12693 - Who Is Running the ‘Orchestrated Wine And Cheese Campaign’ Against Aadhaar in the SC? - The Wire

Who Is Running the ‘Orchestrated Wine And Cheese Campaign’ Against Aadhaar in the SC?

BY ANOO BHUYAN ON 18/01/2018 • 10 COMMENTS

Defenders of Aadhaar have called opposition to it an organised campaign stemming from paranoia. But a look at the petitioners proves it is anything but.

One cannot confirm if any of these petitioners, who have all submitted bulky petitions, do in fact drink wine or/and eat cheese. Credit: File photo

New Delhi: Just last week, UIDAI’s former chairman Nandan Nilekani called the opposition to Aadhaar, an “orchestrated campaign”. A few days before that, an editorial in an Indian news portal said the opposition comes from “activists of the upper crust, upper class, wine ‘n cheese, Netflix-watching social media elite – mostly of the Left”.

And in an interview with The Wire last year, former Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said, “This paranoia is coming from a few people in a country of 150 crore.”

Nilekani, the architect of the Aadhaar project, has also spoken at length in reference to a major story in The Tribune that took on global resonance on how India’s entire Aadhaar database is being breached and leaked through various vendors.

Among the more prominent faces at the helm of the fight is one Padma Shri awardee, three Ramon Magsaysay awardees, three former Indian army personnel, a retired high court judge, a parliamentarian and the entire government of West Bengal.

And yet who are these people who apparently “drink wine, eat cheese”, and also make a commitment to the Supreme Court to spend money and time (over six years for some), only to spite Nilekani’s Aadhaar project?

The protesters

A look at the 30 challenges filed before the Supreme Court and the people behind them casts doubts on the accusations that the ‘wine and cheese’ lot have no understanding of base realities.

In fact, by simply looking at the various sections of society those opposed to the project belong to, it becomes clear that this isn’t an organised and ‘orchestrated’ campaign, but a motley bunch of individuals who have been tagged together by the Supreme Court on a now bloated Aadhaar petition. The earliest petition (by retired Justice Puttaswamy) has been plodding along for six years, since 2012, and 11 others out of the 30, joined the fight the very next year.

Also read: Aadhaar Isn’t Just About Privacy. There Are 30 Challenges the Govt Is Facing in Supreme Court

One cannot confirm if any of these petitioners do in fact drink wine or/and eat cheese, but from reading their bulky submissions, they appear have committed themselves to a cause that they truly believe interferes with the lives of the Indian people.

Justice (retired) Puttaswamy: At 92, Puttaswamy is one of the oldest living petitioners in the Supreme Court, and the oldest petitioner in the Aadhaar case. He was born in 1926 and enrolled as an advocate in 1952. By 1977, he was appointed a judge of the Karnataka high court. His challenge, a path he put himself on in 2012, is the first challenge to the Aadhaar case. The now historic privacy judgement delivered in August 2017, takes its name from his challenge.

Bezwada Wilson: Wilson has been the driving force behind India’s efforts at providing dignity, security and emancipation to manual scavengers who risk their lives while cleaning drains and latrines. Manual scavengers, who largely belong to the ‘lower caste’ in India, face stigma and exclusion. Wilson is not new to long-fought and hard-won public interest litigations and has fought a case which led to the government to pass laws for the prohibition of the employment of manual scavengers. In 2016, he received the Ramon Magsaysay award.

Major General (retired) SG Vombatkere: Vombatkere retired as a major general of the Indian Army after 35 years of service. He is now over 70 was awarded the Visishta Seva Medal by the President of India in 1993. He is a key petitioner in this case along with Bezwada Wilson. Their submission says it is “wider” than Puttaswamy’s and calls for the Aadhaar Act to be declared a violation of Article 14, 19 and 21 of the Indian constitution and asks that no one be denied any service on account of Aadhaar. They have also asked the court to direct that all data collected under Aadhaar by the public and private sector be destroyed. They have challenged the National Population Register and Aadhaar’s link.

Shantha Sinha: Shantha Sinha was the first chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and served two consecutive terms (2007 to 2013). She has also been on various other government committees on national integration, right to education, mid-day meals and adult education. Her work on the ground in Andhra Pradesh was directed at rescuing children from child labour and admitting them to government schools. She also received the Ramon Magsaysay award in 2003 and the Padma Shri in 1998.

Kalyani Menon Sen: Sen is a feminist scholar and has been an activist for women’s rights for over 25 years. She has worked with the United Nations Development Programme, advising on gender related issues. Sinha and Sen are co-petitioners in their case. Some of their prayers are similar to Wilson’s and Vombatkere’s. They’ve also moved court seeking that “accounts of current bank account holder will not be made in-operational and future applicants will not be coerced to submit their Aadhaar numbers.” They’ve petitioned the court similarly for the government’s order on linking mobile numbers to Aadhaar.

Aruna Roy: Roy was briefly a bureaucrat in the Indian Administrative Service (1968 to 1975) but resigned and is now known for her nearly 40 years of work with the rural poor in Rajasthan and ‘Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan’ which she runs. She was also a key figure in the movement which led to India passing the Right to Information Act as well as the Right to Food. She was a member of the UPA’s National Advisory Council for five years and was instrumental in the passage of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. Along with Wilson and Sinha, Roy has also received the Ramon Magsaysay award.

Nikhil Dey: Dey is a long-time colleague of Aruna Roy, a co-founder of the ‘Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan’ and a co-petitioner with her on this case. With Roy, he too has worked on the right to information, food and employment in India. Their petition saw every state and union territory of India being made a respondent. “The present experimentation would undoubtedly result in social exclusion by depriving persons of the fundamental rights and also putting at stake vast sums of tax payer’s money,” says their petition.

Major General (retired) SCN Jatar: Jatar served with the Indian Army from 1954. He commanded an engineer regiment in India’s 1971 war in the Poonch Sector (Jammu and Kashmir) and was the commander of infantry brigades in the Kashmir Valley and Rajasthan dessert, from 1977 to 1981. He has been appointed to several government committees and was also the Chairman at ONGC Videsh Limited and Oil India. His petition saw the Election Commission and Reserve Bank of India appear as respondents.

Colonel (retired) Mathew Thomas: Thomas, who is around 80, retired as Colonel from the Indian Army and has seen military action in Nagaland, China and Pakistan. In 2014, he was invited to address a BJP parliamentary panel, where he explained various issues around the Aadhaar scheme. He has asked the court to direct an investigation into the role of foreign and private companies in the collection of biometric data of Indians.

Supporting material in the form of research has been submitted to the court by Reetika Khera (professor at IIT Delhi), Jean Dreze (co-author with Amartya Sen of An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions), Jude Terence D’souza (securities system specialist in Mumbai), Anand Venkatanarayanan (data security expert in Bangalore), Samir Kelkar (security consultant) and Anumeha Yadav (journalist, formerly at Scroll.in).

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2928 - Is UID Anti People - Money Life

Is UID anti-people? Part-1 The database state  by Mathew Thomas

Is UID anti-people? –Part 2: A bundle of contradictions, misconceptions & mirages by Soma Sekar

Is UID anti-people?-Part 3: Tall claims and tomfoolery of UID by Mathew Thomas

Is UID anti-people?-Part 4: Does the implementation smack of corruption and negligence? by Mathew Thomas

Is UID anti-people?–Part 5: Why UID is impractical and flawed “Ab initio” by Soma Sekar

Is UID anti-people?–Part 6: The foundation for incessant intrusion by Vickram Crishna

Is UID anti-people?–Part7: Incarnation of new geo-strategic tools, NCTC, NATGRID, UID, RFID and NPR by Gopal Krishna

Is UID anti-people?–Part 8: UID’s security is flawed by Dr.Samir Kelekar

Is UID anti-people?-Part 9: Law makers as law breakers by Mathew Thomas

2550 - Aadhar or Aandhar? - by Samir Kelekar

Aadhar or Aandhar?

Now, as little details of the totally non-transparent Aadhar are coming out in the press due to the recent scam by Mohammed Ali, we realize how pathetic Aadhar's software has been, and the only place for it seems to be the trash bin. It is a shame that it has come from a high-profile personality such as Nandan Nilekani and thousands of crores of tax payers' money has gone into it.

First of all, a few weeks back, a news item appeared that an entity --- not even a human being --- by the name of coriander with father named biryani was issued an Aadhar number. There is no idea what biometric was used to get the number but the face was that of a mobile phone, not even a human being. The Aadhar software failed to detect the fraud.

And now there is news that Mohammed Ali, an enroller of Aadhar, has created 30,000 Aadhar ids in a span of six months. Given the rate at which he has created the ids, they seem fake. Out of the 30,000, 800 have been created in the physically-disabled category stating that the people did not have hands and were blind as well, thus they did not have any of the biometrics -- neither fingerprints or iris --- needed by UIDAI. The interesting point is what biometrics were used for the rest of the ids namely around 29200 which were in the regular category. And if the ids were fake, what was the much touted de-duplication software of UIDAI doing that it passed all of them? The fraud was detected only because someone noticed that one enroller had created a huge number of ids in a small time. In other words, if Mohammed Ali had created only a couple of thousand ids --- those which a normal enroller enrols --- this fraud would have gone unnoticed. Not just that, there could be many other such Alis who are already around and who have gone unnoticed and probably will never be caught.

UIDAI claims that the project will detect and reduce frauds in schemes such as NREGA. Now UIDAI software itself seems so full of security holes that NREGA and other schemes themselves may be already doing a much better job than UIDAI on fraud detection.

Another fact that has come up is that for enrollers, if the biometric fails twice, the third time whatever is given  is accepted by the UIDAI system by default and authentication granted. This, for a security system in this time and age?

And UIDAI claims it has companies such as Ernst and Young as security consultants?

All in all, Aadhar seems to be the mother of all scams where thousand of crores of tax payers' money are spent by fooling a government that is not aware of the issues. Not just Aadhar should be scrapped immediately, but a thorough probe is needed, especially since people had warned of the issues beforehand and no notice was taken. Indeed each and every paisa spent from the tax payers' kitty needs to be recoverd from the perpetuators, backers of this scam called Aadhar, which is more appropriately called Aandhar meaning darkness in Marathi.

Samir Kelekar

Bangalore

2160 - Aadhaar Ya Niraadhaar? Bumblebee - Fundamatics - IITBAA

Aadhaar Ya Niraadhaar?

Bumblebee

When Nandan Nilekani took charge of the Unique Identification Authority of India he was feted for his business-like approach, his stewardship of a project to give identity numbers to millions of Indians, an exercise unprecedented in its scale across the globe. While most accept the need for creating a systematic database of our citizenry, the path to be taken for this has become the subject matter of a viral attack from many quarters—cabinet ministers and bureaucrats, policy experts and activists, even a few state governments. 


Everything, from Nilekani’s procedures for data collection and the potential errors therein, to concerns over privacy, is being questioned.


UIDAI is also a subject very close to the IIT Bombay family. Nandan and many of his aides are from within the alumni community as are several detractors who question its “security” and “developmental” dimensions of they scheme. They claim that the former leads to an invasive state; the latter leaves us with a retreating state. 


Bumblebee felt that it was time some of that rumpus in the national stage was brought within the pages of Fundamatics in an unbiased point-counterpoint debate straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth.
Bumblebee

Imagining Aadhaar
Raj Mashruwala

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will celebrate its third anniversary next month. When Nandan Nilekani took office, he defined its mission “to issue a unique identification number that can be verified
and authenticated in an online, cost-effective manner, which is robust enough to eliminate duplicate and fake identities.” 


Hardly a day passes without the press reporting on Nandan or UIDAI, with headings like ‘Declare Aadhaar Illegal’, or, ‘Chidambaram wants Nilekani to log out’. Tabloids and bloggers have a field day speculating, insinuating and dispensing free advice on the matter. Interestingly, the ground-level reality is different. The reality is that Aadhaar has become the largest and fastest growing identity database in the world in less than 14 months. Is Aadhaar the first sign of a brave new world, the next stage of people empowerment?


Before we begin a discussion on the future of Aadhaar, let us first take stock of where it is today.


1. Just the numbers: Over 140M enrolled; 3⁄4 million new enrollments per day; active enrollment camps (16) in every populous state. In short, Aadhaar is growing faster than the mobile phone subscription rate, the most successful private initiative in recent times.


2. The system is working. In a year, it has scaled up to become the world’s largest biometric system, doing 100 trillion biometric comparisons per day while exceeding target accuracy. The reality: Indians will receive a unique ID. Built in the system is a portal for transparency, a toll-free call centre for assistance, an online appointment system, an online enrollment status query, a developer portal and more technical documents than one can read. Let us face it: despite IIT alumni running the show, something real and functional has emerged.

3.Aadhaar was sold to the public to facilitate delivery of public service. Whether this means direct payment for a NREGA recipient, delivery of subsidised LPG cylinders, KYC validation for the SIM card or opening of bank accounts for the unbanked, our babus are discussing, defining, building and testing new apps rapidly. We will see them in 2012.


4- Innovation — new ideas of UID’s uses are in the air. Once you assume a reliable verifiable unique ID, you can dramatically simplify banking and payments, healthcare and education monitoring, and identity fraud detection. People are building such systems right now. Our very own IITB professors are changing their 30-year curriculum and giving assignments to students to envision uses of Aadhaar. Admittedly, one application — the biometric student attendance system — is not in the best interest of junta.

5.Costs as per government records, all, I will offer my commentary. At the onset, UIDAI has spent I 468.91 crore (ap- prox. $100 million) from its inception till September, 2011. UIDAI strangely seemed to have grossly under-spent its budget, which was reported to be thousands of crores of rupees. Crap, another target missed.

6- Residents— do they want it? At the moment, enrollments lines don’t seem to be getting shorter. We must love standing in lines for no benefits. Wait, maybe people do need verifiable IDs.


7- What is the problem then? The civil society is deeply concerned. Their objections — privacy, reliance on unproven biometric technology, run-away costs and using the information for security instead of development — ought not to be dismissed summarily. Where do we, the armchair democratic activists, go from here? We could:

1. Support the continuation of Aadhaar. This is what the government would want us to do.
   
2. Raise our voice to scrap the programme. This is what some in the civil society would want.
   
3. Find ways to help improve the vision of Aadhaar. This is what the idealist in us would want.
   

Let us examine some of the objections raised by respected civil society leaders such as Ms Usha Ramanathan, Arundhati Roy, Aruna Roy and Justice V. R. Krishna. As a know-it- it is fair to say that a constructive dialogue has not occurred between them and the Government of India. The government has generally ignored them and the civil society has destructively criticised the government in turn.

1. Privacy: Civil society leaders discuss a number of subtopics -


a. Need for a strong personal privacy law that India lacks. Aadhaar is too dangerous without a personal privacy law in place. No one disagrees on the need for such a law. The question is, do we put infrastructure projects on hold until such a law is passed?


b. Use of Aadhaar data for security, including national ID card. National ID card and building the National Population Registry (NPR) are in an act passed by parliament in 2004. Enrollment in NPR is mandatory and would occur regardless of Aadhaar. Would it make sense to build a chinese wall between Aadhaar and NPR?


c. Operational issues, such as data sharing among agencies Privacy is a topic that every country must find its own balance of. It can’t be borrowed from the US or China. Do we put Aadhaar project on hold until we find acceptable answer to privacy? Do we believe we can achieve a national consensus on privacy any time in the near future? 

2.Unproven biometric technology: The three most common objections are 


(a) it is inherently probabilistic and hence fal- lible, 
(b) it can easily be faked, and 
(c) it is not workable with India’s large and diverse population.


I am absolutely amazed at the speed at which India has produced biometric experts (albeit self-proclaimed) in the last two years. You- Tube is now overflowing with these experts. Having spent a considerable amount of time getting entertained by them, I can safely say that

1. These experts have zero understanding of the probability theory. For them, Heisen- berg’s theory of uncertainty would be deeply disturbing. Any verification system has a certain probability of error. We need to characterise it, model it to predict error rates, and include additional verification factors if higher accuracy rates are required. Biometric verification is simply one factor.
   
   
   
2. Faking. A four-digit PIN has 1 in a 10,000 chance of getting faked. Credit cards can be spoofed en masse at a negligible cost. We use both daily. We need to under- stand the cost benefits of each verification method and use whichever method is economically acceptable. Biometric identification has many good uses just like other methods such as tokens and passwords.
   
   
   
3. Self-proclaimed experts conveniently disregard empirical data analysis on Indian population, which concluded that UIDAI can establish individual uniqueness with desired accuracy (> 99%). Current enroll- ment accuracy results seem to validate the original proof of conceptual results.

d. Indian experts have the uncanny talent of quoting real experts out of the context. The fact remains — we could discuss privacy, technology and intentions of the government ad infinitum. 


The crux of the issue is
a. Do we have a severe leakage problem in public benefits schemes due to duplicate and fake identities?
b. Do we want to provide services to people who need them the most, but lack identity proof?
c. Do we want to continue wasting umpteen hours at the bank, at the mobile shop and at the government office, trying to prove our identity over and over again?


Then we need Aadhaar. Aadhaar is necessary, but it may not be sufficient. Scrapping it is definitely not a solution. Can I challenge the IIT community to suggest ways to improve it?


Raj Mashruwala


The author Raj (Mashru) Mashruwala, 1975, Mechanical Engineering, has painstakingly researched the questions. The same thing can’t be claimed for the answers. He refused to provide his bio(metric) to the editors for verification due to privacy reasons.

Imaginary Aadhaar

Samir Kelekar

At a recent debate on UID in Bangalore, UIDAI's Deputy Director General, Mr. Dalwai was asked about the faking of finger prints, which can easily defeat the biometric scanners of UID. A video of how a faked fingerprint can defeat a typical fingerprint scanner has been put up by Mumbai-based biometric consultant, J. T. D’souza, on You- Tube. One expected a sensible answer from Mr. Dalwai, perhaps something on the lines of, ‘our fingerprint scanners can’t be fooled by such faking’.


But instead, he answered saying that if it does happen, it can only happen in small proportions. As a security professional, I don’t really know whether to laugh or cry at such an answer. It is like saying, yes, our backdoor doesn’t have a latch and is open. But there is little chance that anyone will notice it, or for that matter even if someone does notice it, let us hope that they are not tempted to take anything.


To put it bluntly, we are spending — by various estimates — right from Rs5,000 crores to Rs1,50,000 crores on the UIDAI project. The exact estimate of the project is unknown — so much for its transparency.


But it takes just Rs 30 — a little bit of wax and fevicol — to fake a fingerprint and fool a fin- gerprint scanner. It would take a bit more to

identify someone else's fingerprint from say a glass of water, taking a photograph of it, making a transparency, etching it on a PCB and then making a fake fingerprint.


Fraudsters everywhere are a determined lot, and when such a process to steal and fake fingerprints can be scaled to millions and billions, it makes ‘business’-sense for fraudsters to invest their time and money in the scam.


To top it all, there are various news reports which say that banking will be solely based on one's fingerprints after the UID comes in full swing. This is indeed what the fraudsters would want.

The UIDAI project is meant to give an identity to all Indians. However, it is not just the security aspects, but also other aspects that don’t seem to have been thought of thoroughly. For instance, the iris scan was not present in the originally proposed plan. But when it was commonly known that fingerprints by themselves may not be enough for de-duplication —and that they can be faked easily — the iris scan was introduced. 


There is no cost benefit analysis or feasibility study of any kind available in the public domain. No full life-cycle pilot study of any size for this project has been done and results studied, before launching such a huge and costly project nation wide. Privacy considerations haven’t been looked into either.

All the claimed benefits of this project are mere speculations; they are not based on a systematic study. For instance, one of the claims is that leakages in government- sponsored schemes such as NREGA and PDS will be reduced. There is no substantiation of this claim. Less than 10% of the leakages are due to double-dipping at the last mile. Most leakages take place at the back-end, with the active connivance of politicians and the powers that be, and UIDAI can do nothing about that.


Interestingly, a recent report by a US research entity — the research was commissioned by the US government itself — bursts the myth of the usefulness of biometrics. It recommends that especially in remote areas where no direct supervision is possible, biometrics by itself should not be used for any authentication. If it must be used, there has to be another factor of authentication. Two-factor authentication is not proposed by UIDAI, and cannot be easily introduced in a country like India where due to lack of literacy, things such as passwords cannot be easily used.


Another big problem with biometrics is that unlike a password or a PIN which banks use, biometric information once lost, is irreplaceable. Once you have lost your biometric identity, you have lost it for good. Passwords or PIN numbers on the other hand, can be easily replaced. In a recently reported incident from Mumbai, it was found that fakesters picked up biometrics of people in order to issue them UIDs. These fakesters now have the biometric data of those people, and now, they are forever excluded from the UIDAI project.


Other issues include the fact that the National Identification Authority of India bill has not been passed by the Parliament. Thus, the legality itself of this project is suspicious. Foreign companies have been given control or access to biometric data of our country’s citizens. There is no concept of a security clearance to bid for projects from UIDAI — a fact which puts our national security itself at risk.

All in all, this project is a white elephant in its current form. The earlier it is stopped or at least seriously relooked at, the better it will be for all of us concerned.


Samir has a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering (1983) from IIT Bombay, an MS from Clemson University, South Carolina (1987) and a PhD from Columbia University, New York (1994). He has worked for several companies including Motorola and Alcatel. Currently, he runs a startup called Teknotrends Software Pvt. Ltd. that does cutting-edge work in the area of network security. He is based in Bangalore. 

1018 - UIDAI chairman leaves simple questions unanswered at lecture for students_Samir Kelekar - Money Life

January 10, 2011 04:04 PM 

Samir Kelekar

Students at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore raised questions on the huge cost of the newly-launched unique identification project, the security of the system and what was being done to prevent its possible misuse, but they got no clear answer

In the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) that I graduated from way back in 1983, dialogue and debate were the essence of true talent. Those who were revered most by the janta (as we used to call the crowd) were not just the toppers and gold medalists of the class-of course they had their special place too-but those who excelled in debating. In all the talks and public functions that we attended at IIT, the speaker would be booed if he shied away from the debate or the questions-and-answers session. It was okay if he gave the wrong answers, but it was important that he stuck on to face the music.

I am told that the IITs have changed a lot now, and the most revered are those who are best at playing computer games and not debates. But let me leave that topic for another day.

Among technical institutes in India and especially in fields such as computer science, IISc was one of the best at the time I graduated. Perhaps, it still is, but I don't know of the latest ratings. Admission to the school of automation programme for MTech at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was much sought after.

Memories of my IIT days came back a couple of days ago, when I attended a lecture by the chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies at IISc in Bangalore. The hall was jam-packed with thick-glassed, nerdy-looking students. The vociferous among them asked several tough questions on the UID project. But, sadly, the answers by Nandan Nilekani, the UIDAI chairman, were more evasive and less direct. Mr Nilekani focused on the role of 'Aadhaar', the 12-digit unique identification number, in the transformation of public services.

One youngster asked whether the Rs1,50,000 crore to be spent on the UID project would be worth it. The UIDAI chairman asked where he had got the number from. When the student mentioned the name of Professor Ramkumar and The Hindu newspaper, the chairman told him not to believe what newspapers write. Sadly, the chairman did not say what the UIDAI's actual budget is.

To another question about whether UID might give excessive information to the states, enabling them to target minorities, the answer was again evasive and academic. The chairman thought that it was up to the state governments to legislate against this possibility. Indeed, when the custodians of the law themselves target minorities (like we have seen in the case of Gujarat), how does the answer square up?

It doesn't require an investigator to see that the fair implementation of the law is the biggest problem in our country. While a Binayak Sen is condemned to jail, we know well how Suresh Kalmadi, at the centre of the Commonwealth Games scandal, and A Raja, who is alleged to have manipulated 2G spectrum allocation that is responsible for the telecom scam, are roaming scot-free. Surely, the UIDAI chairman is not unaware about this.

In answer to another question, the chairman said that even in the US the state has the power to gather data of its citizens, for purposes of national security. Again, what was left unsaid was that in the US, the real ID project, which gathers the biometrics of citizens has been stalled and has been struck down by a number of states.

To a third question about whether there was no better, cheaper way to stop the leakage from government departments, the UIDAI chairman asked the student to come up with a better solution. He did not explain what other options had been considered before arriving at the UID proposal. Surely, there could be a better solution, but it's not an issue that can be resolved on the spur of the moment.

The chairman did not say whether there was a systematic study undertaken on the various options open, their pluses and minuses, before deciding on spending a huge amount from the taxpayers' money on UID. And by the way, it has been conclusively proved that the major leakage of government aid is not due to a lack of proof of identity that UIDAI claims.

The chairman mentioned that 600 million rural people do not have a bank account. But what he did not say was that 1,400 people who have been given bank accounts in Nandurbar district in Maharashtra where the UID project was inaugurated, have zero deposits in their accounts and that they have never operated the bank accounts. Of what use is the bank account if there is no money to deposit in the account? How viable will the economics of such bank accounts be for the banks? Will banks now start charging a commission to account holders?

A couple of weeks ago, at a public function held in Bangalore, an information technology security expert, J T Desouza, demonstrated in full view of the people, how fingerprints could be faked to fool a fingerprint scanner. At the demonstration was none other than Karnataka IT secretary Vidyashankar who works with the UIDAI very closely. He promised to arrange this demonstration before the UIDAI's technical people. Like many other promises by UIDAI, this is also unfulfilled.

At the end of the day, I came out feeling that the young IISc students, on the threshold of a career, required mentoring, rather than an exercise in half-truths. But my biggest take-away from the programme was the sight of a couple of boys and girls from IISc demonstrating silently at the gate of the auditorium. A placard that one of them held, read: 'Happy New Fear'. I am happy to see that a new generation of young students, concerned about their country, is emerging.

(The author has a B Tech from IIT Bombay and a PhD from Columbia University, New York. He runs Teknotrends Software Pvt Ltd, a start-up that does cutting-edge work in the area of network security.)

925 - UID: Some unique life stories of common citizens - Money Life

December 07, 2010 01:01 PM |  
Samir Kelekar

The average Indian has much more serious problems to attend to, like making both ends meet, or how to procure high-priced essentials, or get decent health care, and the hugely expensive UID programme isn’t going to make any difference about this

Thanks to a pliant media (and through the Radia tapes we now know who controls the mainstream media) and the UIDAI's media campaign (tax payers' money spent to brainwash people) one almost begins to feel that lack of identity is a real problem in India. In urban India, however, one need only look at a few examples to bust the myth being propagated by the UID campaign. Here are some examples from lower middle-class Bangalore.

Joy is a car mechanic who has his own mechanic shop. He works deligently, gets a few customers, and does a very good job for a very reasonable price. He is not a dealer or an approved mechanic for any of the big car brands; he doesn't even have an air-conditioned showroom that might attract upmarket customers. He operates in a low-class locality in Bangalore called Viveknagar.

Joy basically lives a hand-to-mouth existence, and to his credit has created a few jobs too. Joy's mother, 75, was ill some time back. She was taken to the government-owned Bowring Hospital. She was diabetic and also suffered from a heart disease. The doctors told her that one of her kidneys was not functioning and that the heart was functioning only about 10%, and that was only a matter of time before she would leave for her heavenly abode. They asked that she be taken back home.

No tests like echocardiogram, or a treadmill test, let alone an angiogram. It puzzles me how the doctors came to the conclusion simply on the basis of an ECG. I won't be surprised if they looked at Joy's ability, or rather inability, to pay for the sophisticated tests and surgical procedures and concluded that Joy and his mother were not worth wasting time on. Joy had a resigned look on his face-he told me it is all a matter of fate. A few weeks after his mother was brought home, she passed away.

Harry is a painter who works for a big paint manufacturing company in Bangalore. He earns Rs10,000 a month. Harry is a Bangalorean, owns a small house in the HAL locality. He has rented out a part of his house, and that gets him an income of Rs2,000 a month.

Harry's problem is that two years ago, his son who was about 12 years old had an accident. His leg was damaged; the bones near his thighs were damaged. The hospital screwed up or some such thing happened, and his son will forever be on crutches. Harry spent Rs2 lakh on medical treatment. Not knowing the intricacies of the medical condition, or how the hospitals and doctors operate, Harry sees no solution for his son's health condition. All Harry does is plead with me, "Pray for my son".

I could describe a hundred stories like these, deaths that should not have happened, or of permanent disabilities due to a lack of knowledge of patients, about private health-care costs that are very high, and dismal health care in public hospitals.

Among the several people in the low-class localities of Bangalore that I know, the story is more or less the same. Many die by the time they are 50, bad food habits, drinking and ignorance of modern health care leading to heart attack in most cases. When the sole bread-earner dies, the cycle repeats. Children don't have the money to study and take up a higher professional degree, as a result of which their earning capacity is dismal. The loop will continue to the next generation. This to me is urban lower middle-class India's story.

Unless I am drastically wrong somewhere, I believe what urban India needs is cheap government subsidised education, affordable health care, and good education that can give people higher-paying jobs. For instance, today the IT sector has high-paying jobs but not enough talented and skilled people. There are too many low-skilled or unskilled people around, and most job vacancies require higher skills. Thus, there is a mismatch.

I cannot understand how UID (unique identity number), or deploying a sophisticated biometric scanner is going to help these people. Sure, they will enroll in the UID programme; for that matter, show them any carrot and they will enroll in anything. They are too naive to see through the complex, sophisticated business models of the fat-cat corporates.

Portable identity is touted as a feature of this UID programme. Eliminating fake ration cards is touted as another feature. In a recent talk by the IT secretary of Karnataka on a panel discussion on UID, he mentioned how computerisation of traffic records and subsequent linking of records had helped increase revenues from traffic fines in the state. This may be true, but how high a priority should this be? 

Even with a few fake ration cards, a poor family could make say Rs5,000 a month more by pilfering grains and kerosene. Compare this with the hundreds of thousands of crores taken away by sophisticated scamsters in the Commonwealth Games, the Adarsh army building case and the 2G spectrum allocation matter. Who should the government be going after? Big crooks or petty thieves?

Coming to catching traffic violators, it is interesting that most traffic cops prefer to catch two-wheeler riders over those going around in say luxury cars. The concept of a hierarchical society is ingrained in our psyche so much, more so in the psyche of even our cops. That all citizens should be equal before the law is hardly practiced in our country.

Coming back to the UID programme, why spend Rs50,000 crore of tax payers' money to catch a petty thief? And to whom are we going to give the contracts for biometric scanners and such other contracts to? 

It would have helped if the contracts for biometric scanners were given to Indian companies who could have done research on biometrics, manufactured the scanners in India and as a result would have created good technology and good jobs in India. Indeed, India could have become leaders in biometric research and manufacturing, and these companies could have then tried to get into foreign markets. 

However, these contracts have been given to the likes of Microsoft and L-1 identity solutions. L-1 has had or continues to have a number of former US government intelligence personnel as its top executives or employees.

Indeed, it takes a few conversations with a man on the street, and not moving about the malls alone, to see the state of the nation and the aam aadmi's problems.

Even the so-called conveniences attributed to come from UID-instant mobile connection for instance-would be useful really for the upmarket crowd who are busy making money and cannot afford to make even two visits to a mobile providers' office, or do not have the time to arrange for address proof and identity proof documents. 

The aam aadmi on the other hand has time at his disposal; he wouldn't give much importance to this convenience. But he has much more serious problems to deal with-like how to make both ends meet; how to deal with the huge price rise of essential commodities; how to get health care; problems that are much more serious than helping you shop for the right item at the click of a mouse.

(The author has a BTech from IIT Mumbai, and a PhD from Columbia University, New York. He runs a start-up, Teknotrends Software Pvt Ltd, that does cutting-edge work in the area of network security.)

864 - UID - Another big scam -Watch out for CIA & FBI Agents Involvement - Sangh Parivar

Submitted by rashtrapremi on Fri, 11/19/2010 - 12:45. Political Discussion
Is the UID system a potential threat to national security and sovereignty?
November 18, 2010 05:42 PM |
Samir Kelekar

A recent deal for the purchase of biometric scanners from a US-based company, which has worked closely with American intelligence agencies, raises serious questions on the security of data in the Aadhaar project
Could the Aadhaar project, touted as a critical requirement for development, turn into a threat to the country's national security and sovereignty?

It was recently reported that L-1 Identity Solutions, a US-based company which is now being bought by a French company, has been given a $25 million order for biometric scanners. This was among the deals announced by the White House during the visit of president Barak Obama to India a fortnight ago. In fact, president Obama, for the same reason, also blessed the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) with a visit to the innovation forum event in Mumbai where he even had a chat with UIDAI's tech head.

In the case of any other commercial deal this would not have raised eyebrows. But it is the background of L-1 Identity Solutions that raises questions. L-1 has close ties with US intelligence agencies. Read what a report says about L-1: "I will start by mentioning that Louis Freeh (former director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation), Admiral Loy (former head of the Transportation Security Agency), George Tenet (former director of the Central Intelligence Agency), Frank Moss (former program manager for the State Department's E-Passport program), and many others who previously held key positions in the federal government, all joined Viisage/L-1 as members of the Board of Directors or as paid employees of Viisage/L-1. It must be really sweet to sign off on contracts worth millions of dollars, tens of millions or more in fact, and then turn right around and go on the payroll of the same company that you awarded the contracts to. Sure, Tenet, Freeh and the others may not have had to sign the actual contracts but certainly they are responsible for knowing who the contracts went to when they were in charge of their respective agencies and departments.

"L-1 dominates the state driver's license business. L-1 also produces all passport cards, involved in the production of all passports, provides identification documents for the Department of Defense and has contracts with nearly every intelligence agency in our government. To a large extent it is fair to say that your personal information is L-1's information. L-1 is the same company that thinks our political party affiliation should be on our driver's license along with our race. L-1 has a long history starting with its taking over Viisage Technology. It was a great sleight of hand, Viisage morphing into L-1 while Viisage was under investigation by our government," the report said. Tenet, the former CIA director who was later on the board of L-1, was accused of passing on false information concerning Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) capabilities which led to the Iraq war. In the new world of surveillance that is emerging, L-1 is turning out to be very powerful, a multi-national giant which can potentially have control over countries. How, some skeptics might ask. Is this one more bogey by the activist lobby? Recently, L-1 has bagged orders from France as well as China.

UIDAI has been professing open standards. But the contract to L-1 is a slap in the face of its professed policy. By now, it is clear that UIDAI does not keep the promises it makes, so this does won't surprise anyone.In the absence of a thorough audit of source code-the only way in which one can be sure-a backdoor can be easily inserted in any of the biometric scanners. This backdoor can not only transfer biometrics data to the vendor's database and to UIDAI's database, but it can also shut down the scanner at will. So, if the UIDAI project goes through and the biometric scanners and UIDAI's infrastructure becomes ubiquitous to the point that every financial transaction in the country requires a biometric scanner, it doesn't require a scientist to tell us that this is equivalent to handling the nation's economy in the hands of foreign companies. The danger posed to the nation's economy is no less than that from foreign companies controlling our telecom infrastructure.

In the case of telecom, after a lot of noise, some action is being taken. It is another matter whether the action taken is good enough or not. But no amount of charisma on the part of the UIDAI chairman can fix this problem which could affect the sovereignty of the nation. The only way out is to ask all vendors of biometric equipment to open their source code and subject it to thorough audit by experts. That is how countries such as China would handle similar situations. Recently, China asked Microsoft to reveal its source code and Microsoft complied. The US too secures its own nationalistic interests properly. Sometime back the US stopped the sale of Tipping Point, a US security company, to a Chinese firm on the grounds of securing national interests.

Further, there could well be a vendor lock-in. L-1 has been on a buying spree, taking over smaller biometric companies. It is quite possible that it buys off other biometric vendors of UIDAI, resulting in a virtual monopoly, which could lead it to hike the prices for upgrades. What checks and balances has UIDAI got to ensure that this does not happen? More important, will the checks and balances, if any, stay or will they be dropped as time passes, for UIDAI's statements cannot be trusted as evidenced from its past actions. Coming to the Unique Identification Number (UID), there has been misinformation by UIDAI that the social security number (SSN) of the US is equivalent to the UID in India. This is not the truth. The SSN does not have your biometrics, it is just a number.

The US is trying to introduce something called the Real ID, which has biometrics, and this is being stiffly resisted by Americans. As of 2008, over 20 legislatures in the US had passed resolutions (or legislation) opposing the implementation of the Real ID Act. Eleven of those legislatures had gone further, by passing laws specifically prohibiting compliance with Real ID. What is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander. Will the Indian authorities wake up and investigate this critical aspect before it is too late?

(The author has a B Tech from IIT Bombay, and a PhD from Columbia University, New York. He currently runs a start-up, Teknotrends Software Pvt Ltd that does cutting-edge work in the area of network security).

853 - Is the UID system a potential threat to national security and sovereignty? - Money Life

November 18, 2010 05:42 PM | 
Samir Kelekar
 

A recent deal for the purchase of biometric scanners from a US-based company, which has worked closely with American intelligence agencies, raises serious questions on the security of data in the Aadhaar project

Could the Aadhaar project, touted as a critical requirement for development, turn into a threat to the country's national security and sovereignty?

It was recently reported that L-1 Identity Solutions, a US-based company which is now being bought by a French company, has been given a $25 million order for biometric scanners. This was among the deals announced by the White House during the visit of president Barak Obama to India a fortnight ago. In fact, president Obama, for the same reason, also blessed the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) with a visit to the innovation forum event in Mumbai where he even had a chat with UIDAI's tech head.

In the case of any other commercial deal this would not have raised eyebrows. But it is the background of L-1 Identity Solutions that raises questions. L-1 has close ties with US intelligence agencies. Read what a report says about L-1: "I will start by mentioning that Louis Freeh (former director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation), Admiral Loy (former head of the Transportation Security Agency), George Tenet (former director of the Central Intelligence Agency), Frank Moss (former program manager for the State Department's E-Passport program), and many others who previously held key positions in the federal government, all
joined Viisage/L-1 as members of the Board of Directors or as paid employees of Viisage/L-1. It must be really sweet to sign off on contracts worth millions of dollars, tens of millions or more in fact, and then turn right around and go on the payroll of the same company that you awarded the contracts to. Sure, Tenet, Freeh and the others may not have had to sign the actual contracts but certainly they are responsible for knowing who the contracts went to when they were in charge of their respective agencies and departments.

"L-1 dominates the state driver's license business. L-1 also produces all passport cards, involved in the production of all passports, provides identification documents for the Department of Defense and has contracts with nearly every intelligence agency in our government. To a large extent it is fair to say that your personal information is L-1's information. L-1 is the same company that thinks our political party affiliation should be on our driver's license along with our race. L-1 has a long history starting with its taking over Viisage Technology. It was a great sleight of hand, Viisage morphing into L-1 while Viisage was under investigation by our government," the report said.

Tenet, the former CIA director who was later on the board of L-1, was accused of passing on false information concerning Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) capabilities which led to the Iraq war. In the new world of surveillance that is emerging, L-1 is turning out to be very powerful, a multi-national giant which can potentially have control over countries. How, some skeptics might ask. Is this one more bogey by the activist lobby? Recently, L-1 has bagged orders from France as well as China.

UIDAI has been professing open standards. But the contract to L-1 is a slap in the face of its professed policy. By now, it is clear that UIDAI does not keep the promises it makes, so this does won't surprise anyone.

In the absence of a thorough audit of source code-the only way in which one can be sure-a backdoor can be easily inserted in any of the biometric scanners. This backdoor can not only transfer biometrics data to the vendor's database and to UIDAI's database, but it can also shut down the scanner at will. So, if the UIDAI project goes through and the biometric scanners and UIDAI's infrastructure becomes ubiquitous to the point that every financial transaction in the country requires a biometric scanner, it doesn't require a scientist to tell us that this is equivalent to handling the nation's economy in the hands of foreign companies. The danger posed to the nation's economy is no less than that from foreign companies controlling our telecom infrastructure.

In the case of telecom, after a lot of noise, some action is being taken. It is another matter whether the action taken is good enough or not. But no amount of charisma on the part of the UIDAI chairman can fix this problem which could affect the sovereignty of the nation.

The only way out is to ask all vendors of biometric equipment to open their source code and subject it to thorough audit by experts. That is how countries such as China would handle similar situations. Recently, China asked Microsoft to reveal its source code and Microsoft complied. The US too secures its own nationalistic interests properly. Sometime back the US stopped the sale of Tipping Point, a US security company, to a Chinese firm on the grounds of securing national interests.

Further, there could well be a vendor lock-in. L-1 has been on a buying spree, taking over smaller biometric companies. It is quite possible that it buys off other biometric vendors of UIDAI, resulting in a virtual monopoly, which could lead it to hike the prices for upgrades. What checks and balances has UIDAI got to ensure that this does not happen? More important, will the checks and balances, if any, stay or will they be dropped as time passes, for UIDAI's statements cannot be trusted as evidenced from its past actions.

Coming to the Unique Identification Number (UID), there has been misinformation by UIDAI that the social security number (SSN) of the US is equivalent to the UID in India. This is not the truth. The SSN does not have your biometrics, it is just a number.

The US is trying to introduce something called the Real ID, which has biometrics, and this is being stiffly resisted by Americans. As of 2008, over 20 legislatures in the US had passed resolutions (or legislation) opposing the implementation of the Real ID Act. Eleven of those legislatures had gone further, by passing laws specifically prohibiting compliance with Real ID. What is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander. Will the Indian authorities wake up and investigate this critical aspect before it is too late?

(The author has a B Tech from IIT Bombay, and a PhD from Columbia University, New York. He currently runs a start-up, Teknotrends Software Pvt Ltd that does cutting-edge work in the area of network security).

769 - Letters to the Editor - Mumbai Mirror

UID comes from Kargil
UIDAI says that UID is not a fallout of 26/11. True indeed! It originates from the Kargil War.  The Kargil war committee of Subramanyam recommended the issuing of ID cards to people in border areas to prevent such infiltration and extend it to the whole country to combat terrorism. This is ridiculous, since militants do not come with ID cards, but with AK-47s, and possession of ID cards or citizenship does not prevent one from becoming a terrorist.
— Mathew Thomas
 

Misinformation on UID
The UIDAI chairman, Nandan Nilekani, has misinformed people about the UID in the interview (Mumbai Mirror, Oct 10).One of the points was: Discussions with civil society organizations. It is unfortunate that UIDAI does not know the meaning of discussions. An invited-only meeting was called by UIDAI on May 6. There were so many issues that came up, that probably because of that, UIDAI just gave up on further civil society meetings.
— Dr Samir Kelekar
 

UID, a good project
With reference to your interview with the chairman of UID, Nandan Nilekeni, I wish to highlight a few points on the subject of human rights and privacy etc,.
1. Mobile numbers (private operators mostly) are available at a throw away price.
2. The details of all private clubs, hotel memberships are also available at a premium price.
 

The privacy question should also apply to the Social Security Number of USA. Kindly understand, UID is identifying you as a citizen of the country, where are you registered etc.
— Srikant S

738 -ID program (Aadhar) a draconian project - Samir Kelekar - Goa Herald

ID program (Aadhar) a draconian project
 

UIDAI project may infringe on civil liberty says SAMIR KELEKAR
 

When Nandan Nilekani a technocrat was appointed the chairman of UIDAI by PM Manmohan Singh, I had applauded the decision. The reasons were many, but mainly, given Nilekani’s background as an entrepreneur with high ethics with respect to Infosys, it was expected that he would bring the same standards to this government project. Fourteen months later, the hope of many on this front has not just been shattered, as the monster that is Aadhar (UID) unleashes on a hapless population, now there is a national campaign to stop this project.
   

For starters, this project has flouted all norms of accountability and transparency. The appointment of Nilekani is now widely called undemocratic. The legality of the project is called into question since it was launched by the Prime Minister and it does not have legal sanction as yet. The lack of transparency has been pointed out after only lip-service was paid to discussions with civil society organizations and all calls for transparency have gone unheeded.
   

There is a lot that has gone wrong and continues to go wrong with this project. Even the intent of this project is suspect. Jean Dreze, noted development economist, member of the prestigious National Advisory Council (NAC) of India chaired by Congress President Sonia Gandhi, and the one who conceived of NREGA the scheme that assures 100 days of labour in a year to the rural poor, has called the UID project a national security project camouflaged as a social welfare initiative.
   

Others who are opposing the project include noted Magasasay winner and social activist Aruna Roy also part of NAC, Former Justice of the  Supreme Court Krishna Iyer and a huge number of civil society organizations. Even Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has warned about this project.
   

The fact that UIDAI cannot solve anything other than minor problems with PDS (public distribution system) and NREGA is now backed by data. Both the schemes are plagued by corruption and most of this corruption does not take place at what is called “the last mile” which the UID project tries to fix. At best, the number of fake ration cards in PDS is pegged to around 8 to 10 percent in most instances.
   

In PDS, most of the corruption takes place at the higher end; grains are siphoned off before they reach the fair price shops. The UIDAI makes us think that ration card holders go to the ration shop and use more than one card and pilfer ration. This is not true by and large. Thus, checking the identity of the ration card holders will not solve the pilferage problem.
   

Similarly, in NREGA, the problem is not of identity. The village supervisors take bribes to mark the attendance of workers and only then the workers get paid. UID cannot solve this problem.
   

There are also serious issues raised about the PR campaign mounted by UIDAI which mainly harps on financial inclusion. Even this is proved wrong.  About 83 percent of NREGA payments already take place via bank accounts. 

Also, there are fears that an ID card can lead to exclusion rather than inclusion and even ethnic cleansing. Now, as never before, it would be possible to list the names, addresses and possibly religion (with some more intelligence thrown in the system) of people at the click of a mouse. It wouldn’t take much for an average Indian to imagine the consequences.
   

UIDAI’s promise of a privacy law has been only lip-service till now. There is a clamour in a lot of quarters that the UIDAI program be halted till relevant laws are put in place, but that hasn’t gotten any response from UIDAI. And the project is going on at breakneck speed.
 

   Quite surprising though it is, coming from an organization headed by a former corporate boss, there is neither a project report, nor feasibility or impact assessment study nor a cost-benefit analysis for the UIDAI project.
 

   Thousands of crores of tax payers’ money are being spent without all this. And a recent report from the US National Research Council that has done a multi-year study on biometrics says that biometrics is not reliable as an authentication method and has to be used with some other method for good results. It is not yet known what effect the results of this report would have on the UID project.
 

   The biggest fear due to this project is the threat to civil liberties, democracy and freedom itself. Given that it is well known that fingerprints lying in various places can be captured, and now that the State would have fingerprints of its citizens/residents in a database, an authoritarian ruler can play havoc nailing people at will with false evidence. As yet, there is no law preventing this, only statements from UIDAI saying “we are looking into it”.
 

   Quite interestingly, the monster unleashed by UIDAI could even go out of its own control. It is also worth noting that UK has shelved a similar National ID project. The statements made while getting rid of the project reveal a lot.
 

   UK’s Home Secretary Theresa May said “The national identity card scheme represents the worst of Government. It is intrusive and bullying, ineffective and expensive. It is an assault on individual liberty that does not promise a great good.”
 

   Finally, Mahatma Gandhi’s first satyagraha in South Africa was against identity cards that segregated Indians from others. This identity card had the finger prints of all ten figures and the law was passed in 1906. Gandhi called it the Black Act. A century later, Gandhi’s own party the Congress is reintroducing a similar law in India.
   

The UIDAI project needs to be severely opposed. I urge Goans not to give their fingerprints and iris scans and oppose this draconian project with all their might.