In 2009, I became extremely concerned with the concept of Unique Identity for various reasons. Connected with many like minded highly educated people who were all concerned.
On 18th May 2010, I started this Blog to capture anything and everything I came across on the topic. This blog with its million hits is a testament to my concerns about loss of privacy and fear of the ID being misused and possible Criminal activities it could lead to.
In 2017 the Supreme Court of India gave its verdict after one of the longest hearings on any issue. I did my bit and appealed to the Supreme Court Judges too through an On Line Petition.
In 2019 the Aadhaar Legislation has been revised and passed by the two houses of the Parliament of India making it Legal. I am no Legal Eagle so my Opinion carries no weight except with people opposed to the very concept.
In 2019, this Blog now just captures on a Daily Basis list of Articles Published on anything to do with Aadhaar as obtained from Daily Google Searches and nothing more. Cannot burn the midnight candle any longer.
"In Matters of Conscience, the Law of Majority has no place"- Mahatma Gandhi
Ram Krishnaswamy
Sydney, Australia.

Aadhaar

The UIDAI has taken two successive governments in India and the entire world for a ride. It identifies nothing. It is not unique. The entire UID data has never been verified and audited. The UID cannot be used for governance, financial databases or anything. It’s use is the biggest threat to national security since independence. – Anupam Saraph 2018

When I opposed Aadhaar in 2010 , I was called a BJP stooge. In 2016 I am still opposing Aadhaar for the same reasons and I am told I am a Congress die hard. No one wants to see why I oppose Aadhaar as it is too difficult. Plus Aadhaar is FREE so why not get one ? Ram Krishnaswamy

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.-Mahatma Gandhi

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.Mahatma Gandhi

“The invasion of privacy is of no consequence because privacy is not a fundamental right and has no meaning under Article 21. The right to privacy is not a guaranteed under the constitution, because privacy is not a fundamental right.” Article 21 of the Indian constitution refers to the right to life and liberty -Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi

“There is merit in the complaints. You are unwittingly allowing snooping, harassment and commercial exploitation. The information about an individual obtained by the UIDAI while issuing an Aadhaar card shall not be used for any other purpose, save as above, except as may be directed by a court for the purpose of criminal investigation.”-A three judge bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar said in an interim order.

Legal scholar Usha Ramanathan describes UID as an inverse of sunshine laws like the Right to Information. While the RTI makes the state transparent to the citizen, the UID does the inverse: it makes the citizen transparent to the state, she says.

Good idea gone bad
I have written earlier that UID/Aadhaar was a poorly designed, unreliable and expensive solution to the really good idea of providing national identification for over a billion Indians. My petition contends that UID in its current form violates the right to privacy of a citizen, guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This is because sensitive biometric and demographic information of citizens are with enrolment agencies, registrars and sub-registrars who have no legal liability for any misuse of this data. This petition has opened up the larger discussion on privacy rights for Indians. The current Article 21 interpretation by the Supreme Court was done decades ago, before the advent of internet and today’s technology and all the new privacy challenges that have arisen as a consequence.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MP Rajya Sabha

“What is Aadhaar? There is enormous confusion. That Aadhaar will identify people who are entitled for subsidy. No. Aadhaar doesn’t determine who is eligible and who isn’t,” Jairam Ramesh

But Aadhaar has been mythologised during the previous government by its creators into some technology super force that will transform governance in a miraculous manner. I even read an article recently that compared Aadhaar to some revolution and quoted a 1930s historian, Will Durant.Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rajya Sabha MP

“I know you will say that it is not mandatory. But, it is compulsorily mandatorily voluntary,” Jairam Ramesh, Rajya Saba April 2017.

August 24, 2017: The nine-judge Constitution Bench rules that right to privacy is “intrinsic to life and liberty”and is inherently protected under the various fundamental freedoms enshrined under Part III of the Indian Constitution

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the World; indeed it's the only thing that ever has"

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -Edward Snowden

In the Supreme Court, Meenakshi Arora, one of the senior counsel in the case, compared it to living under a general, perpetual, nation-wide criminal warrant.

Had never thought of it that way, but living in the Aadhaar universe is like living in a prison. All of us are treated like criminals with barely any rights or recourse and gatekeepers have absolute power on you and your life.

Announcing the launch of the # BreakAadhaarChainscampaign, culminating with events in multiple cities on 12th Jan. This is the last opportunity to make your voice heard before the Supreme Court hearings start on 17th Jan 2018. In collaboration with @no2uidand@rozi_roti.

UIDAI's security seems to be founded on four time tested pillars of security idiocy

1) Denial

2) Issue fiats and point finger

3) Shoot messenger

4) Bury head in sand.

God Save India

Monday, January 2, 2012

2166 - Thumbs Up Against UID by Syed Azeez Pasha- Member of the Parliament - Rajya Sabha

December 9, 2010 at 12:01am


A meeting of concerned citizens gave an unequivocal “thumbs down” to the proposed NIDAI Bill and launched a national campaign of non-cooperation with the controversial “Aadhar” scheme that is already being piloted in some districts of the country.

Human rights activists, representatives of Dalit and minority organisations, IT professionals, urban rights groups, security experts, development workers and Members of Parliament Abani Roy (Revolutionary Socialist Party) and Syed Azeez Pasha (CPI) spoke at the meeting, held on August 25, 2010 in New Delhi.

The Government of India and Nandan Nilekani, Chairperson UIDAI, have been claiming that the UID scheme will enable inclusive growth by providing each citizen with a verifiable identity, that it will facilitate delivery of basic services, that it will plug leakages in public expenditure and that it will speed up achievement of targets in social sector schemes.

Presentations by experts at the meeting comprehensively debunked these claims. Speaker after speaker pointed out that while exclusion and leakages in social sector schemes are serious issues, these are not caused by the inability to prove identity but by the deliberate manipulation of the system by those who have the power to control the flow of benefits.

The UID scheme disowns all responsibility for these systemic issues. In fact, a working paper prepared by the UIDAI states that “the UIDAI is only in the identity business. The responsibility of tracking beneficiaries and the governance of service delivery will continue to remain with the respective agencies ' the job of tracking distribution of food grains among BPL families for example, will remain with the state PDS department.”

This being the case, it seems an unjustified leap of faith for Nilekani and the government to claim that that the UID scheme will promote equitable access to social services.

Fears of surveillance and violation of privacy

Legal researcher and civil rights activist Usha Ramanathan pointed out that the UID proposal violates the individual's right to privacy, currently protected under both international and domestic law, and held by the Supreme Court to be implicit under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution.

Although participation in the UID scheme is supposed to be voluntary and optional, personal and household data for the National Population Register is already being collected by Census enumerators. Census respondents are being told that it is mandatory to submit personal information for the National Population Register. This information is being made available to the UIDAI, in contravention of Section 15 of the Census Act which categorically states that information given for the Census is “not open to inspection nor admissible in evidence”.

The draft Bill does not contain any mechanisms for credible and independent oversight. This increases the risk of the government adding additional features and data, or sharing the database with other agencies, without informing or taking the consent of citizens and without re-evaluating the effects on privacy in each instance. The centralised database where personal data will be stored can easily be “converged” with other databases, such as databases maintained by police and intelligence agencies, or by corporates like banks and credit card companies.

More troubling is the possibility that the UID database will be used to identify and eliminate “maoists”, “terrorists”, “habitual offenders”, political opponents and others who are perceived as threats by those in power. There was general agreement that the involvement of the state in mass carnage (as in Delhi in 1984 and Gujarat in 2002), and the Government's support to and defence of the widespread use of  “encounter killings”  and other extra-constitutional methods by the police, armed forces and vigilante groups like the Salwa Judum in Chattisgarh and the VHP in Kandhamal, has already created an enabling environment for abuse of the UID database to serve undemocratic, illegal and unethical purposes.

Speakers expressed concern that Nandan Nilekani and his team have consistently deflected and refused to respond to concerns about security, surveillance and human rights, which have been repeatedly raised on public platforms by concerned citizens.  Senior UID officials have even stated that the risks of surveillance and profiling are acceptable trade-offs for the “inclusion and portability that the scheme will confer.    

Risks of ‘exclusion' and false data

Internet security and biometrics expert Jude D'Souza argued convincingly that, far from facilitating inclusion, around 150 million people are likely to be excluded from social benefits as a result of the UID scheme. Fingerprinting and iris scans ' the two biometrics that the UID scheme will use ' have been shown to have a high margin of error and are easily “spoofed”, and are therefore unreliable as identifiers.

Agricultural workers, construction workers and other manual labourers have calloused and scarred fingers and ‘low-quality' fingerprints. An NREGA beneficiary could present his newly-issued UID number as a conclusive proof of identity to claim payment, but could find the application rejected because a fingerprint scanner could classify the applicant's worn-out fingers as a so-called ‘false negative'. Even going by a conservative error rate of 5 percent, this means that at least 15 lakh people out of the 30 million NREGS job card holders will therefore be put at risk of exclusion.

Iris scans are no more reliable than fingerprints. An iris scan cannot be done on people with corneal blindness, glaucoma or corneal scars. This means that the 6-8 million Indians with corneal blindness, and the much larger number of people with corneal scars (caused by infections or injuries to the eyes) will be excluded from the scheme.

Both fingerprint scanners and iris scanners can be easily “spoofed” or fooled ' for instance, latex and adhesives can be used to create false fingerprints and coloured contact lenses can obscure iris patterns.

Security gaps in UID software technology

IT security experts warned that the technical details of the UID software are easily available and security experts have already assessed the UID database as being very vulnerable to hacking. A confidential working paper titled "Creating a Unique Identity Number for Every Resident in India", recently posted on the transparency website Wikileaks, admits that "the UID database will be susceptible to attacks and leaks at various levels".

The recent arrest of a Hyderabad-based software professional who demonstrated the security gaps in electronic voting machines raises the concern that researchers and IT security experts who are exposing the vulnerabilities in the UID software, are likely to be penalised and silenced.

Huge amounts of money that have been made available to the UIDAI, without any approval from Parliament or discussion in the public domain about the necessity of such a scheme. It took several RTI applications from citizens' groups before even the basic documents were uploaded on the website. The point was made that the allocation to UIDAI was at the cost of other social sector schemes.

MPs Abani Roy (Revolutionary Socialist Party) and Syed Azeez Pasha (CPI) deplored the undemocratic way in which the UIDAI has been set up and characterised the UID scheme as an “expensive and dangerous project” through which several companies will capture massive contracts at the expense of the public exchequer.

There was universal agreement on the need to take immediate action to inform people of the risks involved and the false claims being made by the UIDAI. The UID scheme needs to be seen in the larger context of the shrinking space for democratic dissent, undermining of civil liberties and cooptation of civil society groups and movements into becoming guarantors and monitors for supposedly “rights-based” schemes such as the NREGA. It is a matter of concern that many civil society groups, the media and opinion-makers are lending their support to the scheme without examining its implications.

The group decided to launch a campaign of non-cooperation to stop the UIDAI in its tracks. Activities for broad-based public education and mobilisation, as well as lobbying with MPs and key opinion-makers will also be intensified in the next few months.