Papers Please: India Worships Biometric Enumeration Too

[grarpamp]

http://mashable.com/2017/02/14/india-aadhaar-uidai-privacy-security-debate/

In a bid to get more Indians to have a birth certificate or any sort
of ID card, India announced Aadhaar project in 2009. At the time,
there were more Indians without these ID cards than those with. As a
result of this, much of the government funding for the citizens were
disappearing before they could see them. But according to several
security experts, lawyers, politicians and journalists, the government
is using poor security practices, and this is exposing the biometrics
data -- photo, name, address, fingerprint, iris info -- of people at
risk. More than 1.1 billion people -- and 99 percent of all adults --
in India have enrolled themselves to the system. From a report: "There
are two fundamental flaws in Aadhaar: it is poorly designed, and it is
being poorly verified," Member of Parliament and privacy advocate,
Rajeev Chandrasekhar told Mashable India. Another issue with Aadhaar
is, Chandrasekhar explains, there is no firm legislation to safeguard
the privacy and rights of the billion people who have enrolled into
the system. There's little a person whose Aadhaar data has been
compromised could do. [...] "Aadhaar is remote, covert, and
non-consensual," he told Mashable India, adding the existence of a
central database of any kind, but especially in the context of the
Aadhaar, and at the scale it is working is appalling. Abraham said
fingerprint and iris data of a person can be stolen with little effort
-- a "gummy bear" which sells for a few cents, can store one's
fingerprint, while a high-resolution camera can capture one's iris
data. The report goes on to say that the Indian government is also not
telling how the data is being shared with private companies. Experts
cited in the story have expressed concerns that those companies (some
of which are run by people who were previously members of the team
which designed the framework of Aadhaar) can store and create a
parallel database of their own. On top of that, the government is
making Aadhaar mandatory for availing several things including
registration for nation-wide examinations, but in the beginning it
promised Aadhaar will be used only to help poor get grocery at
subsidized prices.


Ever notice how such things are spun as, never about not doing
them in the first place, but about how to do it "right" to "fix" them...
thereby enabling maximum possible tracking, control and oppression.
Those who do not design out the means of oppression, will not be free.