860 which is much higher than the number of people incarcerated in the US which is around 2.3 million (Federal, state, and local) of which around 1 million are black.
"More Black men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began"
https://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-the-justice-system/bla...
So in reality, central registry of information doesn't really protect you from anything but saves the bad actor a few phone calls. On the other hand, it saves you a lot of phone calls and office visits every time you need to deal with the government.
If Russians install a puppet regime, the existence or lack of central registry wont actually change much. It will require popular uprising to make a difference, which Europeans are actually accustomed to.
Riots and protests happen all the time everywhere and taking down the governments is a thing too. Of course it depend on the specific country but in general governments in European countries resign all the time and when the refuse to resign despite popular demand they end up removed by riots.
The idea is that there's a value in having an enterprise(the government) with centralised record keeping because they own that government and have the power to change managers on predefined reviews(elections) and they have a history of forcefully changing managers who try to stick around despite not being wanted.
What do you do when a private enterprise misbehaves? Mind you, the governmental duties are often monopolistic by nature. What do you do then? Sniper the CEO?
It's much more socially acceptable to riot against the government and burn government building than assaulting company HQ.
More importantly, we already have these registries! There's already a digital identity verification service in place that, according to our law, is sufficient to identify a person to the same degree an ID card / passport would in person. It's there, I've used it as an end-user, I've set up integrations with it for my clients. The issue is that if I want to identify myself to a German institution for whatever reason, the only way I know of involves burning a whole lot of dead dinosaur juice to get to Berlin, standing in an orderly queue for a while, and presenting my passport in person. And probably filling out couple forms along the way somewhere.
The prime difference between American/British world view and continental European one and I'm loving it.
Sure, it's very nice to think that the government doesn't track you and doesn't know where you live. Then they build these giant systems to covertly track everyone and listen to everything.
Essentially, everything that the Americans believe that the government wants to do to them is already being done - just clandestinely.
On the European approach, we assume that the government is competent enough and is ours, therefore we give them the information needed to provide services and security. If the governments misbehave we will simply burn their palaces and drag them on the streets.
IMHO, both approaches have merits and I'm happy that they exist at the same time. It kind of keeps the institutions on track as scandals happen and fixes are implemented in attempt of self preservation.
I, as a german trust Scholz only as far as i can throw him... and as i am a pencil necked hacker this isn't far
Thales on the other hand are not what I would describe as a good actor but rather one of the "usual suspects".
Also there are so many bullshitters and snake-oil merchants in this field; makes you think that most of the "security" industry is a confidence game.
Let's manage the beloved and accountable Eurocrats in Brussels our private Auth-infrastructure, because its not like this problem would be solvable otherwise:
That's the key. European politicians are accountable to European citizens. Big corporations are not. This seems a step in the right direction.
That joke made my day. I'm guessing Ursula von der Leyen is a real people's champ then.
> * Big corporations are not. This seems a step in the right direction.*
So let big corporations develop the technology? Especially those that are intertwined with the state? In otherwords, entitites where the state has created plausible deniability for itself? Great, what could go wrong?
And again, FIDO is an open standard, that by definition isn't run or dependend on the servers of "for profit private companies".
But gee, I must be total noob then. Open-Source can be bad, as can be accountability.
For the greater good I guess.
The example provided (bank account, university registration) make it clear that we're talking about authenticating against a person real, legal entity here. It's not needed in all cases, and when it's not FIDO is fine, but when it's needed in the end the root of trust in Europe is one's national state anyway.
People in Europe don't. People in the various countries do. This is just a level above, just like you don't say "oh why do we need the german government, can't the mayors do everything?".
Different levels of organization need different democratic governments. Tribalism is not the solution.
Having an executive made up of people selected by other politicians for political reasons is all very well as long as they understand that they do not have much legitimacy.
JC Junker, for all that he was a bit of an old sot, understood this very well.
Von der Leyen, either because of her immensely privileged background, or because of her inability to communicate in any diplomatic way, has revealed the undemocratic abomination at the heart of the European Project.
Her press conference with Stoltenberg (and Belgian nonentity Michel) at the outset of the Ukraine war deprived the EU of any room for manoeuvre in relations with Russia. She unilaterally committed hundreds of millions of people to a diplomatically absolutist position. Furthermore, she actively spun against attempts by Macron and Scholz to moderate that position.
The EU cannot continue like this: already I'm quite dubious as to whether it will survive the winter, with double digit inflation and mass industrial layoffs in prospect.
If Putin wants to play divide et impera with Russian fossil fuel supplies, she has certainly created the ideal conditions for him to do so.
She is corrupt (see Pfizer SMS) and unaccountable.
Are all of those undemocratic, too?
> Her press conference with Stoltenberg (and Belgian nonentity Michel) at the outset of the Ukraine war deprived the EU of any room for manoeuvre in relations with Russia.
Russia's war of aggression on our neighbor deprived us of any room for manouvre. We've seen what appeasement brings in the 30s, no need to play that game again.
The game we are playing is resulting in mass death and destruction in Ukraine, and slowly throttling the European economies. What's the point?
Perhaps if you expanded your frame of historical reference you might see more clearly.
Perhaps if you educate yourself more about the era you might see the parallels more clearly.
You say "slowly throttling the economies", I say finally giving us a reason to accelerate investment in renewables before climate change kills us all.
That's not quite correct; the PM is appointed by the Queen.
In the event of a revolt by the parliamentary party of government against their leader, then the party gets to appoint a new leader, who then becomes PM. But that choice is reserved to the MPs of the majority party - hardly democratic.
But in the general case, there's a General Election, and the leader of the winning party becomes PM.
It's designed for things like filing your taxes or applying for a passport.
Does the grocery store ask you for your passport? If not, why should the online store ask you for your online passport?
I also wonder how this will be regarded in countries like Ireland, which doesn't have a national ID card and where a recent attempt to make a similar digital ID system mandatory was ruled unlawful (PSC/MyGovID).
So the situation will be better for us than today - there will be more options providing the ID (and wallets), including highly privacy-preserving tech based on modern encryption techniques. That will make it much harder to be tracked by commercial players and much harder to be tracked legally by governments.
For the blackhat / illegal security agencies: you might make it a little harder because the US-compromised companies (FAANG + MS) aren't (always) involved.
But this suggestion ain't it. Most EU countries already have a de facto mandatory electronic ID for every resident.
What's your basis for this claim? From the declared strategy, it seems perfect for abuse as a surveillance tool.
> Most EU countries already have a de facto mandatory electronic ID for every resident.
As stated elsewhere, my country (Ireland) does not. It's attempt at a mandatory electronic ID (MyGovID/Public Services Card) was ruled as unlawful (it's still available, but cannot be required to access government services).
Strategy link: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
however, as an EU citizen, I can see immediate advantages to a cautiously administered digital id. as it is, many states within the EU demand a national tax id on registration for services as simple as bike rental, such a digital id would presumably supersede such nonsense and help further the single market everyone is working towards.
What happens when I buy debian mobile? I presume it will not be accepted because there will be no safe app. No app, no identity? No identity means you're suddenly locked out of society.
What phone theft? Most people's phone security is almost non existent.
What about luddites who have no mobile at all?
It seems like it's 100% about control of people. And that's a privacy matter. My body, my life, my choice.
In theory, you should be able to go on using a passport for your actual needs. In practice, it is to be seen whether this initiative will cause or not cases where "options" become "constraints".
Said perspective is insanity: for those websites relevant to an anagraphic identity it would be dramatically abnormal to use any supposed private company related account. It would be sheer absurdity to suppose a "need" for accounts with private entities to log on to nominal services.
I don't think so. The idea is to make the wallet offline.
> It solves a problem that does not exist,
I does exist. Automatically checking identity is hard. Some counties apparently issued certificates to their citizens and enabled them being verified by anyone, simplifying several online businesses patterns.
> will likely be mandatory at some point
More like fast lane. But eventually (30 years) probably yes.
> and is executed by a defense company.
Every country is responsible for their own part. There are going to be ETSI standards for interoperability.
The actual trouble here is that (at least in my country) the officials responsible believe that rooted phone is higher security risk than automatic updates from Chinese government.
This seems like a feature, not a bug.
However, many (all?) EU members already have developed their own national system. So this tries to unionize those systems so dealing with other member nations becomes easier. Today I often have to mail a bunch of documents if I want to prove my business ownership to foreign companies.
Any data that is aggregated is open to abuse by the aggregator and it will be definitely abused if the aggregator is a government body.
Even in your contrived dystopia, I'd rather have a democratic government be the Big Brother than some unelected tech CEO.
I trust the former more to have my best interests in mind.
When somebody says "This may be controversial // Well, much better than being crushed under a rock", the latter is supposed to be rhetoric, here somebody seems to treat it like a real alternative, as if you went into the current events to avoid that!
Norway is one step closer to that:
https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norway-to-track-all-supermarket...
So why do we need this newer, more expensive, dystopian stuff made by some private company? How do I vote against this? Oh wait, it's the EU...so I can't.
Others are outright creepy. You can't access medecine without verifying your ID? That locks lots of people out of access to healthcare (illegals, tourists, etc). Age verification? So porn websites will store the real id of all their visitors (or alternatively a central EU age verification system will be notified every time you visit such a website)?
In France for instance it is illegal to identify people by their social security number in a system (at least it was 20 years ago). That's a safeguard to prevent it from making it too easy to correlate an identity across many systems. This ID scheme will go around that. To be honest I think that law was passed at a time where surveillance was still considered evil. I think governements of most liberal democracies today are actually entertaining stasi-style surveillance as a greater good.
I opted out of the digital functions of my ID, but I plan to have them activated, because it's better than video identification or uploading scans of my documents. That being said, I hope that only serious processes will adopt this.
For age verification requests, the service provider can set the amount of years, and the ID card will simply answer with a yes or no.
The pseudonym isn't created, but calculated from the ID's private key and the service provider's public key, so even a new card means new pseudonym, which makes it slightly less useful for login long term.
Does it not make sense that prescription medication can only be picked up by somebody who has been prescribed that medication (or somebody who has been delegated that authority by the prescribee)? As long as there's an offline mechanism available for verification I don't see the problem here.
>Age verification? So porn websites will store the real id of all their visitors (or alternatively a central EU age verification system will be notified every time you visit such a website)?
Presenting a token verifying that one is over 18 is not the same thing as presenting one's entire identity so that the service can verify one is over 18.
The way it could work is this: You try and access an age-restricted service (ARS). It returns a request for age verification including a unique ID. You then pass a hash of that request to the age verification service (AVS), and get back a token which is signed by the AVS. That token is then presented to the ARS, which validates that the signature and that the hash of their request are valid.
Boom, you have just verified that you are over 18 without leaking your identity to the ARS and without leaking the ARS's identity to the AVS.
I'm sure there could be some sort of more elaborate protocol that would preserve privacy in the case of a log breach, the one I sketched out just shows that (assuming logs remain private and there's no collusion) that the ARS doesn't need to know the user's identity and the AVS doesn't need to know the ARS's identity in order to validate the user's age.
This is a digital form of all the IDs you get from the state already.
There are genuine concerns about the scale at which digital IDs can potentially be exploited and/or the scale of monitoring this can enable, but in functional societies and governments you can build laws and systems to mitigate such issues.
The alternative are low quality ad hoc systems that offer convenience, but have no incentive for privacy and/or security.
For example, consider the massive Experian hack in the US. A credit score is basically required if you want to be a functioning member of American society. And yet they barely got a slap on the wrist and continue with their pathetically poor security practices. And it's not like they (or any US entity, for that matter) will not make their data available to the government.
In fact, with a government controlled DB the voters can have far more say on what the govt can do with that data, as opposed to Apple or Google owning that data (which is what's happenign in the US with Apple providing digital ID for states, and I'm sure Google will get into that as well), which becomes their private data and as a member of society you have no say on what can be done with that.
As others have mentioned, similar stuff exist in other countries as well.
So to me, I'd rather have a single common, shared and opensource system for both Denmark, and all of EU.
Something the customer is (fingerprint, iris, face)
Right there, trying to normalize the idea that the government needs our fingerprints, iris etc. And that ship has sailed, lots of laws getting passed that will require this from citizens.
The quiet explosion in CCTV cameras across Europe is far more a threat than some unique identifier.
Physical documents. This is an electronic system, with potential for issues as you (in this crowd) should suspect.
> is far more a threat
Which definitely concerns us in its own turn - who the daughter is dating will take its own slot.
The issue is not with the governmental database, taken for granted. It is with the consequences brought by the electronic system on the user side.
Let’s say, travelling to a different country without a wallet would be amazing to me.
Well yes, have you seen what europol can do now? Safe and analyze data even from unsuspected people.
German:
https://www.heise.de/news/Europols-Mandat-zur-Massenueberwac...
Most EEA countries issue physical identity cards already, so a digital one would seem a logical step.
Not that I don't disagree with the concerns about it.
Edit: I stand corrected, with Thales writing this article, we can expect conglomorates such as Thales or Siemens to build this as well (corporations that due to their long standing national prominence are de-facto state-entities, although not de-jure).