Not a near-term solution, but the Free Software Foundation just announced the LibrePhone project!

This is exactly why giving ID scans to online sevices is a terrible idea, even ignoring the privacy aspect.

Sure am glad we have police robots in the sky to protect us from 19 year old kids stealing stuff from Walmart

Gozz is correct. You’re misunderstanding the nature of a digital signal. What the author did was convert a digital signal to an analog signal, store that analog signal on a bird, then record that analog signal. Whether it was redigitized after the fact is irrelevant. It is not a digital process end-to-end. This is the same as if I were to download a YouTube video, record that video on a VHS tape, then redigitize that video. Not only would the end result not be a bit for bit match, it wouldn’t be a match at all despite containing some of the same visual information, because it would be the product of a digital-analog-digital conversion.