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

Thursday, May 18, 2017

11420 - Aadhaar and an Omnipresent State That Will Never Forget You- The Wire



If the aggressive anti-rights stand of the government in the Aadhaar case triumphs, the march towards an authoritarian state will be swift.

The Indian attorney general has argued that there is no fundamental right to privacy. Credit: Nick Youngson, Creative Commons

“It’s clear, isn’t it?—to assert that “I” has certain “rights” with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. That explains the way things are divided up: To the ton go the rights, to the gram the duties. And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you’re a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.”
∼ Yevgeny Zamyatin,
We

Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi’s argument to the Supreme Court that “citizens do not have absolute right over their bodies” elicited justified outrage. More revealing though, was his claim that the state is like a corporation, individuals are its members and therefore the “collective might of the state” could be deployed in the interest of an “orderly life, peace and tranquility”. This doctrine – with its origins in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, later perfected by G.W.F. Hegel – conceives the state and other corporate and legal entities as ‘social organisms’ that exist logically prior to, and have rights over and above, their constituent parts. The state, so conceived, has a life of its own, cares most for its own preservation and is the source and basis of all rights. Since it emerges from a mythical union of its members, it is the embodiment of the social and moral ‘whole’ and the realisation of the ‘common will’. Freedom then is the freedom to do what the state prescribes; greatness, in the readiness to subordinate oneself in the service of the state.

‘The state will not forget you’
If this is the theory, it follows that such a state must be all seeing, all knowing and all pervasive to enforce an “orderly, peaceful and tranquil life” for all. It is hardly surprising that the Indian state has been gradually building a stupendous machine to identify and profile, intercept, track and monitor its population. While it is common for bureaucracies to collect information on citizens, databases produced by various departments and agencies remain safely isolated from each other, making it difficult to monitor and profile people. The Aadhaar programme’s most important function is to create ‘linkage’ between databases, by attaching identification data – biometric and demographic – with behavioural data – bank transactions, communications, locational information or anything that can be picked up by surveillance systems. When ready, this Argus Panoptes will grow a billion eyes, sprout a billion ears and record in a boundless ledger of statistics the thoughts, desires and deeds of all. In an ominous tone, Rohatgi announced in the Supreme Court, “Even if you want to be forgotten, the state is not willing to forget you.”

Having run out of credible pretexts, the Narendra Modi administration has gradually become more honest about the Aadhaar programme. It is now common knowledge that the true purpose of Aadhaar is surveillance and profiling of ‘residents’. With big data on citizens, big corporations like Microsoft and Google have already begun to look for ways to tap into its commercial possibilities. What is frightening is the general indifference to all this, perhaps a reflection of our acquiescence to – even willing participation in – a culture of surveillance where every aspect of our lives can be observed, measured and commodified by corporate and state power. The founder of Facebook could even declare recently that “privacy is no longer a social norm”. And more and more, we have internalised the line that ‘those who have done nothing wrong have nothing to hide’. We also buy the excuse that privacy needs to be ‘balanced’ (compromised) with security and other concerns.

‘Nothing to hide, hence nothing to fear’
B.R. Ambedkar once pointed out that a fundamental right”‘means that the majority [or the state] has no right to do a certain thing” and it places “an absolute limitation upon the power of the majority”. As a liberal, he would argue that for citizens, the presumption must always be in favour of liberty and the burden of justification always on those who seek to restrict liberty. Conversely, for the state, the presumption must always be in the direction of tyranny. The assumption – rightly – is that the state is likely to encroach upon freedoms unless its actions are significantly restricted. For instance, if the police want to search your home, they must first back up their suspicion with credible evidence to obtain express legal authorisation to do so. This process ought to be a painstaking process, and the burden of justification heavy, since liberal societies carefully circumscribe the extent of intrusion by the state. In other words, enforcing the law must not be easy.
Consider this: almost all of us at some point have knowingly or unknowingly broken laws – bribed a clerk, jumped a light, ‘negligently’ flown a kite (yeah, it’s illegal), indulged in ‘indecent behaviour’ in public or made love ‘against the order of nature’. To land in jail, one has to first be ‘found out’ and identified, then be apprehended, tried and convicted. The harm caused by these minor ‘infractions’ often does not justify the trouble and effort required to punish them. In a Surveillance State, this trouble and effort is reduced effectively to zero. An omniscient and omnipresent state will have enough on everyone to ‘frame’ them whenever it chooses to. And when the whole society lives in violation of some or the other law, and the state ‘knows’ all of it, who will it decide to punish? Clearly, you will be put away the moment you become a threat to the ruling order. Law enforcement in such a regime would become targeted and selective, not principled or rule bound. As it turns out, we all may have something to hide after all.

But more importantly, constructive change can only occur in a system that tacitly or explicitly accommodates deviance. People often experiment and explore living alternatively – often outside the law – for societies to learn and change what it considers acceptable and thereby to transform or temper the codes that govern it. Law breaking is often a conscious risk, even a tactic, that people employ to shed light on a greater injustice or sometimes simply to oppose unjust laws. They do this with the understanding that law, as a system of formal rationality, must serve as an instrument of social adjustment and evolution. When one-sided and moralistic, it becomes a mask for despotism. A society of perfectly obedient ‘lawful’ subjects is one that is incapable of imagining another.

‘Why do you want civil rights?’
Though mass surveillance programmes have had very little success in anticipating and thwarting major terror attacks abroad, for a moment, let’s take the argument in favour of such programmes seriously. Imagine a condition of total surveillance, the dream of surveillance mongers. This, they hope, will create a perfectly law-abiding world. The impossibility of escaping the law would make everyone obedient – citizens would be transparent to the authorities, their behaviour would be predictable and orderly, and society would run like a well-oiled machine.

This is a conception of law transformed into an instrument of political power. In this world, the actions of those who undertake surveillance programmes are always self-justifying, while the acts of those they watch over are always suspect. To the watchers, every technological breakthrough provides enhanced tools for intrusion into the private lives of people and they often devise new legal contrivances to launch fresh assaults on civil liberties. After all, if you have done nothing wrong, the watchers will ask, why do you need civil rights to protect you?

Sure enough, Rohatgi has argued that “there is no fundamental right to privacy”. More recently, he dismissed privacy concerns as the “luxury of the rich”, ergo the poor, “who need benefits”, cannot afford (and therefore deserve no) privacy. When the attorney general talks about trading rights with (often illusory) promises of ‘benefits’, one must be deeply alarmed.

What was once called liberty, we now call privacy
The philosophical and legal debates over privacy has an interesting history and can be traced back to the elementary distinction between the public and private spheres. Proponents of privacy speak of it as a value or domain where one can be free from interference of others – ‘the right to be left alone’ – or, as a concept that is essential for human dignity. Critics of privacy, on the other hand, consider it at worst a redundant concept, at best ‘derivative’ of other rights.

However, privacy is much more than the right to be left alone. It is freedom to determine how much of, and in what manner, we wish to share ourselves with others. Far from being derivative of other rights, it is implicit in many of our other freedoms, but is not exhausted by them. There are laws that protect our bodies, enable us to isolate ourselves, protect our right to associate with others, ensure that our conversations remain private and so on, all of which presuppose privacy. But privacy is also a social norm, where we constantly negotiate our varying assessments and and expectations of privacy with others, and enforce it through a range of social regulations and practices.

The direct effect of widespread surveillance is to be deprived of the freedom to determine and protect what we regard as private, or the possibility of negotiating it with others. But the indirect effect of privacy is even more pernicious, where simply the possibility of being watched makes people less likely do things that they think might arouse suspicion. Under the public eye, people behave as they would like to be seen, which is often at odds with how they actually are or would like to be. Perhaps the first empirical study of such ‘chilling effects’ in the context of online surveillance was published recently by Jonathon Penny of Oxford university. Penny’s paper confirms a long-held belief, that being watched creates a tendency towards conformity and self-censorship. The French philosopher Michael Foucault popularised the image of the Panopticon, a circular prison building designed by the 19th-century British jurist Jeremy Bentham (whose spirit still haunts the Indian Penal Code) to efficiently control inmates who think they are under the watch of an ‘omnipresent inspector’. To Bentham, his prison was a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”. Being watched makes people more docile, conformist and deferential, and less likely to think and act independently. The attack on privacy is therefore, most of all, an attack on the domain of creative thought, activity and dissent.

As the Supreme Court faces the challenge of curbing the voracious ambitions of the executive, it must recall John Stuart Mill’s ‘most cogent reason’ for objecting to governmental interference: “the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power”. Generalised surveillance will greatly enhance the power of the state by being able to inspect over and intrude into the lives of all citizens. If the aggressively anti-rights stand of the government triumphs in the Aadhaar/PAN debate, the descent towards authoritarianism could be quick, and perhaps unstoppable.