David Moss

#497a The putative Times leading article above (#497) is followed the next day by Anthropic Opus 5 Max's putative letters page, claude.ai/public/artifacts/9…: Hypothetical scenario — imagined by Claude. Not a real Times letters page. All signatories are invented (see note below) Saturday May 23 2026 Letters to the Editor Page 28 The Times Letters to the Editor Letters should include the writer's name, full postal address and a daytime telephone number. They may be edited. Correspondents are asked not to enclose identity documents. Who can Britain trust to prove that its own citizens exist? Sir, Your leading article ("A Failure of Identity", May 22) was generous in its praise of Pakistan's National Database and Registration Authority. I write, in a spirit of friendship, to observe that the comparison you drew was a modest one. The Unique Identification Authority of India has issued more than 1.3 billion Aadhaar numbers since the first was assigned in 2010. It authenticates identity many tens of millions of times each day; it underpins the direct transfer of welfare payments to households across a subcontinent, in more than twenty languages, to citizens many of whom have no fixed address and some of whom have no literacy. It has been examined by our supreme court, which upheld its use for welfare and taxation while striking down its compulsory extension elsewhere — a distinction your government might find instructive, since it appears to have made no such distinction at all. India does not pretend the system is without difficulty. Questions of exclusion and of data protection are live, and properly so. But it functions, at ten times the population of Pakistan and twenty times that of the United Kingdom, and it has functioned every day this week. Should His Majesty's Government wish it, the Authority would be glad to share its experience with British officials. We would ask only that they arrive with an open mind, and that they do not describe what they are shown as unsuited to a country of Britain's complexity. S. R. VenkataramanHigh Commissioner for India; India House, Aldwych, WC2 Sixty providers, and none of them large Sir, Your analysis (May 22) proposed that half a dozen firms from the Digital Verification Services register might step in where One Login has failed. As one who has spent forty years reading the accounts of small companies, I counsel caution. Certification against the trust framework establishes that a provider's processes are sound. It establishes nothing whatever about its capacity. A good many of the registered providers are, on the evidence of their filings, micro-entities and small companies: a handful of employees, a single office, turnover that would not cover a fortnight of the One Login programme's consultancy bill. Verifying tenants for letting agents is honourable work. It is not the same undertaking as verifying seventy million people inside a quarter. Which invites the question your analysis did not ask: who actually can? On any realistic timetable the answer is a very short list of American corporations, two of which already carry government-issued identity documents in the wallets on our telephones. I would expect a "strategic partnership" to be announced before the summer, presented as pragmatism. Your readers should understand what that would mean. The means by which a British subject proves his existence to his own government would be owned by a company incorporated in another jurisdiction and answerable to another legislature. We would have declined to be governed from Brussels and consented to be identified from Cupertino. I would offer chapter and verse from the providers' filed accounts. Unfortunately Companies House is unable to show them to me. Michael Harbottle, FCAChartered accountant; Ludlow, Shropshire Monday morning will be the test Sir, The political commentary has concentrated on jobcentres and school vetting. It has missed where this ends. Bank onboarding and much routine account verification in this country now lean on the same identity rails that failed on Wednesday. A depositor who suspects he may shortly be unable to move his money does not wait to find out. He moves it, and he moves it into a form he can hold. Expect queues at cash machines from Monday, at branches by Tuesday, and expect the television pictures of those queues to do the rest of the work unaided. The gilt market poses the graver problem. A sovereign borrower's ultimate collateral is its capacity to tax, and a state that cannot establish who a taxpayer is cannot enforce a liability against him. That is not a liquidity question, it is a solvency question, and the desks that price it will not be reassured by a press notice about unauthorised activity. I would be astonished if the next auction were fully covered. Gold will pass $10,000 the moment the New York open digests what has happened here. Sterling will find its own level, and it will be a lower one. I hope very much to be proved wrong, and I have been before. Prof Alastair MenziesEmeritus Professor of Economics, University of Reading Buy the expertise abroad Sir, None of this is news, and that is the scandal. Those of us who followed the Identity Assurance programme and then GOV.UK Verify set out, in public and at length, why they would fail. We were told we were negative. Verify duly failed, at a cost the National Audit Office declined to call value for money, and the response was to disband the team and start again with a new name. The pattern is unvarying. Generalist officials of no particular technical accomplishment, rotating through posts every eighteen months, disburse hundreds of millions of pounds of other people's money to management consultants who bear no consequence whatever when the thing does not work. Nobody is dismissed. Nobody repays a fee. The programme is renamed and the cycle resumes. We do not build our own airliners on the grounds that they must be British. We should stop insisting that public administration is different. There is no reason in principle why the operation of a national identity service should not be tendered internationally, on a published specification, with penalties that bite. Were such a tender held tomorrow, I would expect Singapore to win it. GovTech Singapore has run Singpass for two decades and Myinfo alongside it, and it does not lose the population's data on a Wednesday evening. It would be humiliating to buy the service from a city-state of six million people. Humiliation may be the only thing left that this country has not tried. David Moss We wrote it down in 2018 Sir, I was an engineer on GOV.UK Verify. In 2018 my colleagues and I set out, in a document that went to senior officials, why a single centralised identity service would become the most attractive target in government and why the fallback routes then being closed would one day be needed. I have no idea whether anyone read it. I know that within two years everyone who wrote it had left. Institutional memory in the Government Digital Service is measured in months, not decades. That, and not any individual failure of engineering, is what your leading article correctly identified as the British disease. Name and address supplied I know this tone of voice Sir, For eleven years I was told that the computer could not be wrong, that mine was an isolated case, and that the matter was in hand. I lost a business and very nearly a marriage before anybody in authority conceded a word of it. I have no view on the technical merits of One Login. I recognise the vocabulary exactly. Raymond AldertonFormer subpostmaster; Nantwich, Cheshire In defence of a single front door Sir, Amid the recrimination, one point deserves stating. Before One Login, citizens dealing with central government faced some 190 separate login systems, many built a decade or more ago, several without meaningful monitoring and none subject to a common security standard. Nobody wrote letters to The Times about them, because their failures were small, dispersed and invisible. Consolidation did not create risk; it made risk visible and concentrated it where it could be defended. The failure here was one of investment and of governance — of proceeding to mandate the service before the security work was finished — not of the underlying idea. Britain will still need a coherent way for citizens to identify themselves to the state on Monday, and the answer will not be 190 systems again. Sir Peter Lascelles, KCBFormer Permanent Secretary; London SW7 The deeper failings Sir, Your leading article confined itself to matters of engineering and procurement. I venture that the roots lie deeper. Systems are built by people, and people build in their own image. A programme conceived and delivered by teams drawn from a narrow band of background and formation will reproduce that narrowness in its assumptions — about who has a passport, who has a smartphone, whose name fits the field, and whose life is legible to a database. The exclusions now surfacing were not foreseen because there was nobody in the room to whom they would have occurred. Nor can we set aside our departure from the European Union, which removed this country from the shared work now producing an interoperable identity framework across the continent. We chose to build alone, at the precise moment when our neighbours chose to build together, and we have paid for the solitude. Let me end where my office obliges me to end. A person's identity is not conferred by a database and cannot be revoked by one. The nursery assistant in Leeds and the widow in Cornwall of whom you wrote are known, and were known before any register existed. Whatever the state's systems may presently be able to confirm, they remain exactly who they were on Tuesday. The Most Revd Dr Helen MarchbanksArchbishop of Canterbury; Lambeth Palace, SE1 A welcome north of the Tweed Sir, In my first weeks in this office I had not expected to be extending hospitality to our neighbours quite so soon. The Scottish Government declined, some years ago and against a certain amount of advice, to route devolved services through One Login. Scotland's own arrangements have run without interruption throughout this week. Our health service, our social security agency and our registers are working normally this morning. Any Englishman who finds himself this weekend unable to demonstrate to his own government that he exists is warmly invited to come north, where he will discover that he remains a person. I am assured no identity verification is required at Berwick. Fiona Strachan MSPPresiding Officer, The Scottish Parliament; Edinburgh A register that has never gone down Sir, The register of baptisms, marriages and burials in this parish has been maintained without interruption since 1559. It has survived a civil war, two world wars, three fires in the village and the reorganisation of local government. It has never once been unavailable. It is kept in a locked chest in the vestry. I am happy to advise the Government Digital Service on the arrangements. Margaret EnderbyChurchwarden; Blythburgh, Suffolk A question of purpose Sir, Following official guidance, I attended my local library yesterday to have my identity re-established in person. I was asked to bring my passport. I have been reflecting ever since on what precisely One Login was for. Dr Colin WraysburyHexham, Northumberland This is an imagined letters page written by Claude at the user's request, exploring a hypothetical scenario. It is not a real Times page. Every signatory is fictional, including the holders of the real offices named (High Commissioner for India, Archbishop of Canterbury, Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament) — no words here are attributed to any real holder of those posts. The sole exception is David Moss, included at the user's request; the views in that letter are an imagined restatement of positions he has argued publicly for many years, not a real letter by him. Institutions and schemes referenced (Aadhaar and the UIDAI, Singpass and GovTech Singapore, the DVS register, GOV.UK Verify) are real; the May 2026 attack and all consequences described are invented.