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

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

1260 -Aadhar is India's app store- This has to be the Joke of The year

Aadhar is India's app store - This has to be the Joke of the Year
 
The fundamental difference between Appstore and NN's so called Appstore is that the moment it was found that iphone was tracking locations, Apple has agreed to fix the problem.
 
On the other hand, Aadhar's raison d-etre itself is tracking. Apart from that, Appstore wasn't built on tax payers' money.

Aadhaar is India's app store: Nilekani
 
MUMBAI, INDIA: According to UIDAI’s chairman Nandan Nilekani, the UID project is very important as it will give unique identity to the Indian people and will enable government in ensuring the benefits of social development schemes and financial inclusive growth reaches the beneficiaries.

UID project, also known as Aadhaar, provides unique identity number to everyone, which can be accessed and authenticated online. The project uses biometric cards to ensure no duplication occurs by the method of scanning 10 finger prints of two hands and also the iris of both the eyes.
 
“The most unique ID program”
 
“It’s the most unique ID program as the architecture is separate from various application modules. For enrollment, individual’s name, age, gender, date of birth, address along with 10 finger prints and two iris images would be sufficient enough for providing unique identity to people,” Nilekani said.
 
“User details such as name, age, gender, data of birth and address provides all information required for KYC norms, which can be utilized by government bodies for offering services like opening banking accounts and subsidiary of essential commodities like kerosene, fertilizer and food,” he added.

Aadhaar has three de-duplication engines running in the back-end, built on a standard architecture for enrollment of data or information of people. It’s a highly scalable system both at front and back-end. The front-end can be scaled up by adding enrollment points, while servers can be added at the back-end.

Calling Aadhaar as India’s app store, Nilekani asked technology heads to leverage the project infrastructure and online platform to develop enterprise services for people based on application programming interfaces (APIs).

“The opportunities for offering services using Aadhaar are enormous and now it's up to you CIOs to utilize the capabilities,” Nilekani said, while addressing the third anniversary of CIO KLUB in Mumbai o Friday.
 
Powered by open source server architecture
 
Like any Internet providers, Aadhaar is powered by open source server architecture like MySQL, Hadoop and others and uses the smart feature of BI (business intelligence). It has two datacenters in Delhi and Bangalore, the former is the primary datacenter and the later is secondary.
 
Beside the project's complexity and challenges, Nilekani pointed out that there are social challenges as well.

“Crowd management for enrollment of old-age people, children, physically challenged and remote locations remains key challenges during enrollments...
 
However, using technology fundamental social problems can be solved and the platform will enable for innovations,” he added.
 
UID project has issued 5.3 million Aadhaar cards till April 29, 2011 and was started last year on September 29. In just 14 months the platform of this project was rolled out and today it has a real-time portal to provide daily updates on the enrollment data across states.
 
Presently, about 100,000-200,000 enrollments are done everyday; however, Nilekani informed that it will reach one million per day by October this year and expect to touch 600 million by 2014.
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