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

12705 - Aadhaar, EVMs tools of autocracy? - Tribune India


Posted at: Jan 11, 2018, 12:40 AM; last updated: Jan 11, 2018, 12:48 AM (IST)
MG Devasahayam


There is a parallel between the UIDAI action in The Tribune case and the Election Commission of India's attitude on the integrity of EVMs. The technology of these two instruments is not 'infallible'.

MG Devasahayam
A former bureaucrat

AN FIR has been against Rachna Khaira, a reporter of The Tribune, by the Delhi Police. The offence is her expose of a massive Aadhaar fraud in which, for a small sum of money made to a payment bank, an agent of a private group allegedly created a gateway to access details contained in an individual's Aadhaar card. 

Coming under criticism, the UIDAI spokesperson has offered a specious argument that it was "duty bound" to disclose all the details of the case and name everyone who is an active participant in the chain of events leading to commission of the crime. According to him, the UIDAI's act of filing an FIR should not be viewed as targeting the media or the whistleblowers or 'shooting the messenger.' But he said nothing about the core question that is agitating the minds of everyone: how safe is Aadhaar and what is the agenda behind its mad pursuit by the powers-that-be?

Commenting on this episode, the newspaper's Editor-in-Chief said: "The Aadhaar is not a misconceived project, but its security and impregnability are yet to be fully assured." I beg to differ. Aadhaar, as is being pursued in India, is one of the most misconceived and autocratic project ever conceived and implemented. First and foremost, the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 (the 'Aadhaar Act') was itself a fraud on the people and Parliament since it was introduced and passed as a money Bill in the Lok Sabha without referring it to the Rajya Sabha. 

Once this fraudulent act was completed, Aadhaar was rammed down the throat of everyone despite a clear order of the Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court on October 15, 2015: "We will also make it clear that the Aadhaar card scheme is purely voluntary and it cannot be made mandatory till the matter is finally decided by this Court one way or the other." 

This 'decision by the court' is still pending, but the state, in total defiance, has been spreading terror and panic to coerce the citizens to obtain Aadhaar card and link it to every conceivable purpose/service, including public distribution system, old-age pension, NREGA, healthcare, LPG supply, disaster relief, bank account, income tax return, mobile phones, school admission and even birth and death certificates.

This is being done despite the fact that millions of citizens will be denied their right to access many of these essential public services. It is already evident that making it compulsory in food distribution in some states has excluded many needy and deserving citizens without cause. 

Besides, Aadhaar allows for unprecedented surveillance of every citizen and massive invasion of privacy. It can be used by governments at different levels to target all kinds of dissent. Because it enables data-sharing even by private companies, it renders all citizens vulnerable to identity theft, fraud, cyber piracy, data breaches and other uses of their personal data with very serious security implications. 

This is precisely what was exposed in The Tribune and the response of UIDAI was typical of an autocratic state — deny the message and shoot the messenger! For the government and its minions, Aadhaar is infallible because it is high-tech and anyone questioning it commits blasphemy and is anti-national. 

It is the same mindset that dominates Election Commission of India (ECI) when electronic voting machines (EVMs) are being increasingly questioned. The integrity of EVMs has been challenged from the time they were introduced in 1999. It flared up in 2009 soon after the UPA's victory in the parliamentary elections. The most articulated opposition to the EVM came from those aligned to the BJP. 

The grounds on which EVMs were trashed were: the whole world has discarded similar EVMs; their use is unconstitutional and illegal; EVM software and hardware are not safe; EVMs are sitting ducks; insider fraud, storing and counting are concerns; ECI is clueless on technology and there is trust deficit. 

But the ECI dismissed it all by just saying that the EVM technology is infallible. 

When the EVMs were challenged after the 2017 assembly elections in UP, Uttarakand and Punjab, the ECI again dismissed them, claiming infallibility. The commission challenged the political parties to prove that the EVMs are tamperable and set the date as June 3, 2017. This came to be known as EVM 'hackathon'. This much-hyped 'challenge' turned out to be a damp squib since the ECI refused to give the access code and share the memory and battery number of machines!

This time around, the ECI had already fortified itself with a stringent mandamus in favour of EVMs and gag order against its criticism from the Uttarakhand High Court which unilaterally certified that EVMs are not hackable and tamperable, because they use some of the most sophisticated technological features. The gag order barred all political parties, individuals, media and even social media networks from criticising the use of EVMs. The Chief Election Commissioner claimed one-sided victory in the non-event and declared that the issue of tamperability "stands closed". When criticism persisted, the ECI moved the government, seeking contempt powers to prosecute the dissenters. All these came handy when the issue cropped up again after the recent Gujarat elections to summarily discard all discordant voices using the shield of 'infallibility'!

The Emergency of the 1970s is considered as the darkest period for India's democracy. This is how civil rights stalwart Rajni Kothari described the state of affairs then: "It was a state off-limits, a government that hijacked the whole edifice of the state, a ruling party and leader who in effect treated the state as their personal estate. It was the imposition of a highly concentrated apparatus of power on a fundamentally federal society and the turning over of this centralized apparatus for personal power and aggrandizement. It was one big swoop overtaking the whole country spreading a psychosis of fear and terror…."

Are things any different now? They are a shade worse. With these two instruments of 'infallible' technology — Aadhaar and EVM — before long, democracy might get replaced with autocracy!

(Views are personal)