Ukraine’s Dystopian “State in a Smartphone” App Is Taking the World By Storm — With America’s Help

[Photo credit: Unsplash]

By Stavroula Pabst

DIIA, Ukraine’s state-in-a-smartphone app, has digitized and centralized 120 government services as part of Ukraine's wartime efforts to become the most “convenient” and “digital” country on earth. 

Despite the app’s dystopian disposition and severe prospects for mass surveillance and function creep, similar versions, like Estonia’s mRIIK and Poland's mObywatel, are being tested and adopted all around the world — thanks to the help and funding of the United States. 

DIIA: “The State and Me”

As its Ministry of Digital Transformation’s flagship project, Ukraine has been touting its DIIA smartphone app as a “one-stop-shop” for 120 online government services, including taxpayer services, digital IDs, driver’s licenses and digital biometric passports. 

And, as part of Ukraine’s larger wartime plans to become the world’s most “convenient” and “digital” country, DIIA’s presence in Ukrainian daily life is rapidly expanding: 19 million people are now estimated to use the app, which has been downloaded onto about 70 percent of Ukrainian smartphones. 

While proponents boast of DIIA’s ease-of-use and ability to boost the public’s participation in civil society, its propensity for ethical and social harms are difficult to overestimate. After all, DIIA is an acronym for “The State and Me,” in Ukrainian, which suggests the facilitation of a more hands-on, direct relationship between the state and civilian.

Critically, however, this “hands-on relationship” pushed through apps like DIIA also facilitates the government’s unprecedented access to the civilian and their private lives and personal information, simultaneously constructing a hyper-centralized digital infrastructure that could facilitate or inhibit civilians’ access to critical services and public life. 

And it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where the state’s direct access to the populace’s smartphones could be weaponized in dangerous ways: if the government can add, remove, or otherwise manipulate public services with the push of a few buttons, they can make major decisions about daily life with relative impunity.

It’s clear, moreover, that DIIA and its equivalents are being designed to play key and growing roles in civilians’ economic, social, and daily lives. As I noted for Unlimited Hangout, many people prove their identity via DIIA to access banking services. Reporter Dan Cohen highlighted on Redacted, further, that CNN and Eurovision were available through DIIA, showing the tool’s propensity as a (government-curated) entertainment- and information center alike.

Despite DIIA’s dystopian disposition and apparent capacity for endless function creep, as demonstrated by its collaborative use with Telegram as a tool to help spy on and report Russians and even alleged “collaborators” to the authorities, the elite have declared DIIA a resounding success both as a tool for government services and war. “Diia was a gleam in someone's eye just in 2019,” Sa

mantha Power exclaimed about Diia in an interview with Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, and CNN’s Andrea Mitchell. “And here we are just four years later, a massive full-scale invasion later, and you have more than 120 services available to citizens.” 

In light of its perceived successes, DIIA and adjacent app-based government services like Estonia’s mRIIK, are being tested and adopted all around the world — thanks to the help and funding of the United States and especially its foreign aid and development “soft-power” arm, USAID. 

Governments Everywhere Take Interest in DIIA Equivalents — With USAID’s Help

As news of DIIA spreads, governments around the world are exploring utilizing equivalent and adjacent services within their borders. At the forefront is Ukraine’s Baltic neighbor Estonia, whose DIIA-based mRIIK app is set to launch in the near future. Through mRIIK, citizens will be able to access a variety of public services, including digital identity cards, passports and driver's licenses, though it’s currently unclear whether they’ll be accepted with the same legal authority as their paper equivalents without changes to Estonian law. 

Poland, further, has launched DIIA-adjacent “mObywatel,” or “My Citizen,” a government services app which had already been downloaded over 9 million times by late February of this year. mObywatel offers a variety of public services, including eRecepty (ePrescriptions), eZwolnienia (eSickLeave) and mPrawoJazdy (mDrivingLicence). According to the Polish Government, 1.4 billion e-prescriptions were issued in 2022, suggesting eObywatel’s high adoption rate amongst the general public. Large Family Cards, a system of discounts on basic goods and services for larger families, are also available through mObywatel.

USAID, meanwhile, is facilitating new collaborations between Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and other countries. As I noted in Unlimited Hangout, USAID provided years of financial, technical, and legal support towards DIIA’s development and launch, and has pledged $650,000 to “jumpstart the adoption of Diia-like systems and the digital technology services that underpin them” elsewhere. 

At May’s DIIA in DC event, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Samantha Power announced planned collaborations between Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, USAID and the governments of Kosovo, Colombia, and Zanzibar towards the creation of their own public services apps.

Mykhailo Fedorov noted in an interview with US-backed Radio Svoboda, further, that Ukraine was in communication with “more than five countries” about the prospects of developing equivalent applications to use within their own borders. Ethiopia has also been mentioned as a candidate for a prospective state smartphone application. Speaking with Financial Times writer Gillian Tett, moreover, USAID Administrator Power suggested that paper-reliant American officials could perhaps learn from DIIA’s successes in government digitization.

In short, as the Atlantic Council puts it, “Ukraine’s Diia system could soon be serving as a model [for digital governance] throughout the transitional world.”

Critically, USAID is widely suspected to be a CIA front. As such, the group’s apparently intense interest in DIIA and equivalent state smartphone apps, as I wrote in Unlimited Hangout, perhaps even “posits another dimension of surveillance potential through the app — data gathering for the intelligence community.” 

After all, USAID has a track record of data-gathering shenanigans around the world: for example, the organization had even created a Cuban twitter equivalent, ZunZuneo, in 2010 to meddle in the country’s affairs. According to The Guardian, the ZunZuneo app at its peak drew in about 40,000 users, who “were never aware it was created by the US government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.” While USAID is more open about its relationship with DIIA than it was with ZunZuneo, the ZunZuneo incident shows that DIIA and adjacent state service apps’ prospects for mass data collection and surveillance, especially for “political purposes,” cannot be discounted.

Many of these international “state in a smartphone apps” may be based directly off DIIA, finally, perhaps suggesting the app’s possible standardization across borders, and therefore even centralization or interoperability internationally. After all, according to a June 2023 e-Estonia’s podcast episode, strides are being made towards interoperability between DIIA, mRIIK, and even the prospective EU digital wallet, which is slated to hold a variety of key digital documents. In fact, Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on Telegram in mid-July that DIIA will assist in the development of the EU Digital Wallet, and that DIIA representatives showed off their app’s capacities at the POTENTIAL (Pilots for European Digital Identity Wallet) Consortium this summer, where the EU Digital Wallet program kicked off.

And DIIA also provides its services in the form of a digital Polish residence permit, Diia.pl, in a collaboration between Ukraine and Poland (which hosts about 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees as of March 2023), allowing Ukrainian refugees to access the Schengen zone and upload other relevant government documents, like driver’s licenses, to mObywatel through DIIA.

In short, the emerging picture depicts efforts towards hyper-centralized state services’ unlimited access to and possible ability to gather data on civilian populations, perhaps even in ways that will become interoperable across borders. 

And while these digitized government services are not mandatory for civilians to use at the time of writing, it’s plausible they could be one day as their paper equivalents are less frequented or otherwise phased out. After all, such apps are already being nudged on the larger population to encourage uptake: Ukraine, for example, has provided stipends to war-affected civilians through DIIA. 

Towards App-Based Governance?

While proponents boast DIIA’s convenience and propensity to boost participation in civil affairs and crush corruption, the tool’s prospects for mass surveillance, function creep and even social control are ultimately unprecedented. Such issues, however, remain little discussed despite the concept’s rapid international proliferation. And assistance and investment to DIIA and adjacent projects through USAID, considering the organization’s track record, only signals the US’ desire to mass surveil or otherwise influence other nations’ affairs as war in Ukraine deepens.

Unfortunately, because DIIA is an effort grounded in a fusion of public but also private, and therefore functionally unaccountable, efforts (including the likes of tech and financial giants, such as Visa), those developing and spreading it and similar apps have little contact with or responsibility to the very public who will likely be nudged into using the technology. 

In other words, DIIA’s likely coming to a country near you soon.