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

Sunday, March 26, 2017

10917 - Hello Aadhaar, Goodbye Privacy BY JEAN DRÈZE - The Wire



Far from ensuring that your identity information is secure, the government is selling it (or is, at least, authorised to sell it) to anyone who has your number and cares to pay the fees.

File photo of Aadhaar cards. Credit: PTI

How would you feel if you lived in a country where everyone’s identity information (name, address, date of birth, photograph – whatever the government decides) is stored in an open-access database? Think about it, because India is nearly there, with some minor restrictions on the content and terms of access of the database.

To understand this, we must make the effort of decoding Section 8 of the Aadhaar Act, despite its opaque – perhaps purposely so – wording. But first, some background.

In the Aadhaar Act, a person’s “identity information” has two components: demographic information and biometric information. Demographic information includes details “related to the name, date of birth, address and other relevant information of an individual,” collected when an Aadhaar number is issued. Demographic information explicitly precludes a few specific details, such as caste and religion, but otherwise, it is basically whatever the government decides. Further, the Act allows the government to require you to inform the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) if your demographic information changes – say, if you have a new address.

Biometric information includes photograph, fingerprints, iris scan, and – once again – whatever “other biological attributes of an individual” the government may decide. The Act also uses the concept of “core biometric information,” which is defined in the same way except that the word “photograph” is omitted. 

The boundary between core biometric information and other biometric information can, yet again, be modified by the government, except that core biometric information must include fingerprints and iris scan by definition.

Coming back to Section 8, it is concerned with “authentication”. On this, there was a massive foundational change between an earlier draft of the Act (the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010) and the final version, the Aadhaar Act 2016. In the earlier version, which corresponds to the original discourse on Aadhaar, authentication was just a yes/no response. You give your Aadhaar number, along with your fingerprints (or iris scan) and the system verifies whether the two match, in other words, whether you are the person who legitimately holds that number.

In the Aadhaar Act, however, authentication is a completely different thing. When it submits an Aadhaar number, the “requesting entity” (any “agency or person” who is willing to pay the fees) can now ask for any aspect of that person’s identity information, except for the core biometric information.

Everything else, including photograph, can be shared by UIDAI with the requesting entity. To illustrate, if you use your Aadhaar number to buy a sim card, the company can use it to access all your identity information, minus the core biometrics.

The foundational shift that occurred between the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010 (NIDAI) and the Aadhaar Act 2016 is clear from their respective definitions of authentication:

NIDAI 2010: “The Authority shall respond to an authentication query with a positive or negative response or with any other appropriate response excluding any demographic information and biometric information.” (emphasis added)

Aadhaar Act 2016: “The Authority shall respond to an authentication query with a positive, negative or any other appropriate response sharing such identity information excluding any core biometric information.” (emphasis added)

To be fair, two safeguards are in place in the Aadhaar Act. One is that the requesting entity must inform you about the use it proposes to make of your identity information. But who reads the fine print of the terms and conditions when buying a sim card, or before clicking “I agree” when installing new software? 

The second safeguard is that the requesting entity cannot publish or display your Aadhaar number (or your core biometric information, but that is not accessible to a requesting entity in the first place). Note, however, that nothing prevents a requesting entity from publishing or displaying other identity information, as long as it has informed the concerned person.


In light of Section 8, there is something highly misleading about the recent debate on whether the central identities data repository (the store of identity information held by the UIDAI) is “secure”. This repository is not supposed to be inaccessible. 

On the contrary, the Aadhaar Act puts in place a framework for sharing the identity information in that database, minus the core biometrics. Further, the government (read UIDAI) has virtually unlimited powers to prescribe the content of the identity information, the terms of access and much more.

How did this little-noticed shift in the nature of Aadhaar take place? One plausible answer is that the leading lights of Aadhaar woke up to the business value of the database. By this I do not mean the money that can be made by selling identity information contained in the repository – under the Act, the authentication fees must be credited to the Consolidated Fund of India. The point, rather, is that private access to the repository opens up plenty of business opportunities. This is all the more so with the growing corporate interest in ‘big data’.

The recent discourse on Aadhaar stresses its value as an ‘identity platform’ around which countless apps can be built.

In short, far from ensuring that your identity information is secure, the UIDAI is selling it (or is, at least, authorised to sell it) to anyone who has your number and cares to pay the fees. Only the core biometrics are protected.

This situation must be read in light of the fact that, for practical purposes, Aadhaar is compulsory, or will be compulsory very soon. The claim that Aadhaar is a voluntary facility was nothing more than “smart demand evangelisation,” as some champions of Aadhaar like to call their propaganda. In line with their hopes, Aadhaar is all set to become universal and ubiquitous.

That brings me to the biggest danger of Aadhaar: its power as a tool of mass surveillance. This is, possibly, far more serious than the issue of confidentiality of the database. Once Aadhaar becomes an all-purpose identification tool, your life will be as transparent to the state as a contact lens. Details of your railway bookings, phone call records, financial transactions and so on will be accessible to the government at the click of a mouse without invoking any special powers (it is only to go a little further, like tapping your phone, that special powers – readily available – will need to be invoked). This is all the more worrying as the government has already shown an ominous propensity to control, or try to control, our thoughts and actions. 

Feel like giving up your Aadhaar number? Too bad, there is no provision for this in the Aadhaar Act.

Jean Dreze is a visiting professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University.