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

Friday, January 12, 2018

12696 - Unique question: Will we have a life after Aadhaar? - Economic Times

By Chaitanya Kalbag, ET CONTRIBUTORS|

Updated: Jan 11, 2018, 10.57 AM IST

The real question now is: what will all our data be used for? 

If you are of a certain age, and not one of the millennial Indians who will turn 18 this year and be eligible to vote, you might remember watching The Net, the 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock as a cybersecurity expert who gets into a whole lot of trouble with cyberterrorists, who erase her identity and cut her off from her home, job and credit cards. 

Or you might remember the 1998 movie Enemy of the State, in which Will Smith plays a lawyer who inadvertently gets caught up in a U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) plot and has his own personal life wiped clean, his bank accounts frozen, and his marriage nearly wrecked. 

Both movies portrayed the Internet at its most sinister. But that was two decades ago. The appetite and the ability of the state to monitor every citizen's life down to her minutest activity has enormously expanded since then. In 2007, the NSA launched a program called PRISM, which gathered and analysed Internet traffic from around the world, ostensibly aimed at thwarting terrorist attacks but also encompassing U.S. citizens. 

Both PRISM and another NSA program called Boundless Informant were exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013. 

The noise and fury over India's unique identity number programme Aadhaar is growing by the day. On January 17, a five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court will begin hearings on the pleas against Aadhaar in the petitions clubbed under Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd) vs Union of India. Last August, these petitions triggered a review by a larger nine-judge constitution bench of the concept of privacy. 

In six historic, erudite, well-reasoned and unanimous opinions spanning 547 pages, the Supreme Court overturned its own past rulings and unequivocally declared that "The right to privacy is protected as an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and as a part of the freedoms guaranteed by Part III of the Constitution." 

The privacy judgment makes for fascinating reading. It ranges across Indian and foreign constitutional jurisprudence, as well as international privacy laws, while also examining the meaning and implications of the global information-based society we live in. The author of the substantive portion of the judgment, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, explains the essential nature of privacy. 

"Privacy postulates the reservation of a private space for the individual, described as the right to be let alone," Justice Chandrachud writes. "The concept is founded on the autonomy of the individual. The ability of an individual to make choices lies at the core of the human personality. The notion of privacy enables the individual to assert and control the human element which is inseparable from the personality of the individual ..." 

One would hope that by spelling out its ringing protection for the individual's privacy, the Supreme Court has presaged its ruling in the Aadhaar case. But that is not a given. 

The Justice B.N. Srikrishna committee, set up last July to draft a data protection and privacy bill, has proposed setting up a data-protection authority as well as audits and penalties. But I'm not holding my breath: We can add layer upon layer of regulations, it's the leaky implementation that defeats ordinary mortals. 

I am not blindly opposed to a unique (and uniform) identity system for all residents in India. I have lived and worked in several countries where important transactions and activities were identifiable with my unique number. The same ID number appeared on my bank statements, driving licence, income-tax returns and residence permits. 

But that is where it stopped. In India, we already have an untidy array of identities: our voter cards, our Permanent Account Numbers, our driving licences, and our government-employee and armed forces ID cards. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, after first passionately opposing Aadhaar when he was Gujarat chief minister, has now mandated that Aadhaar must be linked to everything, from our PAN cards to our bank accounts, investments, property transactions, mobile phones and much else. We have been bombarded with coercive and threatening reminders to do so or be left penniless and sans communication. Although the deadline for compliance has been extended to March 31, the Supreme Court's Aadhaar ruling may come too late for the recalcitrant. 

Aadhaar was originally designed as a voluntary enrolment for residents of India. Section 7 of the Aadhar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act of 2016 says verification of an individual's identity will be necessary for transfers from the Consolidated Fund of India (i.e. the state exchequer). In reality, the demand for Aadhaar is now being used by growing numbers of service providers. 

Aadhaar was aimed at eliminating corruption in subsidies and enabling direct transfers to beneficiaries. In practice, its biometric (fingerprint and iris) verification has been found not to be fool-proof. As The Tribune reporter proved last week, unscrupulous agents are already peddling access to the database of names, addresses, email IDs and so on (though not so far of biometrics). How much longer will it take for our most intimate details to fall into the paws of those who do not give a fig about our lives.

Much of the hand-wringing about Aadhaar has come from people who will not actually need to use Aadhaar regularly. The system's weaknesses will hit the poorest the most. Already, from outrages like refusals to issue death certificates to refusing a retired serviceman his pension to blocking a young man from obtaining a 'hall ticket' for an important examination, Aadhaar is proving exclusionary for the people it was meant to benefit the most. 

Lawyer Arvind Datar, who is appearing for one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court, cites examples like an elderly man near Manipal who could not authenticate his ration card because the ridges on his fingerprints had changed with age. This man had a fistful of other identifications, but was forced to travel to another town for iris authentication. "This is extreme bullying," says Datar. 

The Supreme Court is not likely to abolish the programme: more than 1.19 billion Aadhaars have been generated, and over 15 billion transactions already authenticated using Aadhaar. The big question is: what will all our data be used for? 

In The Net, Sandra Bullock's character is more exposed because she does everything on her computer, including ordering pizza online, and is barely known to her neighbours. In a tongue-in-cheek 2013 review, Wired magazine wrote the main discovery was that "our entire lives are recorded on computers, from our work to our taste in movies. In 1995, this was a shocking problem that people had to learn to deal with. In 2013, it's basically how Facebook works." 

In a 1934 interview, Mahatma Gandhi said: "I look upon an increase of the power of the State with the greatest fear, because although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress." 


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