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

Thursday, August 15, 2013

4473 - Snowden’s exile warning against UID scheme by Sandhya Jain - Niti Central


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).