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, July 30, 2015

8390 - A dangerous convergence - Live Mint


India’s rush in creating a a DNA-profiling system and the reach of Aadhaar pose a danger to civil liberties



Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

Two distinct processes based on questionable premises and exaggerated benefits are converging, threatening individual liberties in India. The convergence can severely undermine existing constitutional interpretation of the right to privacy. The proposed Human DNA Profiling Bill, if passed and enacted as law, is an ambitious project that will gradually expand and catalogue the profile of every Indian. The Unique Identification Authority (UID) of India oversees the assigning of a randomly generated number to each Indian as proof of the person’s identity, regardless of his or her caste, religion or ethnicity. But the authority lacks statutory backing.

Both are technical solutions to address complex human problems. Both are marketed as benign innovations without sinister implications. The UID project, popularly known as Aadhaar, is presented as a simple way to authenticate an individual’s identity and prevent fraud so that benefits reach the right person. For the poor, who lack other forms of identification, the system is meant to eliminate hurdles and reduce the likelihood of corruption. The DNA project aims to assist in solving crimes, identify victims after a natural disaster, and trace missing persons, but the database will include “volunteers” and any other index that regulators wish to add. Both projects have advanced with limited scrutiny of their impact on individual privacy, and in both instances, authorities in charge of the project have said—trust us, there is no hidden agenda.

The DNA project was conceived in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee era, and the UID project during the Manmohan Singh years. There is bipartisan support precisely because it strengthens the state, not the individual; it empowers the government, not the citizens; it extends the reach of the state and its agencies to intrude deeper into people’s lives, offering limited protection to the people.

The underlying message is—trust the government. To be sure, the DNA project can have positive outcomes, such as identifying missing persons or victims of disasters. DNA-based evidence can also establish the innocence of a defendant in a criminal case. Proper identification can, in theory, protect the poor from getting short-changed, and intermediaries will find it harder to inflate the number of beneficiaries and pocket the difference.

But a nationwide database that links individuals with their DNA, connecting personal data with biometric information, gives enormous powers to the state, and there are few credible safeguards. In a Supreme Court case where petitioners challenged the Aadhaar card being made compulsory, attorney general Mukul Rohatgi argued that privacy is not a fundamental right in India. But Shyam Divan and Gopal Subramanium, appearing for the petitioners, countered his narrow interpretation. Rohatgi’s assertion is not as monumental as Niren De’s during the Emergency, when De, then attorney general, said that the right to life was at the mercy of the state. 

But the philosophy is the same—that between the individual and the state, the state triumphs, not the individual.

That assumes a benign state, but no state is truly benign. Democratic countries with superior technologies and well-established search-and-seizure authority have set rigorous standards to protect individual privacy. Their bureaucracies have learned the hard way that over-reliance on data can be counterproductive, and there have been repeated failures of protecting data. Besides, as Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US show, even governments that have strong laws respecting individual rights ignore restraints on their powers. Nobody likes being accused of being soft on terrorism, particularly in times of strife.

The officials who administer Aadhaar may say that they are only assigning random numbers to individuals. But once that database is accessible to other agencies—government and private—they can link or match the data with other databases and get a precise profile of individuals beyond what is strictly necessary: what are their preferences and tastes; to which communities they belong; and with whom they interact. A rogue government can impose mass surveillance on a scale unimagined, enabling the state to track any individual. Databases can be linked easily and there are no safeguards to prevent misuse. Agencies—public and private—have demanded Aadhaar numbers from Indians performing routine transactions or seeking access to government services, without explaining why the numbers are needed.

The DNA-mapping project also categorizes people by caste. What purpose does that serve? When such data is overlaid with data from Aadhaar, which has people’s addresses, it makes the job of identifying specific groups simpler. Given India’s record of communal violence, it is not far-fetched to think that anthropologists, demographers or market researchers are not the only ones who would want access to such data.

Technology can have enormous uses and it would be Luddite to argue against its use. But privacy is too important to be left to technocrats alone. These systems need robust safeguards to protect the individual from the reach of the state. Governments with far clearer constitutional protection for individual rights have failed doing it. What makes Indian authorities so certain they’d get it right?

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.
Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com. To read Salil Tripathi’s previous columns, go to 
www.livemint.com/saliltripathi

FIRST PUBLISHED: WED, JUL 29 2015. 07 49 PM IST