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, November 30, 2015

9101 - Can Aadhaar be saved? - Live Mint


What’s essential for the unique identification number to continue is a strong law. But what should it look like?


Some critics say that Aadhaar will not address the problems it claims to solve, such as exclusion of the most marginalized communities from basic services. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint
A key thrust of the 2012 writ petition filed in the Aadhaar case (Puttaswamy versus Union of India) was that the executive action in implementing Aadhaar was unconstitutional in the absence of a law.

Later developments in the case, including the government’s argument that there is no fundamental right to privacy, and the limitations placed in the use of Aadhaar unique identity numbers in the interim orders, have overshadowed this objection.
Reports from earlier this month indicate the government is considering re-introducing some version of the National Identification Authority of India bill (NIAI bill), with finance minister Arun Jaitley stating that a draft was ready (http://bit.ly/1PfslOq ).

The first version of the draft law was rejected by a parliamentary standing committee in 2011, chiefly on the grounds of lack of clarity of purpose, potential for fraud and misuse, and high security risks. (http://bit.ly/1Xld4uJ )
The concerns raised by the committee report, and by the Supreme Court (SC) in its interim orders must be adequately addressed in a new draft for it to pass both parliamentary and judicial assessment.

What’s been wrong with Aadhaar?

It is a daunting task to cull out all the grounds of opposition to Aadhaar, since fears and objections of different shades have been raised. However, three broad strands can be gleaned.
One is that Aadhaar infringes the privacy and personal liberty of the individual. This includes objections to both the collection of biometric data and the uses (yet to be exhaustively specified) that such data could be put to.

The second argument goes that Aadhaar will not address the problems it claims to solve, such as exclusion of the most marginalized communities from basic services. Instead, it will exacerbate them, because Aadhaar numbers are mandatory in fact, notwithstanding government press statements, and many still do not have it.

The third main argument is that the data security framework in place for Aadhaar is inadequate, and the most personal data of 930 million people are at risk.

Not all these concerns can be addressed through law.
If SC holds that the very act of storing the fingerprints of citizens, even with consent, is a violation of privacy (as some petitioners have argued), then the basis for the programme will be lost.

Some of the objections, however, can be addressed through a legal framework which establishes safeguards and limitations, and more importantly, gives adequate recourse to individuals if those safeguards are violated.

The NIAI bill, however, abdicated its responsibility by handing over most of the decision-making power to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the authority in charge of Aadhaar.

A better Aadhaar?
The new bill should not repeat its mistakes. The objections relating to compulsoriness, privacy and data security must be addressed adequately in it to pass muster.
First, on the compulsory use of Aadhaar. The directive that Aadhaar is optional and can only be used on the basis of free and informed consent must bind not only UIDAI but also the government and private institutions that use the service.
Further, it is inadequate to merely state that Aadhaar is consent-based, or even declare it so in law. Effective recourse must be established in case of violations; for example, in the shape of a grievance redressal authority that is sufficiently empowered to take meaningful action.
Second, there has to be greater certainty on the uses that the Aadhaar number can be put to.
UIDAI has stressed on several occasions that it does not store the source of each authentication, and therefore, it is not possible to track the usage of Aadhaar with respect to an individual over a period of time.
This by itself is not sufficient.
Even with this design, authorities other than UIDAI can cause the convergence of databases where the Aadhaar number is seeded, linking databases to get detailed profiles of citizens. If, for example, Aadhaar numbers are provided for a marriage licence, a gas licence, an entrance examination and for registering a lease deed, then linking the information provided to these public service providers using the Aadhaar number as the common factor gives unprecedented levels of information to the state.
This must be made explicitly illegal.
Further, one of the most troubling aspects of the Aadhaar number is the attempts made to use it in criminal investigation. A public example of this was when the high court in Goa ordered UIDAI to share a database with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
While this was contested by UIDAI and overturned by SC, measures such as these should not be dependent on the inclinations of the executive in charge at the time.
The design of the unique identification number assumes that its usage is open-ended. At the very least, however, no-go areas should be designated in the law.
If the Aadhaar number has been designed for only civilian, not law enforcement or security purposes, the law should say so.
Third, on data security and protection, more needs to be said. While a law should aim to be technology-neutral, requirements such as independent security audits, or preconditions for private contractors entrusted with data belong properly in the bill.

Who watches the watchers?
All of these measures depend on a strong system of oversight and accountability.

Oversight was missing from the NIAI bill, which only contained a provision for an identity review committee.

That committee’s sole function was to write an annual report on the usage of the Aadhaar number. It was appointed by a search committee where two of the three members belonged to the executive wing of government.

This falls considerably short of the standards of oversight. As a result, if a government service provider demands an Aadhaar number before providing a service, in spite of repeated SC orders and UIDAI advertisements, an individual will have no recourse except the courts.

Instead, models akin to the privacy commissioners proposed by the group of experts on privacy, chaired by former judge A.P. Shah, should be adopted in the bill to address non-compliance with the safeguards in the proposed law, unauthorized disclosures as well as security breaches.

A single law cannot address all the fears of surveillance and privacy invasion that have been validly raised in the last few years.

A privacy bill that actually addresses the issues at hand, along with stronger data protection regulations, must be demanded.
But a new NIAI bill is a good place to start.
Srijoni Sen is a senior resident fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy in New Delhi, and leads the public law vertical.



Topics: AadhaarUIDAI

9100 - Jan Dhan Yojana: On paper, a radical scheme. On the ground, a catalyst for confusion - SCroll.In


In villages, several farmers had not yet understood why the government wanted to open new bank accounts, or how to access the overdraft, and other facilities
Anumeha Yadav  · Today · 09:15 am

Photo Credit: Manob Chowdhury

Ghasiya Oraon was one among a group of tribal farmers patiently waiting outside the Pragya Kendra, the office that administered services for the village, in Rol Toli in Ranchi, Jharkhand.

It was five in the evening of a humid September day. They had been waiting for several hours and now the power had gone out, putting the systems on the blink.

Oraon was in line to open new accounts for his three school-going children. Till the other day, the state scholarships for tribal children had been disbursed in cash directly by their school. Now the school, citing the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana launched in August 2014, had said that each child had to be enrolled in Aadhaar, the biometrics-based database programme, and open a bank account in order to avail the scholarship.

Sanjeet Mahto, area banking correspondent for United Bank of India, whose job it is to open the bank accounts, marked time waiting for the electricity to come back. “This is a regular problem,” Mahto lamented. “Every day, we get only about four hours of electricity. No bank transactions can be done.”

Opening new accounts was time-consuming, Mahto said, and it was not only because of insufficient infrastructure. Of the 1,238 new accounts he had opened in Lali panchayat the previous year, a third – over 400 accounts – had since been frozen for lack of any transactions. Re-activating the frozen accounts entailed starting from scratch – each villager had to re-submit his proof of identity and residence. “This may take several weeks or months,” said Mahto.

Lali panchayat, 20 kilometres from Jharkhand's capital Ranchi, gets only four hours of electricity everyday.

Jan Dhan's mixed success

To solve the problem of low banking access – only 53% of all Indians have a bank account – the Narendra Modi government in August ordered banks to open zero-balance accounts for every citizen. To overcome the related problem of dormancy – many of the new accounts had no money in them, and reflected no transactions – the government attached these new accounts to insurance schemes. It also offered an overdraft facility, similar to a credit card facility, of Rs 5,000 or 50% of turnover, whichever was lower, through a RuPay debit card.

Addressing the Delhi Economics Conclave on November 6, Modi said the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan scheme was “transformational” in its impact, and had led to a “quiet revolution”. Since the launch of the programme, the prime minister said, 19 crore people had been brought into the banking system, with the accounts having a total balance of Rs 26,000 crore. He pointed out that 36% of all debit cards in India were now RuPay cards.

But closer scrutiny of the numbers underlines the limitations of the scheme. Of the 19.1 crore bank accounts opened all over India as of October 30, over one-third of the total  – 7.1 crore accounts – were dormant, with no money in them. In Manika in Latehar, Jharkhand for example, banking correspondent Ramesh Gupta said 40% of the new accounts opened since last August were now inactive.

Many users are too poor to have substantial savings. Also, several features needed for the government transfers to work – including infrastructure and legal sanction to use of Aadhaar in all social schemes – are not yet in place.


Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana accounts, as on October 30.

Similarly, of the 16.37 crore RuPay debit cards issued as per government figures, 22.4 lakh accounts, or only 1.3%, have the overdraft facility. The number of those who have actually used this facility is even lower at 8.3 lakh, or less than 1% of the total beneficiaries.

"No overdraft facility"

In villages in Jharkhand, beneficiaries expressed disappointment in the scheme. While opening new bank accounts, they had interpreted the overdraft facility to mean that the government would put Rs 5,000 in their bank accounts as a subsidy, which was not the case.

Ghasiya Oraon opened an account with Allahabad Bank in 2013. In February, he got a second account under the Jan Dhan scheme. “I had heard that those who open a new account will get Rs 5,000," said Oraon. "I went and enquired twice at the bank, but I have still not got this amount." Others waiting in line concurred.

Even the banking correspondents proved to have little or no information about how the overdraft facility works. In most instances, RuPay cards have not reached the beneficiaries. In instances where they have, the users have not got the PIN numbers needed to operate the card.

In Navagarh panchayat in Latehar, a forested district along Jharkhand's western border with Chhattisgarh, area banking correspondent Sarwar Alam has opened 600 accounts in the village, but not a single one of the villagers has been able to use the RuPay card facility. “The post does not reach the village regularly, so the PIN numbers don't reach on time,” said Alam. “By the time the PIN reaches the village and the concerned person makes the trip to town to activate it, it has stopped working. Banks destroy the PIN if it is not used within a month.”

Alam tried to figure out for himself how the overdraft facility works, and failed. “I maintained a balance of Rs 1,200 and did a few transactions, but even then I could not get the overdraft to work,” he said.



Originally given to only adult, literate account holders, bankers say RuPay cards were later provided to all users. 

This story is not true only of the relatively inaccessible areas of the forested interior, such as Latehar. In Lali panchayat near the state capital Ranchi, Sanjeet Mahto, the banking correspondent for United Bank of India, said that of the 1,238 accounts opened under the scheme, only around 500 had got their RuPay debit cards, and of these, not a single villager had got the overdraft facility.

Putting the cart before the horse

In Ranchi, officials in the department of rural development who supervise the scheme blamed the developing fiasco on public banks who, they said, had not sufficiently publicised the mechanics of the scheme.

More than 40 lakh Jan Dhan bank accounts have been opened in Jharkhand and over 29 lakh RuPay debit cards were issued, said MK Gupta, a manager at the Bank of India and head of Jharkhand's State Level Bankers' Committee, a forum of bankers coordinating development schemes. He was reading out from a progress report on the scheme, which he has to submit once every two weeks  in a video call with the finance ministry. But, he admitted in an aside, only a small proportion of these accounts were active.

Gupta put the blame on logistics. “Nearly 70% of the villages here get no electricity and 44% of Jharkhand has no internet connectivity,” said Gupta. “Our original plan was to go door-to-door for mobile micro-ATM services, but we have had to do it at the panchayat level using small satellite ground stations, and we are facing problems with this.”

He added that while the passbooks were hand-delivered by the banking correspondents, the same agents were not given the job of delivering RuPay cards and their PINs because of security concerns. Further, RuPay cards need to be activated at ATMs, which do not exist in villages. An option exists to activate the cards by submitting applications, but this too had not been done in most villages.

Another senior banker, a member of the State Level Bankers' Committee who requested anonymity, said the central government was rushing the scheme through even though on the ground, at district and village level, the banks were not prepared for this transition. “The villages have poor connectivity, there were security concerns in many parts,” he said. “These should have been sorted out and prepared for. Instead, Delhi tried to rush everything.”
A faultily functioning scheme, and much confusion on the ground, has been the outcome.

No takers for pension scheme

In his November 6 address in New Delhi, Prime Minister Modi said that along with opening bank accounts for everyone, the government was providing a safety net to the poor through three new social security schemes that provided accident insurance, life insurance and pensions. The schemes have already registered over 12 crore subscribers, Modi said.

Experts point out that the test of an insurance scheme is in what happens with regards to claims. Finance ministry data show that there is a massive number of subscribers, but an extremely low number of claims. Till October 30, 9.1 crore subscribed to the accident insurance scheme, 607 had got their claims. Over 2.9 crore subscribed to the life insurance scheme, 1,450 claims were settled. The prime minister did not address the question of why the number of claims is minuscule, even several months after the schemes were launched, whether the subscribers among agricultural and unorganised sector workers were able to even submit a claim.

The Atal Pension Yojana, which offers small pension amounts to workers in the unorganised sector when they complete the age of 60, is based on monthly contributions from workers. It has the least number of subscribers, at 8.5 lakh, or less than 1% of the total subscribers to the three schemes combined.

The pattern is similar in states. In Jharkhand, 16.6 lakh subscribed to accident insurance and 5.9 lakh to the life insurance scheme, and only 8,037, had opted for Atal Pension scheme.

State officials said casual labourers and farm workers do not find it viable to maintain steady contributions for at least 20 years, as required in the pension scheme. “If a 40-year-old worker opts for the Atal Pension scheme today, she will have to contribute Rs 291 every month for 20 years, to get a monthly pension of Rs 1,000 when she turns 60,” explained an official in the rural development department. “How will workers who have no certainty about their next job, who don’t know what they will be able to earn next month, contribute a few hundred rupees monthly? No one wants to opt for the pension scheme.”

In October, the Jharkhand government held a three-day drive to increase the subscriber base, but it was not particularly successful. In Latehar, for instance, 3,000 new subscribers opted for insurance schemes in the course of the three-day drive, but only four people signed up for the Atal Pension scheme.

To massage the numbers, the state government has begun to shift government staff to the new pension scheme; these include para-teachers, home guards, beneficiaries of public schemes such as MNREGA, and self-help savings groups. In some instances, this was done without the subscribers' knowledge or consent.

“I found out recently that my pension account was shifted from Swawlamban National Pension System [launched by the previous UPA government] to the Atal Pension without my knowledge,” said an official in Latehar who requested anonymity. “The Swawlamban scheme required less contribution from me, and the return would have been higher than what I will get now under the new scheme. I said I did not wish to shift to Atal Pension, yet my account was transferred against my wishes.”

In its rush to declare the “Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile” scheme a success and to enshrine it as the basis for all social policy, the government appears to have systematically ignored the experiences of its intended beneficiaries – who now suffer from the consequences of this rush to implementation.



This is second part of a two-part series on the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile programme. You can read the first part here.

9099 - What’s the evidence that mass surveillance works? Not much - Scroll.In



In the wake of Paris, officials are again pointing to the need for mass surveillance to take down terrorists. Here’s what we know about how well it works.

Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica  · Nov 20, 2015 · 08:30 pm



Photo Credit: Don Emmert/AFP

Current and former US government officials have been pointing to the terror attacks in Paris as justification for mass surveillance programs. CIA Director John Brennan accused privacy advocates of “hand-wringing” that has made “our ability collectively internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging”. Former US National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Hayden said, “In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn’t seem to be the scariest thing in the room.”

Ultimately, it’s impossible to know just how successful sweeping surveillance has been, since much of the work is secret. But what has been disclosed so far suggests the programs have been of limited value. Here’s a roundup of what we know.

An internal review of the Bush administration’s warrantless programme – called Stellarwind – found it resulted in few useful leads from 2001-2004, and none after that. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage obtained the findings through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and published them in his new book, Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post–9/11 Presidency:
[The FBI general counsel] defined as useful those [leads] that made a substantive contribution to identifying a terrorist, or identifying a potential confidential informant. Just 1.2% of them fit that category. In 2006, she conducted a comprehensive study of all the leads generated from the content basket of Stellarwind between March 2004 and January 2006 and discovered that zero of those had been useful.

In an endnote, Savage added:
The programme was generating numerous tips to the FBI about suspicious phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and it was the job of the FBI field offices to pursue those leads and scrutinize the people behind them. (The tips were so frequent and such a waste of time that the field offices reported back, in frustration, “You’re sending us garbage.”)

In 2013, the US President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies analyzed terrorism cases from 2001 on, and determined that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records “was not essential to preventing attacks”. According to the group’s report,
In at least 48 instances, traditional surveillance warrants obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were used to obtain evidence through intercepts of phone calls and e-mails, said the researchers, whose results are in an online database.

More than half of the cases were initiated as a result of traditional investigative tools. The most common was a community or family tip to the authorities. Other methods included the use of informants, a suspicious-activity report filed by a business or community member to the FBI, or information turned up in investigations of non-terrorism cases.

Another 2014 report by the nonprofit New America Foundation echoed those conclusions. It described the government claims about the success of surveillance programs in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as “overblown and even misleading.”
An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by al-Qaeda or a like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology, and charged in the United States with an act of terrorism since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was minimal.

Edward Snowden’s leaks about the scope of the NSA’s surveillance system in the summer of 2013 put government officials on the defensive. Many US politicians and media outlets echoed the agency’s claim that it had successfully thwarted more than 50 terror attacks. ProPublica examined the claim and found “no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate”.
It’s impossible to assess the role NSA surveillance played in the 54 cases because, while the agency has provided a full list to Congress, it remains classified.

The NSA has publicly discussed four cases, and just one in which surveillance made a significant difference. That case involved a San Diego taxi driver named Basaaly Moalin, who sent $8,500 to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab. But even the details of that case are murky. From the Washington Post:
In 2009, an FBI field intelligence group assessed that Moalin’s support for al-Shabab was not ideological. Rather, according to an FBI document provided to his defense team, Moalin probably sent money to an al-Shabab leader out of “tribal affiliation” and to “promote his own status” with tribal elders.

Also in the months after the Snowden revelations, the Justice Department said publicly that it had used warrantless wiretapping to gather evidence in a criminal case against another terrorist sympathizer, which fueled ongoing debates over the constitutionality of those methods. From the New York Times:
Prosecutors filed such a notice late Friday in the case of Jamshid Muhtorov, who was charged in Colorado in January 2012 with providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a designated terrorist organization based in Uzbekistan.

Mr. Muhtorov is accused of planning to travel abroad to join the militants and has pleaded not guilty. A criminal complaint against him showed that much of the government’s case was based on intercepted e-mails and phone calls.

Local US police departments have also acknowledged the limitations of mass surveillance, as Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis did after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. Federal authorities had received Russian intelligence reports about bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but had not shared this information with authorities in Massachusetts or Boston. During a US House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Davis said,
“There’s no computer that’s going to spit out a terrorist’s name. It’s the community being involved in the conversation and being appropriately open to communicating with law enforcement when something awry is identified. That really needs to happen and should be our first step.”


This article was first published on ProPublica.

9098 - Aadhaar Is The Worst E-Surveillance Instrumentality Abused By Indian Government: Praveen Dalal




This is the guest post of Praveen Dalal elaborating the dangers that Aadhaar project is posing to the democracy and fundamental rights of Indian citizens. The persistent use of Aadhaar by Indian government even at the cost of contempt of court and prohibition by the Supreme Court of India shows that Indian government is well committed to violate the civil liberties of Indian citizens, opines Dalal. In fact, the Digital India project has become the biggest digital panopticon of human history as Indian government has illegally linked the same with the illegal and unconstitutional technology names Aadhaar, says Dalal.

Aadhaar Project was visualised as a public good project but it ended up being a project that is violating various Constitutional and Statutory Provisions. The Constitutional Validity of the Aadhaar Project has been questioned before the Supreme Court of India. In another related case, the Supreme Court of India has held that the Aadhaar cannot be made compulsory for availing Public Services. Similarly, the Supreme Court has also restrained UIDAI from transferring any Biometric Information of any person who has been allotted the Aadhaar number to any other Agency without his consent in writing (PDF).

Just like Congress Government even the BJP Government has declared that it would bring and ensure a Legal Framework for Aadhaar. However, till the writing of this Article, no news about a Legal Framework for Aadhaar is available. As a result the position on the date is that Aadhaar is operating without any Legal Framework and Parliamentary Oversight.

Aadhaar Project in its “Current Form” is suffering from many “Illegalities and Infirmities”. For instance:

(1) Aadhaar has been made “Mandatory and Exclusive” for availing many Public Services in India despite Supreme Court’s Interim Order and Constitutional Prohibitions.

(2) Aadhaar Project is not supported by any Legal Framework and is not subject to “Parliamentary Oversight”.

(3) Aadhaar Project is violating various “Civil Liberties” like Privacy Rights of Indians.

(4) Aadhaar Project is “Grossly Weak” on the fronts of Cyber Security and Data Security.

(5) Aadhaar is not “Fool Proof and Tamper Proof” and it can be “Obtained Illegally” and in Wrong Name.

(6) The “Authentication Mechanism” of Aadhaar Project is also faulty and in many cases gives “False Negative Alarms”.

(7) The present Practices and Methods adopted by Indian Government and its Agencies for Biometric Collection of Indians/Residents is Unconstitutional.

(8) Even “Clubbing/Merging” of Biometric Data of Aadhaar and National Population Register (NPR) has “Serious Constitutional Ramifications” and the same should not be done.

(9) Absence of Encryption Policy of India (PDF) to safeguard Biometrics Data, etc.

If we add the “Unaccountable Intelligence Related Exercises” of Indian Government, its Agencies and Foreign Partners like United States, the list is too bulky to be discussed here. Suffice is to say that the Aadhaar Project is suffering from many “Vices and Illegalities”. These include Civil Liberties Violations, Unconstitutional E-Surveillance Issues, Data Security and Cyber Security Issues, Compulsory Nature of Aadhaar, Unaccountable Intelligence Agencies, Foreign E-Surveillance Threats, Telecom Security Issues, Integration with Surveillance projects like NATGRID, Unconstitutional Biometrics Collections, etc.

All these aspects make the Aadhaar Project an Unconstitutional Project that was required to be Scrapped by the Modi Government. Alternatively, all these Constitutional Infirmities and Illegalities were required to be “Eliminated” by the Modi Government before allotting further funds to Aadhaar Project. There cannot be a “Third Option” for the Modi Government and wasting precious “Public Money” on Unconstitutional Project like Aadhaar “Can Never Be Justified” even by the Standards of the “Fancy Words and Empty Promises” made by the Congress and BJP Governments regarding Aadhaar Project.

Not only this, the entire situation has also raised “Serious Questions” about the “Real Intentions” of Indian Government vis-à-vis Aadhaar Project. The “Present Form” of Aadhaar Project and the behaviour of Indian Government regarding Civil Liberties have definitely negated the theory of Welfare Project as projected by both Congress and BJP Government. But if Aadhaar Project is not a Welfare Project what is its purpose and true nature?

In my personal opinion, Aadhaar in its present form has no Welfare Elements attached to it whatsoever but is an “Endemic E-Surveillance Project” that is operating well beyond the Constitutional Protections, Parliamentary Oversight and Judicial Scrutiny. The sole purpose seems to be to club the Biometric Details of Indian Citizens/resident with other “Centralised Databases” like National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) Project of India, Central Monitoring System (CMS) Project of India, Internet Spy System Network and Traffic Analysis System (NETRA) of India, Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) Project of India, etc. Gradually, both Biometrics and Non Biometrics based details and data would be clubbed with the DNA Databank of India that Indian Government would definitely go for in the near future.


It is for You to decide whether You wish to give Your Children a “Free and Transparent India” or You wish Your Children to be a Guinea Pig or Lab Rat for Indian E-Surveillance Projects like Aadhaar that are clearly Illegal and Unconstitutional.

9097 - Cash transfers: Miracle or mirage? - Live Mint



Photo: Mint

The success of cash transfers will depend on how well the government addresses design bugs

Pramit Bhattacharya

The recent economics conclave hosted by the finance ministry in the capital has rekindled the debate on cash transfers in India. Among the invitees to the conclave was one of the most vocal critics of India’s transition to direct cash transfers, Jean Dreze, a development economist and an advisor to the erstwhile United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. But the invitation was revoked at the last moment for reasons that are not quite clear (bit.ly/1Okx3Y6).

Dreze, in turn, published a scathing critique of the move towards direct cash transfers, warning, “A single-minded focus on high-tech cash transfers as a foundation for social policy in India is fraught with dangers.” He argued that implementation challenges may hobble the cash transfer programme, which seeks to substitute the myriad subsidies the Indian state provides for direct cash transfers to beneficiaries.

 The cash transfer scheme risks excluding vulnerable groups and poorer people from the ambit of social protection schemes, Dreze wrote. He also warned that cash transfers may dilute people’s entitlements, “become a stepping stone towards state withdrawal from many essential services”, adding that “some influential economists are advocating precisely that”.

Why has cash transfer become such an important policy tool in India? Is it a miracle cure for India’s poorly functioning and leaky social security system, as some of its proponents suggest? Or is it a mirage as Dreze and other critics suggest?

The most powerful case for cash transfers came in a 2008 Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) article by economists Devesh Kapur of the University of Pennsylvania, Partha Mukhopadhyay of the Centre for Policy Research, and Arvind Subramanian, chief economic advisor to the finance ministry.

The trio argued that despite several long-running anti-poverty programmes, India’s record against poverty has been less than stellar because of the leaky nature of many of these interventions. Hence, the time had come to whittle down the number of centrally sponsored schemes, and use up the saved resources to fund a direct cash transfer programme. If the Rs180,000 crore spent on centrally sponsored schemes and food, fertilizer and fuel subsidies in that year were distributed equally to the 70 million poor households, it would mean a monthly transfer of over Rs2,140 per household, enough to pull them out of poverty, they wrote.

Arguing that the poor should be trusted to use these resources as they deem fit, the authors argued for a two-pronged decentralization of state funding: direct cash transfers to individuals, backed by complementary funding to local governments.

In a rebuttal published in the same journal, the former Planning Commission member Mihir Shah argued that channelling all or even a large fraction of development funds directly to beneficiaries would mean ignoring important public infrastructure and rural development projects. Also, expecting weak local governments to implement development projects is a tough ask, Shah argued.

In their reply to Shah, Kapur, Mukhopadhyay and Subramanian pointed out that they did not advocate that the government should stop providing for public goods, such as rural roads, which are needed to complement the effect of direct cash transfers. They also argued that local governments can be expected to reform once they are provided the resources and mandate to undertake development works.

The debate on cash transfers has only intensified since then, with many of the arguments for and against cash transfers, appearing in the pages of the EPW, which published a fantastic special issue on the topic in 2011.

Critics of direct cash transfers agree that cash transfers can be a useful tool for some welfare benefits, such as scholarships and old-age pensions, but do not see a much larger role for cash transfers in India. They make six key arguments.

First, an unconditional direct cash transfer scheme relies heavily on technology and infrastructure, which may not be available in all areas of the country.

Secondly, even if technological constraints are addressed, technological fixes cannot solve the vexed problem of targeting—the problem of identifying beneficiaries correctly. While biometric cards may weed out bogus names from the list of beneficiaries, the government will still need to identify a credible mechanism to identify beneficiaries that does not leave out a large section of the poor.

Thirdly, providing cash to the poor may lead to wasteful consumption (such as on alcohol) rather than on essentials, such as food.

Fourthly, critics argue that the influence of local power brokers, which hamper the delivery of many existing schemes, can also thwart effective implementation of cash transfer programmes. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) economist Jayati Ghosh pointed out in an EPW article that actual payments for the rural employment guarantee scheme are often lower than the sanctioned amount even when they are linked to bank accounts of beneficiaries in some parts of the country. Forcing poor people to receive only a fraction of cash transfers could be possible at least in those areas, Ghosh warned.

Fifthly, critics point out that applying the lessons of Latin America to India is fraught with dangers because countries such as Brazil where cash transfers have succeeded are predominantly urban, unlike India. Rural markets for essentials, such as food items, may often be imperfect, necessitating in-kind transfers by the state, critics argue.

Also, in countries such as Brazil, cash transfers have accompanied a gradual expansion of the state (especially in sectors such as health and education) to provide a demand-side boost. In India, cash transfers are expected to be accompanied by a contraction of the state, and the effects are therefore likely to be different.

Finally, critics point out that replacing subsidies such as those on fertilizers and food with cash transfers may have adverse effects on the food economy. If withdrawal of state support for production of food grains leads to a fall in production, it may lead to expensive imports. Hence, implementing a cash transfer programme without consideration of the impact it would have on food security is fraught with dangers.

Among the objections, the objections about implementation challenges and the use of technology are the weakest. Any reform of welfare programmes involve the use of new technology and teething challenges. Indeed, irrespective of whether one advocates cash transfers or reforms of existing in-kind transfer programmes, such as the public distribution system (PDS), one would necessarily have to rely on several technological fixes. Chhattisgarh, which is widely hailed as a successful PDS reformer, made extensive use of technology to minimize leakages in its distribution system.

As Silvia Masiero of the London School of Economics and Political Science argued in a recent EPW article, the JAM trinity can be used to reform PDS as it can be to roll out cash transfers. Masiero pointed out that both Karnataka and Kerala have used elements of the JAM trinity to reach intended beneficiaries and to monitor delivery of food grains more effectively. JAM trinity refers to the Jan Dhan Yojana bank account number, Aadhaar unique identity number for every resident and a mobile phone number.

Evidence from a UN-sponsored 2011 survey on cash transfers in a Delhi slum suggest that the introduction of cash transfers may not lead to a decline in food consumption, or an increase in wasteful consumption, as some critics fear. The beneficiaries in fact spent more on food, purchasing a more diversified food basket than before.

A widely cited 2013 study on the impact of cash transfers in Kenya also records similar results, with monthly cash transfers leading to improved levels of food security and lower levels of mental stress among beneficiaries.

On the question of targeting, there is a broad consensus among both proponents and opponents of cash transfers that India’s record in targeting the poor has been quite dismal, with many poor people excluded from below-poverty line lists, and many non-deserving households finding their way into those lists. The socioeconomic caste census was supposed to take care of these problems, but large discrepancies in the data raise questions about its credibility.

In the absence of a credible mechanism to identify poor households, most economists recommend a universal social safety net (whether it be in kind, or through cash transfers) or a near-universal programme which provides income transfers to everyone except an easily identifiable set of the affluent (such as income-tax payers, government employees and owners of motor vehicles).

The argument that food markets may not work effectively in all areas of the country, requiring state-led distribution networks to provide in-kind food transfers is acknowledged even by many proponents of cash transfers, who advocate a gradual shift to cash transfers, starting with areas with well-functioning competitive markets. The Shanta Kumar committee report on restructuring India’s food procurement and distribution system, for instance, recommended a shift to cash transfers initially in the large cities.

Some proponents of cash transfers have also underscored the need to think through the question of how cash transfers will impact food and energy security of the country. In another of his EPW articles (bit.ly/1MtSgy6), Kapur, for instance argued that the real promise of cash transfers will bear full fruit only when India is capable of a new strategic vision on food and energy security.

Kapur argued that the government must consider alternative approaches to food security (such as through long-term forward contracts in international markets) and higher levels of agri-investments, if the existing procurement and distribution system is replaced by a cash transfer regime. Merely moving towards piece-meal replacement of subsidies with cash transfers smacked of tactics without a well-thought out strategy, wrote Kapur.

Given that a move towards cash transfers entails a transformation of India’s social contract, it is imperative that the government spell out its broader vision on the pace and sequencing of reforms, and the implications for the wider economy. Rather than shutting out voices of criticism, the government must engage with its critics, and make an honest effort to respond to their concerns.

Ultimately, of course, the debate on cash transfers can only be settled by empirical evidence. The government must invest in statistical systems that can provide a credible picture of the impact of cash transfers across India’s state and districts across time.

One of the big lessons from a Latin American success story in cash transfers, the Oportunidades Program of Mexico, is that big-ticket welfare reform can be politically sustainable, and can withstand shifts in political winds if the aims and objectives are clearly spelled out, and the outcomes carefully measured.

In their analysis of the political economy of Oportunidades for an International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI) publication, Mexican social scientists, Iliana Yaschine and Monica Orozco pointed out that despite bitter polarization within the Mexican polity, there was widespread consensus and unflinching budgetary support for the programme.

“Some of the reasons consensus was built about the positive nature of Oportunidades are related to the impartiality of its targeting method, the effectiveness of its operation, and the positive results from evaluations delivered by external academic institutions using rigorous research methods,” the duo noted.


Economics Express runs weekly, and features interesting reads from the world of economics and finance.

9096 - We need more, not less democracy

Jacob Appelbaum 20 November 2015

I hope you'll join me in installing free software for freedom, fighting against mass surveillance, and refusing to be instrumentalised by those who have failed us – our intelligence services.

 Military units, centre of Paris. David Julià/Demotix. All rights reserved.

This article is taken from Jacob Appelbaum's opening remarks at the World Forum for Democracy 2015.

We are speaking here in a very intense context. I feel very sorry for what has happened in Paris and in Beirut, and for the context that seems to have taken American wars and brought them to European soil.
With that said, the responses that I have seen have been terrifying, and not merely in the technological realm. And while I am a technologist, I am also a human being, and I refuse to be pigeon-holed into merely speaking about technology.
Some of the things that I have heard raised for me a great deal of historical terror, and I wish to say, especially to the people who are here, who are European residents like I am now, that I encourage you to learn from the mistakes of my country, in the wake of our most recent, horrific, terrorist attack.
I feel that we have responded with wars, and because those wars have come to your doorstep, we actually see grave interventions with more violence, which in fact feed into what Daesh wants. Daesh wants to have more war.
They want to eliminate the grey zone where anyone with a beard, anyone who is a Muslim, anyone who looks different, will be treated as an outsider and will be harmed. They want to enlargen the xenophobia, they want more violence, and so we should consider whether or not that is what we wish.
Daesh wants to have more war.
We also see that the intelligence services have absolutely failed us. The intelligence services of the world claim that encryption is a problem. But the evidence has come out that, in fact, the attacks in Paris were perpetrated by people who used credit cards in their real name, who used unencrypted text messages to say things like 'let’s go'.
No one is asking how these people are doing arms-trafficking – those are physical goods that do not travel through the internet. How is it the case that the intelligence services have failed so badly, and that they seek instead to distract and to counter-accuse, and to suggest encryption, something that people don't understand, is the issue?
How about the fact that the United Kingdom has a plan where its intelligence services specifically target religious minorities for political harassment. Why is it that the UK is allowed, and in fact encouraged even, to harass minorities into becoming informants, and if not, will threaten them with stripping them of their citizenship? Their citizenship, which is effectively the right that grants all other rights.
This is a core contributing problem. It is not technology or encryption that is the core contributing problem. It is intolerance, it is a lack of openness, a lack of welcoming, it is this fear of the other that we see.
And this idea that we have even heard in France this week, that there should be pre-emptive arrests and internment of Muslims, this must not happen. It is absolutely against the rule of law and even if it were legal, it is against fundamental civil liberties.
When the attack in Paris occurred, I was in Kuwait, and I was attending an artistic event held by the French ambassador, and I was very shocked by what had occurred. What I found when talking with people was they were not as sympathetic as I would have expected. It was not that they did not care, but they said instead to me something that struck me.
They said, our brothers and sisters are dying in Syria: 250,000 of them so far. More than a million people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you're talking about a couple of hundred people in Paris. We feel you, now you feel us.
What then, might we learn from this?
 Violence in Aleppo. Narciso Contreras/Freedom House/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Is the answer to commit more violence? Is the answer to undermine our fundamental liberties? To add backdoors to technology? Is the answer, for example, to suggest that the problem is with technology? I think that it's not. But it is additionally problematic to suggest that we need a reduction of evil – it suggests that we don't need to study and look to the root causes. For example, pacifism is much more powerful if we consider that it is a choice, and that we choose that when we have the ability to do violence.
It is simply the case that violence is to eschew dialogue, it is to get rid of that dialogue, and so to respond with violence is absolutely a tragedy upon a tragedy, upon a tragedy. We will not bomb Syria into peace, at best we may bomb it into submission. Submission is not the same as peace.
Submission is not the same as peace.
Instead, we should consider the humanity. For example, today on the news we've seen suspects of terrorism, and they've been killed, and the news has stated that no civilians were killed. What is a suspected EU citizen if not a human being? If not a civilian? Each and every person here could be accidentally killed, as a Brazilian man was by the UK secret services after the tube bombing in London. That person was an innocent person, and because their rights were suspended, because they were treated as if they were an other, they were killed and they had no due process.
We should look to the Norwegians for a response, rather than the Americans. After Breivik committed egregious acts of racist, violent, terrorism, Norway decided that they would choose a path of more democracy, one where instead of alienating and pushing people away, instead Norway as a country would continue to do things in the way that they had always done them, refusing to terrorise, refusing to allow the terrorists to change Norwegian society. We should look to that. We should not follow the American example, we should follow the Norwegian example of more democracy and not violence.
And so in fact the response we should consider is the response of expanding our liberty. Yes, we must fight extremism, specifically we should fight the extremism that states have no limits on what they may do or how they may do it. The Council of Europe and the Court of Human Rights exists here today because we understand from history that that is a lie.
States commit terrorism, just as others can, and we must not forget that that lesson is a hard won lesson. If we want to get rid of violent extremists, we must remember that extremists silence us with violence or threats of violence. So we must be extreme in our openness, in our welcoming nature, we must be extreme in a commitment to justice, and with an absolute refusal to push away refugees.
We must remember that we have an obligation to refugees that comes from a history where others did not act correctly, without that obligation. There is an extremism that is correct, that we have an unlimited right to form and to hold beliefs, that these rights must not be abridged. This includes the right to a trial, and our right to face an accuser. And there's a new notion: that we will all be free, and will remain free as long as we submit to endless security checks, border controls, mass and targeted surveillance, and mandatory identification for nearly all interactions. But this notion of freedom is simply incompatible with freedom as we understand it, through the Court of Human Rights, through individual and through societal values of liberty.
 NSA, Fort Meade. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
And we see political opportunism, such as by Robert Bob Litt from the intelligence community, who suggests for example that “the legislative environment is very hostile today”, however, “it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.”
There is a value, he said, “in keeping our options open for such a situation”. Those people are as despicable as terrorists when they would seek to exploit the deaths of these people, to erode our liberties for their own personal power.
We must be extreme in our openness, in our welcoming nature, we must be extreme in a commitment to justice.
So there is technology today that helps us to confirm, to ensure, and to expand our liberties, where we have a right to read, and we have a right to speak freely, and a responsibility to be good to each other. These people wish to weaken our infrastructure, they wish to enable private and government censorship on the internet, they call for back doors, or front doors which would put us at risk.
There are two things you can do right now if you would like. First, you can install Signal on your smartphone, which will give you encrypted voice calls and text messages without backdoors, beating targeted and mass surveillance. I encourage you to do that now, it’s free software, and it’s free of cost. And you can install the Tor browser, which will give you the ability to browse the web and to be anonymous on the internet, where you'll actually be able to do things without leaving a data trail where spies can twist it and harm you later. And where it will make it more difficult for people to target you for other kinds of cyber-crime. Both of them are free software, implemented for freedom.
Remember, it is the same intelligence services who want backdoors today, who are exploiting this tragedy, who exploited Vodafone in Greece, to wiretap the prime minister, who did mass surveillance on all of Europe. We cannot trust them. It is the intelligence services of the US and the UK that use their surveillance systems to enable extra-judicial assassination.
We should secure the internet, and to ensure that such things are more difficult, if not impossible. Our security situation today is not a matter of security versus privacy. Our security requires strong privacy, and our security requires autonomy, it requires transparency and accountability, it requires free speech, it requires fundamental human rights to be respected. And rather than less democracy, we need more democracy. Rather than less secure systems, we need more secure systems. And we need to use them, to run them, and to fund them.

I hope you'll join me in installing free software for freedom and fighting against mass surveillance, and refusing to be instrumentalised by the people who have failed us – our intelligence services.

9095 - Cybersecurity is the new battleground for human rights - Open Democracy

Andrew Puddephatt and Lea Kaspar 18 November 2015

Cybersecurity has become conflated with ‘national security’, with no consideration of what a ‘secure’ internet might mean for individual users. But, such a definition can be diametrically opposed to individual security. 

 Shutterstock/Gaudilab. Some rights reserved.

In July 2015, UKTrade and Investment (UKTI) opened a new centre in London to showcase Britain’s ‘dynamic and innovative’ cybersecurity industry to global investors. Four months later, the UK and US governments conducted a widely reported joint exercise with leading global financial firms to test collective resilience in the face of a ‘cyberterrorism’ incident. Last week, in the wake of horrific scenes in Paris, UK Chancellor George Osborne unveiled a comprehensive new ‘national cyber plan’, allocating £1.9 billion of new funding against a backdrop of swingeing cuts across government departments.
In his speech announcing it, which contained 134 instances of the word cyber, he boasted that despite “taking the most difficult decisions on spending in other areas,” the government has made “a deliberate decision to increase spending on cyber.” These are just three particularly high-profile instances in a year which has seen cybersecurity rise to unprecedented prominence in the media and policy space.
Nor is it just a UK phenomenon. Out of 193 International Telecommunications Union (ITU) member states globally, 67 now have live national cybersecurity strategies, and 102 have National Computer Incident Response Teams (CIRTs). International institutions including the Organisation of American States and the African Union are considering cybercrime conventions to set normative standards across whole continents. Cybersecurity is also increasingly present and visible as an issue in international relations and diplomacy. Recall, for example, Chinese prime minister Xi Xinping’s recent visit to the UK in October, where the main news story was a joint statement on cybersecurity, only a month after reports of a similar ‘cyber-peace deal’ between China and the US. As an ex-foreign minister of India recently noted, “[cybersecurity] has become a fresh domain of contention between states. It is true of land, seas, skies and outer space, all of which we have successfully militarized. Exactly the same thing is happening in cyberspace.” “We have successfully militarized land, seas, skies and outer space. Exactly the same thing is happening in cyberspace.”
A rights-based cybersecurity?
Among civil society and public interest groups however, there has, as yet, been little engagement or even research on this issue - something which unbalances the debate and locates cybersecurity as something for systems, rather than people. But cybersecurity is intrinsically about people. As a policy area concerned with the regulation of online behaviour, how it is defined and implemented will have - and is already having - profound implications for essential human rights such as privacy and freedom of expression. 
As human rights defenders, it is therefore crucial that we engage in this debate. But how? And what would a rights-based cybersecurity look like?
The natural starting point is to define what cybersecurity is - or at least how it is currently understood. This is surprisingly difficult. Cybersecurity encompasses a universe of different definitions, as the Global Cyber Definitions database (with 900 definitions and counting) demonstrates. To further complicate matters, cybersecurity is often conflated with cybercrime, or confused with related but distinct concepts such as cyber-resilience, cyber-warfare and cyber-defence.
Cybersecurity is intrinsically about people. How it is defined will have profound implications for privacy and freedom of expression.Broadly speaking, it is taken to mean the protection of digital information systems against attack, either by states or individual hackers. Recent high-profile incidents of this kind, like the TalkTalk data breach and Sony Pictures hack, have fed alarmist narratives of a ‘cyber-crimewave’, in spite of the absence of reliable supporting evidence (indeed, a recent report suggested cybercrime is actually becoming rarer).
This is not to suggest that threats don’t exist, or that cybersecurity isn’t important - quite the contrary. From a human rights point of view the US Personnel Department hack earlier this year, which exposed the sensitive personal information of 22 million people - including mental health records and details of drug and alcohol abuse - is a catastrophe, demanding urgent remedial action and radical reform to ensure it never happens again.
But because of the poverty and narrowness of current discourse around cybersecurity, this hasn’t happened. There has been no discussion about whether such vast amounts of data should have been collected in the first place, given the weak safeguards in place – a risk which the Electronic Frontier Foundation had flagged as early as 2010. Instead, the incident was treated as a diplomatic incident, with US officials blaming China and weighing options for ‘retaliation’.
This is what happens when a policy area is exclusively framed by security agencies and selected private sector interests. The US Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), for example – which many argue undermines data protection law, and increases rather than reduces the risk of future attacks – was negotiated entirely behind closed doors, with the only non-governmental input coming from telecoms industry lobbyists. We live in a world where a small elite of tech companies have built vast monopolies on a business model which relies on the extraction, storage and monetization of our personal information.
As a result, cybersecurity has become wholly conflated with ‘national security’, with no consideration of what a ‘secure’ internet might mean for individual users. Indeed, such a definition of cybersecurity – in which surveillance powers are expanded, encryption and anonymity limited, ‘backdoors’ installed and accountability structures weakened – can be diametrically opposed to individual security.
Ironically, from the user point of view there has never been a greater need for cybersecurity. We live in a world increasingly defined by data, where a small elite of tech companies have built vast monopolies on a business model which relies on the extraction, storage and monetization of our personal information. Government services, which hold sensitive data on everything from taxation to health records, are rapidly moving online, while a nascent Internet of things ushers in a new age of wearable health monitors, hackable toasters and TVs that listen to you.
That is why rather than simply decrying current attacks on data protection and privacy, we need to proactively advocate for a new definition of cybersecurity, centered on the security and rights of the end user, rather than on systems.
Our informed consent
What would this look like? It might mean a legal and normative shift in our conception of data ownership, putting ownership and control of personal information in the hands of the user, rather than the service provider. It might mean guaranteed end-to-end encryption and public education programs that focus upon personal privacy and data protection. It could mean instilling stronger accountability and oversight structures where data collection is deemed necessary, by ensuring that the scope of such powers is narrowly defined, and that oversight mechanisms include staff with high level computer skills, and judicial authorisation for any interference in people's’ privacy.
The internet is interoperable, multi-jurisdictional, and horizontal, qualities which seldom conduce to security.Above all, we need to fight for an open, inclusive, multistakeholder approach to internet policy-making. In a democratic society, the implementation of cybersecurity demands the informed consent of the population - which means ensuring that voices other than security agencies are involved in the debate. How can human rights defenders push for this?
Local campaigns against proposed legislation are, of course, crucial - with the coordinated fight against CISA in the US an inspiring recent example. But we also need to be thinking about how to drive engagement on this issue in the absence of big legislative flashpoints.
This will mean proactive lobbying and a willingness to engage in public debate - not simply denouncing measures that promote cybersecurity, but consciously seeking to shift the debate to an understanding of cybersecurity as the protection of the person. It will require action at the global, as well as local and regional, level. 
There are signs that these issues are beginning to be addressed. At the recent Internet Governance Forum in Brazil, Working Group 1 of the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) presented a set of draft recommendations for a rights-respecting cybersecurity policy, developed through a multistakeholder process, complementing earlier efforts by civil society groups like CitizenLab and ICT4Peace to move the debate forward. Earlier this year, the Dutch government decided to invite over 500 civil society participants to the Global Conference on Cyberspace - the most recent iteration of the London Process, which previously offered very limited provision for civil society input. We must encourage more initiatives like this.
Cybersecurity is an issue that goes to the very essence of what the internet is. The internet was never, after all, made to be secure - by design it is interoperable, multi-jurisdictional, and horizontal, qualities which seldom conduce to security. But it is these qualities which make it valuable and worth fighting for. If we want to keep it that way, this is a debate we can’t afford to avoid.


The article references the work of the Freedom Online Coalition and the Global Conference on Cyber Space. For the sake of transparency, the authors would like to clarify that Global Partners Digital is the Secretariat of the Freedom Online Coalition, and was a facilitator in the Global Conference on Cyber Space in 2015.

9094 - Over 50,000 units registered through Udyog Aadhar Memorandum - Buisiness Standard

IANS  |  Kochi 
November 22, 2015 Last Updated at 14:22 IST

The newly introduced simplified Aadhaar-based registration system for small industries has been receiving a good response with 53,243 enterprises taking it up so far across the country, an expert said here.

As of November 20, there was a total of 53,243 registrations with Maharashtra, reporting the largest number of entrepreneurs getting themselves registered through Udyog Aadhaar Memorandum (UAM), said P.M. Mathew, the director of Kochi-based Institute of Small Enterprises and Development (ISED).
Notified by the central government on September 18, the UAM is a one-page registration form that can be accessed, filled in, self-certified, and submitted online without the requirement of any other document or payment of fee.
The UAM replaces the filing of Entrepreneur's Memorandum part I and II, and can be done on http://udyogaadhaar.gov.in.
As registration of micro, small and medium enterprises has been simplified, the District Industries Centres (DICs) could now concentrate on development-oriented activities, such as advisory, handholding and information, Mathew said.
"Such initiatives are important for attracting more entrepreneurs to the Aadhaar net and for creating more start-ups in the country."
Mathew said a unique identification number for all MSMEs in the country had been a constant demand of the ISED since 2001.
Incidentally, ISED's 18th annual report is getting released in Mumbai on Thursday, he said.


Sunday, November 29, 2015

9093 - JAM in Jharkhand: 'Apply lemon juice, flour, Boroplus on fingers and pass biometrics test' - Scroll.In


The absence of regular power and internet connectivity has made it difficult to implement the direct benefits transfer programme in many places, severely disrupting services to some of India's poorest people.

Anumeha Yadav  · Nov 23, 2015 · 09:15 am


Photo Credit: Anumeha Yadav

Jyoti Srivastav, head bent over the screen of her laptop, tried yet again to connect to the internet. Behind her, dozens waited at the Pragya Kendra in Cheeru village in Latehar, Jharkhand.

The Airtel phone tower in Balumath, the block headquarters, had caught fire three months before, said Srivastav, manager of the sub-kiosk. “Since then, we’ve had these problems.”

The kendra, of which there is one in every panchayat in Jharkhand, functions as a delivery centre for services; it is where villagers can apply for caste, income, birth and death certificates, and also get private sector services such as mobile recharges.

The kendras are envisioned as the last-mile delivery points in the National Democratic Alliance government's ambitious “JAM” – the bundling together of Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar identity numbers and Mobile networks, as the cornerstone of its welfare policy.

As planned, all social stipends will be routed through Jan Dhan, the bank accounts to be opened for every citizen. Cash transfers to these accounts will replace benefits in kind, such as subsidised foodgrains. The stated goal is that the poor can access benefits at their doorstep, or in their village, by using their Aadhaar, biometrics-based identity numbers.

Between vision and realisation lies a problem – inadequate infrastructure. Even when the internet connection works, Srivastav said, she runs into other problems. She pointed to a small black device emitting a blue light, that was connected to the laptop. It was, she explained, used to verify biometrics data to carry out banking transactions.“If the person has even a small cut on the finger – pathera log, those who work with stones and bricks, often have such cuts – the machine does not recognise the fingerprint," she said. “What can I do? I tell them to apply lemon juice, atta, and Boroplus at home, come back when the cut is healed and try again.”


In August, when the biometrics scanner stopped working, staff had to go to Palamu, and then the capital Ranchi  to get it replaced.

The cup and the lip

The farmers welcomed the idea of having banking services available right there in the village – when the machine works. But when it doesn’t, it leads to months of disruption in payments to the poorest beneficiaries.

Cheeru has been chosen as a pilot panchayat to try out the scheme. Since the village sits on an elevation, district officials had hoped the internet connection would be stable. This isn't the case. Throughout that day, bank kiosk staff worked to try and restore the connection while a line of old-age pensioners waited in hope.

Harif Miyan was one such person. The elderly farmer from a neighbouring village of Rohan said it was his fourth trip. For the past ten years, he received his pension – Rs 600 per month – through the village post office with minimum fuss, on producing his passbook. Under the new scheme, he needed a Jan Dhan bank account to get the money.

“It was more convenient to get the pension at the village post-office,” agreed Shakiran Miyan, a 70-year old farmer from Cheeru who was waiting in line along with Harif Miyan and others. He hadn’t received his pension for two months, and now his anxiety was escalating.

Latehar district, to which Cheeru village belongs, has just 37 bank branches for a population of 7.26 lakh. Most branches are staffed by just one person each, District Collector Balmukund Jha said. Given the shortage of staff, the local administration has partnered with Vikalp Media, a private company, to provide services to the over two lakh new beneficiaries for whom accounts have been opened.

Harif Miyan has not been able to get a bank account opened to get his pensions after three attempts.

Vikalp, in turn, has hired agents, called banking correspondents – village-level entrepreneurs who act as extension counters for the major banks. Their job is to provide doorstep banking facilities such as cash withdrawal and disbursal of wages for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme with the help of hand-held devices, like mini-ATMs. In return, the government pays Vikalp and the banking correspondent a fee of 0.25% of every transaction. (In other districts, authorities have partnered with similar agencies such as FINO, United Telecom Limited). Of this 0.25%, 80% goes to the banking correspondent directly and 20% to the company.

Large areas of Latehar have neither electricity, nor a functioning internet connection. The administration relies on solar panels for power and Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite ground stations for connectivity. When the weather turned bad, said the manager of State Bank of India’s Bhainsadon branch, I Hembrom, both systems collapse.

Connectivity is one problem. Staff at Pragya Kendras in other parts of the district list many more. Banking correspondents are required to carry large amounts of cash for disbursal, and that creates a problem of security.

Other problems

At the Pragya Kendra in Navagarh panchayat, some 80 kilometers from Cheeru, a large crowd had gathered by 11 am one recent day to get bank accounts opened and to enquire about delays in payments of pensions and scholarships.

Navagarh panchayat, hemmed in by a dense sal forest, lies in a Maoist stronghold. In August, robbers cleaned out the local Kendra, housed within the panchayat bhavan. “They took everything – a printer, scanner, two desktops, a computer camera, and even the caste certificates that were stored here,” said area banking correspondent Sarwar Alam.

Not only did it take weeks to get everything replaced, Alam had a hard time even getting a police complaint recorded. “The police asked, 'why did you not take everything home with you before leaving the office?',” Alam said. “I had to explain that desktops, printer, scanner, these are heavy objects, I could not possibly carry them.”

Several of those who had queued up in front of Alam's desk were worried that they had not got their Aadhaar cards despite having enrolled twice, and in some cases even five times, and ascribed it to delays in the post.

Mungeshwar Baitha, a Dalit farmer with a daughter and a son in class VII in the local government middle school, was particularly worried. His son had received a scholarship of Rs 1,000, but his daughter had not. “The Masterji said only my son will get the scholarship in cash this time,” said Baitha. “For my daughter Shobha, I have to get a new account opened. But I do not understand – when both of them have their names in the scholarship list, how come only one gets the payment?”

Confusion confounded

During Supreme Court hearings on whether the government could proceed with the Aadhaar scheme despite the absence of a law to ensure privacy of the data collected under the initiative, the Centre said it was already using the biometrics programme to disburse most social stipends. The scheme, it said, had become indispensable and any restriction on Aadhaar would disrupt payments to the beneficiaries.

But the situation on the ground differs from the picture painted by the government. Though Aadhaar has been made mandatory in some schemes, it is not being used in several others.

Anjan Kumar Moitra, the head of Jharkhand's state-level bankers' committee, a forum coordinating development measures, said that many people did not have Aadhaar cards at the time of the opening of their Jan Dhan accounts. To overcome this, banks had taken prints of their first three fingers of each hand and stored them in local servers. In villages like Navagarh, these are being used to authenticate transactions, especially for scholarships for children.“Most children have not got Aadhaar," he said. "We scan and match the biometrics in the bank's database and complete the transactions."

The use of these multiple systems has created confusion. Villagers in Cheeru and Navagarh said there was insufficient information on the method of identification required to get different types of payments.


Sarwar Alam, the banking correspondent in Navagarh.

In Navagarh that day, only a few transactions were successful. Ishrat Parveen, a student of class IX, was able to verify her biometrics, and was told to collect her Rs 1500 scholarship from the centre the next day. But Class VIII student Mazboon Khatoon, who had come with her uncle Rajab Ansari to access her scholarship, failed, despite repeatedly placing her index finger, then her thumb, on the scanner.

The internet has stopped working again, said Alam as he left the centre to try and identify the problem. Meanwhile, the queue snaked around the block, and continued to grow.

Sarwar bhaag gaya hai, aur server bhi down hai,” exclaimed Mubeen Ansari, one of those waiting in line. Sarwar – the first name of the banking correspondent – has run away, and the server is out of action.

The others laughed at the wry observation. But their laughter had an undercurrent of resignation.

This is part one of a two-part series on Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile. Read the second part here. 

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