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

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

12024 - Lost identity - Hindu Businessline


VENKY VEMBU

Of Aadhaar as an instrument of exclusion
September 10, 2017:  

The Aesop’s fable about the mountain that went into labour only to give birth to a mouse serves as an apt metaphor for most reform processes in India. Much is promised at the outset, to the accompaniment of thunderous auditory effects suggestive of enormous exertions, but the final outcome invariably falls well short of promises.

The experience of Aadhaar, the mechanism to give 1.3 billion Indians a biometric identity, has, however, been vastly different. That’s not surprising, considering that the first chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI, the nodal agency tasked with implementing the project), was Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of a software company that has over the years made a virtue of under-promising and over-delivering. In the case of Aadhaar, however, this ‘over-delivery’ may have come at a price.

Shankkar Aiyar’s book opens by offering a peep into the bureaucratic backrooms in the days and months that led up to the birth of Aadhaar in 2009. Nilekani had been invited by the UPA-II government of Manmohan Singh to oversee the ambitious Aadhaar enterprise, and in particular to harness the transformative power of technology for public good. It was one of the rare instances of private-public partnerships when an eminently successful corporate executive was giving up (for the moment, at least) his seat in the boardroom to indulge his “messiah complex”.

When it was conceived, Aadhaar, the 12-digit unique identification number, was intended as a simple instrument of financial inclusion, directed primarily at the socially and economically disadvantaged communities, the better to target subsidies at them. Yet, for all its noble intention, the Aadhaar project was buffeted by political and bureaucratic headwinds. In a country where politicians have profited from playing identity politics, reckons Aiyar, a validator of identities — which is what Aadhaar claimed to be — became the object of intense suspicion and political-bureaucratic turf battles. It needed all of Nilekani’s personal goodwill, and the political cover that then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee provided, to overcome the odds.
From its simple origin, however, Aadhaar has morphed in many directions, with successive governments seeing it as a ‘silver bullet’ to address everything that afflicts governance, from inadequate financial inclusion to failure of last-mile delivery of welfare services to poor tax compliance to black money — and even to terrorism.

The recent report that Aadhaar details would be required even to procure a death certificate triggered widespread indignation only because it epitomised the cradle-to-grave overreach of an establishment that has discovered a new toy, and is obsessively delighting in it, unmindful of concerns about privacy and data security. Somewhere along the way, Aadhaar appears to have gone from being a facilitator of inclusion to an instrument of exclusion; where once it inspired hope, it today summons up fears of a surveillance state.

Aiyar provides a fascinating back-story to the Aadhaar project, and although some ground has already shifted since its publication (with the recent SC ruling on privacy as a fundamental right), the author points the way forward by addressing some of the concerns that the enterprise must address at an institutional level for it to regain the goodwill.