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, February 8, 2012

2365 - Facebook is a surveillance engine, not friend: Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation - Economic Times


7 FEB, 2012, 10.33AM IST, SRIRAM SRINIVASAN & SANGEETHA KANDAVEL,ET BUREAU 

"You know about the two rules right for interviewing Richard?" a volunteer asks before leading us to meet Richard Stallman, the man who fights for free software day in and out. One, don't use the term Open Source to mean free software.


Two, don't say Linux but say GNU/Linux. Dr Stallman, who started the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to promote freedom to create, share and modify software, is extremely sensitive to whether the goals of his initiative are rightly communicated. 

A computer engineer and self-proclaimed hacker, the 58-year-old Dr Stallman lives the life of an activist. He lives frugally, like a student, he has said once. The philosophy behind the support for free software reflects in other things too. 

During this interview, he gave back a Kinley water bottle, because he doesn't consume Coca-Cola bottles for the way it handles labour. Ditto is his feeling about Walmart. He uses the low-profile Lemote Yeeloong computer, browses the Net only once or twice daily and doesn't own a cell phone, because he believes it creates privacy issues. 

He's a Green Party supporter. And can cut down to size all the new age iconic business corporations, which he has done in this interview. In fact, in what raised a storm, he re-quoted the famous lines 'I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone,' after the death of Steve Jobs. Excerpts: 

How do you see the recent move by Facebook to go for listing? 

I don't care about that. Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. 

Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page. So, Facebook carries out surveillance over visitors to thousands of different Websites, even for people who are not Facebook users. I hope we will have something for free browsers to block Facebook 'like' buttons so that people won't be under surveillance. 

In any case, this is why I ask people not to put photographs of me on Facebook, because Facebook collects data about the names of people in photos. It might as well be working directly for Big Brother. 

Mark Zuckerberg says the likes of Google and Microsoft are collecting information behind your back. 

They all do it in a secret way. Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user. 


Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware. So to that extent, he's right. But that doesn't make Facebook okay. 

A recent book called Master Switch (by Tim Wu) discusses whether the Net could be taken over by a private monopoly in future. 

In the US, it almost has been. Because I think there are three major ISPs that are the only ones that most Americans can use. As a result, those three together could shut down almost all the Internet if they want. The further step from three companies controlling most people's access to one company controlling all is a substantial step but most of the way has gone already. 

The philosophy of free software is competing with the big proprietary software firms, who can spend a lot. 

It's actually the free software itself that opposes them. Competing is too weak a word. This is not a competition for success at all. 

As an idea? 

The idea that users deserve freedom and should control their computing competes with the idea that people should let companies control them with digital colonisation. But most of the time they don't say it's good to lose your freedom and good to be a victim of digital colonisation. What they do is they distract attention away from it entirely and they ask people to think about other things. 

So Microsoft had a slogan, 'Where do you want to go today?' Whereas ours is, 'How do you want to live in five or 10 years?' It's clear that the second question is more important. But Microsoft's goal was simply to get people distracted with something else, so they would never ask themselves the deeper questions. 

In your blog, you have also raised questions against Amazon.com? 

In addition to mistreating its workers, Amazon mistreats its customers. And that's what I focus on. E-books from Amazon and most publishers take away readers' tradition of freedoms. And this is an injustice. 

With paper printed books, you have certain freedoms. You can acquire the book anonymously by paying cash, which is the way I always buy books. I never use a credit card. I don't identify to any database when I buy books. Amazon takes away that freedom. 

Most books are available for the Amazon Swindle (Stallman's pun on Kindle) only from Amazon and Amazon requires users to identify themselves. So Amazon has a database of all the books each user has read. Such a database is a threat to human rights. It must not be allowed to exist. 

There's also a freedom to give the book to someone else or lend the book without telling anyone else. And there's the freedom to sell the book to a used bookstore. Amazon abolishes these freedoms with digital handcuffs. And there's the freedom to keep a book for as long as you wish, which Amazon abolishes with a backdoor in the Swindle. 

We know about this backdoor because in 2009 it was observed that Amazon remotely deleted thousands of copies of a particular book. Those were until that day authorised copies. And then they disappeared. And you know which book it was that Amazon showed the Orwellian nature of its product with? It was 1984, by George Orwell! There was a lot of criticism, so Amazon promised it would never do it again unless ordered to do so by the State. That does not make me feel safe. 

Do you fear for a time when you won't be able to pay in cash to buy a book? 

I am worried about that. But that means I won't get books. There are books available now that I can't get by paying cash. And I don't get them. It's that simple. You have got to be firm when you are standing up for freedom. 

If you say I want freedom but if it's inconvenient for me to keep it I will give it up, then you are weak. That means all that the businesses that are working together have to do is set up a situation where you encounter an inconvenience in maintaining your freedom and you give it up. 

Surveillance is also one of the reasons why you opposed the ID projects of different countries including India? 

Yes, I heard that India has a national population registry which is taking lot of biometrics of people. People in India should organise to fight against and resist the national population registry as well as the ID number. I'm not surprised. What else do you expect governments to do? Governments want total control over people. 

Looking back, do you think if the OS was called GNU/Linux, it would have boosted the entire free software community? 

The issue is not about boosting the community. It's about teaching people to demand freedom. I started developing the GNU operating system as a means to an end and that end is so that we can have freedom in our computing. 

However, it turns out that in order to establish freedom in an everlasting way it is not enough to give people free software. It's not enough to give people freedom if they don't appreciate it. They will have many opportunities to lose it. 

So, to establish lasting freedom you need to teach people to value freedom and demand freedom and we try to do that. We in the GNU project, which is the project to develop the GNU operating system, is a part of the free software movement which says we demand that our software be free and we will work hard to escape from proprietary software because we want to have freedom in our computing. 

However, there are people in the free software community who don't agree with this. For instance, Torvalds (Linus Torvalds) who wrote the kernel Linux. Well they have a right to their views. They have the right to disagree with us and say so. 

But the error of referring to the operating system use as Linux when Linux is just one component of it means that people think that the whole system was started by Torvalds in 1991 rather than by me in 1984. And he tells them I don't think about freedom and that what we need is a powerful, reliable software. 

Well he has got rights to state his views and I would be against censoring his views. But people should know that the system that we use, which is basically GNU plus Linux, exists because of the free software movement.





CLICK ON TITLE TO SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE - Posted by
Labels: