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

Monday, September 18, 2017

12066 - India’s Aadhaar digital ID scheme: what could possibly go wrong? - Naked Security


15 SEP 2017


India’s national identification card scheme — commonly called the Aadhar card — came to fruition in 2009 with an ambitious goal: to register and identify a nation of more than a billion people, each with their own 12-digit unique identification (UID), and adoption of this ID card schema has rolled ahead at a fast clip.

Estimates as of August 2017 have more than 1.17bn unique identifiers under Aadhaar, with 99% of Indians over the age of 18 enrolled in the program. Enrolling more than a billion people in under a decade is indeed quite a feat.

The Aadhaar card serves as a proof of address and positive identification for a number of important services and transactions in India, including opening bank accounts, obtaining a driver’s license, filing income taxes, applying for social services, even filing a death certificate.

As part of the process to obtain an Aadhaar card, the applicant must also submit biometrics: a photograph, scans of all 10 fingerprints, and an iris scan. These biometrics, tied to the individual’s home address and UID, are all stored in a centralized database, the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR), which is managed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

One of the goals of the scheme is to make the identification process easy enough that most people in India, regardless of if they have been able to afford or obtain official paperwork previously, can easily obtain a card. In turn, residents can use their card to enroll in day-to-day services and products much more easily than before with much less bureaucratic overhead (also potentially reducing bribery and fraud), and/or participate in social welfare programs they might not have been able to before due to lack of documentation.

India’s former prime minister Manmohan Singh said at the launch of the project in 2010:

The poor did not have any identity proof. Due to this shortcoming, they could not open bank accounts or get ration cards. They could not avail the benefits of government welfare programmes because of this and many times, these benefits were pocketed by others.

The government’s stated incentive to enroll as many people as possible in Aadhaar was to reduce fraud in these social programs. That said, Aadhar did not receive universal support in Indian politics by any means, with major political parties — such as the BJP, to which current Indian PM Narendra Modi belongs — at one time opposing Aadhar over concerns about privacy and abuse.

The privacy concerns over Aadhaar have grown as the program continues to grow, with cases brought before the Indian Supreme Court monitored closely by privacy advocates such as the EFF.

As Aadhaar becomes nigh-ubiquitous in Indian daily life, the argument is that there are still unanswered questions over how the identification data collected is used and secured, and what kind of privacy rights citizens are potentially signing away when they enroll in Aardhaar. These questions have greater heft after India’s Supreme Court ruled recently that Indian citizens absolutely have a fundamental right to privacy

While there is no immediate impact on Aadhaar or its application, this ruling certainly gives those working to slow the growth of Aadhaar program a bit more leverage.

The biggest counter to any criticism of Aadhaar is that it is, technically, a voluntary program. It’s true that the government does not require its citizens to enroll in Aadhaar, but just as the US.. social security number is not technically required of every citizen unless they want to pay into the social security program, good luck getting almost any kind of job or opening a bank account without one.

The idea of having the biometrics of more than 1bn people — a mode of authentication that cannot (almost) ever be changed — stored in any kind of repository is problematic on its own. Despite whatever security measures put in place, such a repository will always be a tempting target for criminals to try and breach. The most cynical among us will no doubt say that it’s just a matter of time until such a high-value target is breached; whether or not this is realistic or just FUD is a fair debate.

That said, once biometrics data are potentially leaked, their usefulness is void. Just as we saw with the Equifax breach just recently, with nearly half of all Americans social security numbers leaked, this authentication value that’s unchangeable and so crucially tied to so many sensitive transactions has suddenly left millions of people less secure and with little to no recourse.

The biometrics are included as an attempt to dissuade or at least make fraud more difficult, but to be fair to Aadhaar, there are several authentication options, two of which doesn’t use biometrics data at all. UIDAI says the CIDR does all authentication at its own data centers and that at no point during authentication would any personal data, including biometrics data, be transmitted during the process. The authentication process returns only a yes or no value to the requestor. In addition, card holders can lock out access to their biometrics (including for authentication), and unlock them as needed; however, this is an opt-in measure at the moment.

There’s also concern that the degree of tracking in such a centralized database could be rife for exploitation by the government to surveil, or even to discriminate against religious or ethnic groups. 

By using Aadhaar, the government can match existing records such as driving license, ration card, financial history to the primary identifier to create detailed profiles. Aadhaar may not be the only mechanism, but essentially, it’s a surveillance tool that the Indian government can use to surreptitiously identify and track citizens.

The delay in sorting out the nature and scope of privacy as right in India has allowed the government to continue linking Aadhaar to as many schemes as possible, perhaps with the intention of ensuring the scheme becomes too big to be rolled back.

In addition, it’s not clear if there’s any way to unsubscribe or remove yourself from Aadhaar once you’ve enrolled (and presumably given your government all your biometric data) — it could be that the only way to get rid of this information is to never enroll in the first place.

The key question with Aadhaar is quite simply: do the benefits of a centralized ID system like this — which can help reduce burdensome bureaucratic overhead and enable thousands, if not millions, of people to get services they need — outweigh the risks to personal privacy and potential for abuse and fraud?