By Sandhya Jain on August 10, 2013
It is strange that no human rights activist or political party in India has demanded that the UPA Government immediately destroy the vast biometric data of citizens that it collected illegally, even after Edward Snowden exposed the mass surveillance programmes being run by the Governments of the United States and Britain, with at least one server planted on the territory of India.
Snowden escaped incarceration for life in some isolated Guantanamo-type facility by securing ‘temporary’ asylum in Russia, after Washington grounded him at Moscow airport by cancelling his passport. He is likely to remain in Russia for the rest of his life, an irony that could make Moscow the new destination of those fleeing from the repulsive intrusiveness that George Orwell foresaw would be the fate of Western democracies. Big Brother is indeed watching you — all of us, in fact.
But no country over which the Americans have planted their spy cameras and listening devices is as vulnerable as India, because none other has so brazenly collected the biometric data of its entire population. The unique identification (Aadhar) programme has been executed illegally without Parliamentary sanction, at the expense of the taxpayer. Congress regimes like the Delhi Government have illegally forced citizens to enroll under the programme by denying property registration and other civic rights without an Aadhar number.
Right-thinking citizens always had doubts about the intent of the project — which can cancel the citizenship, voting rights, even bank accounts, of citizens — with a single click on the delete button. This is the ultimate in totalitarian power that has always been sought by the security establishments of countries like America which are committed to world domination, which is why the resistance to these powerful technologies emanates from there.
Biometric data is prone to misuse. Its very safety is difficult to guarantee in a world full of accomplished hackers, not to mention compulsive snoops. A particular denomination that feels targeted when certain crimes take place would be especially vulnerable in this regard. This is a grave danger to the entire citizenry, and the Supreme Court would do well, even at this late stage, to order the scrapping of the project and the destruction of all data. It never had any genuine justification, and after the expose by Snowden — who worked for both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) — there is no reason to believe that the data is safe.
So dogged is America in its pursuit of Snowden and all who helped him, even inadvertently, that an encrypted email service believed to have been used by him, shut down suddenly on August 8, after the US Government tried to gain access to customer information. The owner, Ladar Levison, explained to customers, “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.”
He further warned, “This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.” This was a hint at Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and other large providers who, according to Snowden’s leaks, were forced to help intelligence authorities gather email and other data on their users. Soon afterwards, another famous service, Silent Mail, also closed down, seeing the writing on the wall.
The sheer scale of NSA intrusion is causing some misgivings even in the normally discreet mainstream media, with the New York Times editorially commenting on August 8, “Time and again, the NSA has pushed past the limits that lawmakers thought they had imposed to prevent it from invading basic privacy, as guaranteed by the Constitution.” The NSA, the newspaper noted, “copies virtually all overseas messages that Americans send or receive, then scans them to see if they contain any references to people or subjects the agency thinks might have a link to terrorists… data collection on this scale… clearly shreds a common-sense understanding of the Fourth Amendment.” It called for Congress to clamp down on snooping that is not connected to specific targets.
Meanwhile, in the Capital alone, the Delhi State Election Commission found during the course of a routine exercise to weed out bogus voters, that there are over 12 lakh fake names on the voters’ list. In one instance alone, 30 residents of Seelampur got voter identity cards on the basis of a single Aadhar Card (no. 229575371505).
This means that all 30 persons had the same address proof with the same serial number, but different names and photographs. This is not possible without official complicity. It is clearly intended to facilitate bogus voting at election time. It is likely that some of the persons thus given voter identity cards may not be genuine citizens of India. Indeed, this was one of the greatest objections to the Unique Identification Programme in the first place.
Imagine what a foreign Government could do with citizens’ biometric data. Imagine if a country known to sponsor terror got its hands on our biometric data — it could use it to implicate innocent Indians in crimes they did not commit, to forge citizenship cards for its operatives, or to clean out target bank accounts. The possibilities are endless.
Another interesting scam that has come to light in the capital is that against a population of 16.8 million (2011 Census), Delhi has 18 million people on its ration cards. Since the middle classes were made to surrender their ration cards after the voter identity cards were introduced some decades ago, this means that at least 50 per cent, if not more, of the names on the ration cards are bogus.
This is clearly a scam to benefit certain chosen food grain dealers under the guise of the Food Security Bill that Sonia Gandhi hopes to push through in the Parliament session, in order to win the next election.
The food and supplies department claims it will weed out bogus claimants via Aadhar, and the Election Commission has already shown us how that can be fudged. So we are going to have a scam of unprecedented numbers in the guise of rectifying the shortcomings of the old public distribution system (PDS).
