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, May 9, 2018

13492 - Know your Aadhaar BY JEAN DREZE - INDIAN EXPRESS

Know your Aadhaar

Bill Gates’s claim that it raises no privacy concerns is misleading.

Crucial issues that have to do with confidentiality of data and

state surveillance are at stake.

Written by Jean Dreze | Updated: May 8, 2018 12:27:46 am

In the draft of the Aadhaar Act (known as ‘NIDAI Bill 2010’), demographic information was supposed to be confidential — authentication only consisted of a ‘yes/no’ response to a query whether a person’s biometrics matched the Aadhaar number being submitted. (Illustration: CR Sasikumar)

According to Bill Gates, privacy is not a concern with Aadhaar (‘Aadhaar doesn’t pose any privacy issue, says Bill Gates’, IE, May 3). This widely-quoted statement would have been more convincing if Gates had shown a clear understanding of the Aadhaar project. Instead, he revealed his innocence of it in the same discussion, for instance by stating that Aadhaar is “just a bio ID verification scheme”.

To be fair, what Gates actually said is that Aadhaar “in itself” does not pose any privacy issue. He added that Aadhaar applications would need to be scrutinised one by one for possible privacy threats. But anyone who has read the Aadhaar Act would understand that Aadhaar and its applications cannot be neatly separated in this way.

Even more confused is a recent submission to the Supreme Court by senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi on behalf of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). In this submission, dated April 12, Dwivedi repeatedly creates the impression that identity information collected by the UIDAI is confidential. This is very misleading.

Under the Aadhaar Act, “identity information” consists of Aadhaar number, biometric information and demographic information. “Biometric information”, as of now, consists of fingerprints, iris scan and photograph, but its scope can be expanded at the UIDAI’s discretion. “Demographic information” refers to demographic details (name, date of birth, address, etc) collected at the time of Aadhaar enrolment. The term “personal information”, not used or defined in the Aadhaar Act, can be understood in more general terms as any information of a private nature.

Aadhaar raises at least four privacy concerns, explained below in a tentative ascending order of seriousness.

Confidentiality of core biometrics: The core biometrics (as of now, biometrics minus photograph) are supposed to be safely stored in the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR) and not shared with anyone. Some IT experts, however, believe that it is only a matter of time until the CIDR is hacked. That would be a serious breach: If your biometrics are stolen, you would be vulnerable to identity fraud for life. Further, fingerprints are easy to clone or steal outside the CIDR (as Nandan Nilekani himself put it to a Financial Times reporter, “I can steal your fingerprint off your glass”). That, too, presents a threat of identity fraud, given the numerous uses of biometrics in the proposed Aadhaar eco-system.

Confidentiality of Aadhaar numbers: Aadhaar numbers are not supposed to be “displayed or posted publicly” (Aadhaar Act, Section 29(4)). However, this has happened many times, and keeps happening. When Aadhaar numbers are displayed along with other sensitive information such as bank account numbers, it makes the victims vulnerable to various types of fraud.

Sharing of demographic information: In the draft of the Aadhaar Act (known as “NIDAI Bill 2010”), demographic information was supposed to be confidential — authentication only consisted of a “yes/no” response to a query whether a person’s biometrics matched the Aadhaar number being submitted. The Aadhaar Act, however, now allows demographic information to be shared with the entity — say, a bank or telecom company — that requests authentication (Section 8). Further, there is very little protection against this information being shared or misused by the requesting entity, except for a weak “consent” clause whereby demographic information is supposed to be used only for the purpose to which the person has consented at the time of authentication. This is just a cosmetic safeguard. In effect, demographic information is up for grabs. The wide dissemination of demographic information will facilitate large-scale mining of all sorts of personal information by private businesses. It is well known that private businesses already thrive on this type of information for numerous purposes, from targeted advertisement and credit rating to manipulating elections (the recent Cambridge Analytica andFacebook affairs are just the tip of that mountain). Aadhaar is likely to take the mining of personal information — not just demographic information — to new levels. As someone put it in an insightful tweet, “data is the new oil and Aadhaar is the drill”.

State surveillance: By the same token, Aadhaar creates an unprecedented infrastructure of state surveillance. Aadhaar-enabled access to personal information will be even wider for the state than for private entities, because the state has access to numerous Aadhaar-linked databases including the Aadhaar numbers (not accessible, in principle, to private entities). For instance, the state can easily use Aadhaar to link our bank account details with travel details and phone records. Some state governments are already on the job under the State Resident Data Hub (SRDH) project, which “integrates all the departmental databases and links them with Aadhaar number”, according to the SRDH websites. Intelligence agencies, quite likely, are not far behind. To this, the UIDAI responds that the UIDAI is “blind” by design and confines its work to authentication without collecting or collating personal data. This is neither here nor there: The danger of surveillance comes from the government, not the UIDAI specifically.

All this would be easier to swallow if the UIDAI had shown some sense of responsibility and accountability. Instead, it constantly denies the issues, hounds the whistle-blowers, and tries to confuse matters through relentless propaganda. The Aadhaar Act makes the UIDAI a law unto itself. An entire chapter of the NIDAI Bill, aimed at ensuring independent oversight of the UIDAI by a high-powered “Identity Review Committee”, was dropped — how and why one wonders — in the final version of the Aadhaar Act. And of course, under Section 47, no court is allowed to take cognisance of any offence under the Act except on a complaint made by the UIDAI. The unaccountable nature of the UIDAI, an authority of immense powers, reinforces and magnifies all the privacy concerns.

The writer is visiting professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University

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