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

Saturday, September 7, 2013

4560 - ‘Aadhaar system is a great example of using open source technologies - Information week

‘Aadhaar system is a great example of using open source technologies and extensive data-driven analytics to achieve its scale and quality’ 

Building the world’s largest biometric identity platform for authenticating the identity of a billion residents is a mammoth task and clearly has no parallel anywhere in the world. To understand more about the technology architecture for Aadhaar, InformationWeek’s Srikanth RP had the privilege of reaching out to Dr Pramod Varma, who is currently a technology advisor to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and a few technology startups
By Srikanth RP, InformationWeek, September 04, 2013

For initial 3 years of the Aadhaar project, Dr Pramod Varma was the Chief Architect at UIDAI responsible for entire system architecture and strategic technology decisions. He joined UIDAI in 2009 and has been pivotal in ensuring that an open, scalable, and secure architecture is built to meet the needs of Aadhaar project. He led the overall technology and application architecture and application development within the UIDAI Technology Unit and is based in Bangalore. Currently, in addition to working with UIDAI as technology advisor, he also sits on the advisory board for few startups to mentor and provide technology and architecture directions.

Some excerpts from an interview:
What were the factors considered while designing the architecture for Aadhaar?
Within the first 6 months of its inception, UIDAI has defined its technology architecture principles very clearly. They are — “Openness & vendor neutrality,” “Security & privacy by design,” “Horizontal scalability,” “Interoperability & Manageability,” “Use of analytics for transparency and decision making,” and most importantly a “Platform based approach at every layer.” 
For example, Aadhaar system is entirely built using open source components and takes heavy advantage of international open standards such as ISO biometric standards, data representation standards such as XML, JSON, security standards such as 2048-bit PKI, AES-256, messaging standard AMQP, and so on. Aadhaar system uses widely adopted open source components such as MySQL, Hadoop, RabbitMQ and uses Java as the primary application programming language. Entire application is deployed on open commodity hardware using several blade/rack servers on x86 platform running 64-bit Linux and uses large scale cheap SATA storage arrays. Such open scale-out architecture allows UIDAI to procure latest servers and storage from “any” vendor at “the best price” only “when required”. 
Similarly, security and privacy of data within Aadhaar system has been foundational and is clearly reflected in UDIAI’s strategy, design and its processes throughout the system. UIDAI has taken several measures to ensure security of resident data, spanning from strong end-to-end encryption of sensitive data, use of strong PKI-2048 encryption, use of HSM appliances, physical security, access control, network security, stringent audit mechanism, 24x7 monitoring, and measures such as data partitioning and data encryption.

Please describe the scale of data being handled and the complexity?
Aadhaar system requires providing unique identity to more than a billion people. With an aggressive target of reaching 600 million Aadhaars in a short span of 4 years, enrolment module processes about 1 million enrolments every day. De-duplication (ensuring every resident is indeed unique) requires matching 10 fingerprints, both irises, and demographics data of every resident and hence each enrolment packet (PKI-2048 encrypted data) per resident is about 5MB. Currently, system handles about 30 TB (terabytes) of I/O to process 1 million enrolments every day. Given the fact that Aadhaar system has enrolled 400+ million (40 crore) residents already, system storage is about 1.5 PB (petabytes) or 1,500 TB in one data center and same data is replicated across to UIDAI’s second data center having a total of more than 3,000 TB of data. This is expected to grow to about 10-12 PB when entire country is covered. In addition, process data including 100+ million events generated every day, RDBMS data, Hadoop analytics data, etc., adds another layer of data management complexity.

What are the unique needs with respect to analytics for a project like Aadhaar?
At UIDAI, analytics and reporting has been a constituent of the Aadhaar implementation strategy from inception. A large multi-provider ecosystem created by UIDAI can only be managed efficiently by measuring process data at a high degree of granularity, creating well-defined metrics from this process data, and creating feedback loop for these insights and learning to be shared back to the ecosystem for continuous improvement. When working with third-party organizations that are part of ecosystem, it is essential that entire system is measured using data and decisions are made completely based on data. Highly granular metadata (or process data) must be automatically collected throughout the system to ensure quality is measured systematically and feedback is given to improve any specific issues that are identified.

 For example, every enrolment packet is reviewed by a supervisor for data quality (review audits are captured electronically) and signed as required, which means every enrolment is traceable in terms of “who,” “when,” “where,” “under which agency,” “under which registrar,” “who reviewed it,” etc. In addition, several metadata elements such as “how long operator spent on demographic data screen,” “how many times a fingerprint was captured,” “how many corrections were done,” etc. are also collected as part of every enrolment packet. This data is used for providing continuous improvement feedback on data quality to the registrars and enrolling agencies using UIDAI’s analytics platform. An extensive atomic data warehouse built on top of Hadoop Hive already handles several billion analytics data points. This fully anonymized (analytics system has no PII) data source is the driver for all analytics and reporting layer within Aadhaar system.

Please share the unique challenges and lessons learnt in building the analytics system?
Aadhaar system (both enrolment and authentication) records extensive event data within its atomic data warehouse. UIDAI could not have managed its large ecosystem rollout with high degree of data quality and process adherence without its analytics backbone. 
Unique challenge was to effectively manage 100,000+ certified third-party operators operating across 30,000 stations under 50+ registrars across the country without creating massive manual audit processes and still maintain data quality, process adherence, and scale. Instead of using manual audit and control mechanism, UIDAI decided to drive entire system using extensive data instrumentation and analytics. 
For example, enrolment client software is heavily instrumented to record “operator,” “agency,” “location,” “screen transition timing,” “data capture metrics for demographics and biometrics,” “station identifier,” “how many times machine restarted,” “who has logged in,” “what kind of OS and HW is being used,” etc., and all this data is synched with the server to track, monitor, and analyze data quality and process issues at every station and operator level across 100,000 operators. Real learning is that such large scale projects must drive all its decisions and make continuous improvement using extensive data analytics. And this is quite easily possible now using open source technologies such as Hadoop without having the need for large IT budgets.

From a Big Data and analytics point of view, what can Aadhaar enable for the entire country? What kind of functions you see being transformed using the power of analytics enabled by the Aadhaar architecture?
Aadhaar system is a great example of using open source technologies and extensive data-driven analytics to achieve its scale and quality. UIDAI regularly publishes its learning, APIs, technology choices, etc on its website. Specifically on the analytics front, UIDAI publishes these through its portal (portal.uidai.gov.in) and also provide machine readable data via its data platform (data.uidai.gov.in). All these metrics and data points are derived from its analytics platform built on top of Hadoop Hive that has already captured several billion analytics data points by now. This fully anonymized data source is the driver for all analytics and reporting layer within Aadhaar system. By providing all these analytics via its public portal and data portal, UIDAI hopes to enable transparency and encourage researchers to use this aggregate data for various studies and mashups. As described earlier, UIDAI uses this same platform very extensively to monitor data and process quality and provide continuous, automated, feedback to entire ecosystem partners all the way to the individual operators across the country.

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