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

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

10818 - Cashless Biometrics and India’s Demonetization Experiment - Corbett Report



Corbett • 01/24/2017 • 7 Comments

by James Corbett
TheInternationalForecaster.com
January 24, 2017

Well, that didn’t take long.

In the wake of India’s demonetization of the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes last November, I wrote an editorial (“Crisitunity in India’s Cash Crunch“) where I noted that one significant reason for the drastic move was the chance to rein in India’s sizable informal economy:
“In India, they call cash gleaned from counter-economic activities ‘black money.’ It’s not known to the government, it’s not stored in the banks, and it’s not taxed. In other words, it’s the would-be technocratic overlords’ worst nightmare. It’s impossible to know the size of this ‘black money’ pool (can we call it something cooler, like ‘freedom funds’ or something?) but it has been estimated to be as much as 20% the size of the total Indian economy. Now with the vast bulk of those freely-gotten gains being brought back into the banking system (or exchanged with a valid form of government identification), it will come back under the purview of Big Brother and his friend, Uncle Taxman.

As if on cue, earlier this month the Indian income tax department began asking banks for data on their customers’ bank deposits between April and November of last year so they could better analyze the cash that was being turned in for signs of “suspicious” activity. And now, the latest from the Hindustan Times:
“People who deposited huge amounts of cash in their bank accounts after the Centre’s demonetisation exercise may get multiple notices from the Income Tax department through the rest of the year.

“The department – which has started sending notices to those who deposited currency over Rs 2 lakh [200,000 rupees, or about US$3000] after November 9 – directed its officials to ensure that “genuine” cases are dissolved at the earliest. Probes would then be undertaken against those found to have “fuzzy” sources of income. The mammoth exercise could go on till the next financial year, sources said.”

The article goes on to note that “using risk-based data analytics of cash deposits in bank accounts to distinguish between genuine and not genuine cases, the tax department has become capable of targeting even entry-level operators.” Not only that, but we now learn that “the government has begun analysing deposits in new accounts and loan repayments as well as transfers to e-wallets and advance remittance for imports during the last 10 days of deadline to turn in junked notes.”

In other words, the poorest of the poor and the previously unbanked have now been duly identified and branded as tax cattle, ripe for the fleecing (to mix a metaphor). No surprise there.

Indeed, as Satya Sagar points out in our recent conversation on the demonetization scheme, if this scheme were really about cracking down on so-called “black money,” it’s a colossal misstep. Only 6% of the so-called “black money” is actually held in cash, as those looking to evade the taxman invest it in real estate, gold, or foreign bank accounts, and much of the “illicit” cash that is flowing around the system is used as slush funds, bribes and kickbacks to corrupt politicians.

Instead, this campaign can be seen as an attempt to accomplish, among other things, the identification and registration of the previously unbanked and untaxed masses, and the kick-starting of India’s nascent cashless-payment economy.

The first aim is particularly interesting in light of India’s ongoing efforts to force its 1.2 billion residents into the world’s largest biometric database. And the second aim is particularly interesting in light of Norbert Häring’s recent report on how a little-noticed USAID program seems to have been the “catalyst” for this demonetization experiment:
“Not even four weeks before this assault on Indians, USAID had announced the establishment of ‘Catalyst: Inclusive Cashless Payment Partnership,’ with the goal of effecting a quantum leap in cashless payment in India. 

The press statement of October 14 says that Catalyst ‘marks the next phase of partnership between USAID and Ministry of Finance to facilitate universal financial inclusion.'”

But the effort to biometrically register the population and the effort to transition into a cashless economy are, in fact, intimately related. As Häring notes, Alok Gupta, Catalyst‘s “Director of Project Incubation,” was an original member of the team that developed Aadhaar, the Indian government’s biometric identification system. And wouldn’t you know it, the latest word from the World Economic Forum at Davos is that India is going to skip right over card-based cashless payments and go straight to biometric e-payments. According to biometricupdate.com:
“The chief executive of India’s leading economic development agency told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the country could introduce biometric payments within three years, thereby eliminating the need for cash and typical electronic payment methods, including: automated teller machines, along with debit and credit cards.”

That’s right, Amitabh Kant, the head of the National Institution for Transforming India, a government-run policy institute, told the assembled globalists at Davos that India would leapfrog straight over the card-based economy and into the world of biometric payments. As he was creepily quoted by CNN: “Each one of us in India will be a walking ATM.”


This is the direction that things are going in India. And, as I will discuss later this week on The Corbett Report, what is unfolding right now in India is no more than a test run for what will soon be implemented around the world should the globalists get their way.