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

Saturday, September 16, 2017

12051 - How secure is Aadhaar? Gang arrested in Uttar Pradesh cloned its enrolment software - Scroll.In


The Aadhaar authority, however, continues to maintain that the gang’s operation did not affect its database and processing system.

Published Sep 14, 2017 · 12:30 pm

Reuters
The Unique Identity Development Authority of India has always insisted that its database, which holds the biometrics of around 1.17 billion Indian residents, has never been breached.
However, a different vulnerability for India’s controversial unique identity project, also known as Aadhaar, was revealed last week when the police busted a racket in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, whose operators had cloned the Aadhaar client application. According to the police, the gang sold this replica to people, which potentially allowed them to run unauthorised enrolment centres where illegitimate Aadhaar numbers could be generated. Aadhaar is the 12-digit biometrically linked unique identification number that the government wants every Indian resident to have
The gang may have been caught after a complaint by the Unique Identity Development Authority of India – with 10 people arrested – but cyber security experts say the incident should bring the focus back on the state of security of the entire Aadhaar ecosystem, which has been plagued with leaks.
The Aadhaar authority, however, continues to maintain that the gang’s operation did not affect its database and processing system.
Responding to the arrests, the Unique Identity Development Authority of India said in a statement on Tuesday that it had noticed an unusually high number of logins into the client application by a few authorised operators, after which it filed a complaint with the police on August 16. It said: “The attempt to generate fake Aadhaar cards was foiled by the robust UIDAI system and the arrested gang could not succeed in its nefarious and illegal designs.”
The police is yet to ascertain the gang’s scale of operations. For this, it will need to establish how many people the gang sold the replica application to. The police would also have to facilitate an enrolment audit, a task in which the Unique Identity Development Authority of India will have to determine which Aadhaar numbers were generated by unauthorised persons using the cloned app.
Elaborate operation
The Aadhaar client application is only provided to authorised enrolment centres. Its operators are required to log in through a biometric system in which their fingerprints are scanned to check if they are authorised.
The members of the gang allegedly made copies of the login details of registered operators, including their fingerprints, and gained unauthorised access to the application, the police said. The fingerprints were replicated with the help of butter paper, and treated with chemicals and ultraviolet rays at different temperatures to create a mould using gelatin gel and latex, it said.
A few months ago, the Aadhaar authority added another layer of security to the login process for enrolment operators, making iris recognition mandatory for them to access the client application, the police said.
“But by then it was too late,” said Triveni Singh, additional superintendent of police with the Uttar Pradesh police’s Special Task Force. “The gang had already created a replica of the client application in which they had bypassed both the fingerprint and iris recognition requirements, and had started selling copies of the replica for Rs 5,000 each to individuals.”
Individuals who purchased the cloned application could log into the system using the basic login details of registered enrolment operators, which the gang members shared with them. Because the application had been altered, the biometric requirements were no longer mandatory, the police said.
“We are yet to track down the individuals to whom the cloned client application was sold,” said Singh. “Only then we will be able to ascertain details of the illegitimate Aadhaar enrolments they had carried out,” he added.

(Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Cyber security of the Aadhaar ecosystem
According to cyber security expert Pavan Duggal, the cloning racket is a wake-up call for the Unique Identity Development Authority of India. “It has exposed the inadequacy of the Aadhaar framework in terms of cyber security,” he said. “Fishing out unauthorised Aadhaar cards, if any, from the system will be a massive challenge. The incident definitely raises concerns about the cyber security of the Aadhaar ecosystem, which the Aadhaar Act is silent about.”
He said that when the Aadhaar Act was enacted in 2016 the government’s plans to link Aadhaar with bank accounts, permanent account numbers, mobile phone numbers and so on, were not in place. Now Aadhaar has become part of an ecosystem in cyber space and it remains unprotected, he said. “The law has to be amended to take care of that,” he added.
Leaked source code
But how was it possible to make a clone of the client application so easily?
“The gang members had access to the source code of the original Aadhaar client application,” Triveni Singh said. “They tampered with it slightly just to bypass the biometric requirements for the login. It looks like they were helped by someone who is an expert in software development. We also suspect the involvement of an UIDAI [Unique Identity Development Authority of India] insider.”
The source code is a set of computer instructions to build an application, written in a readable programming language.
According to cyber security expert Kislay Chaudhary, who works as a consultant with several government agencies, tampering with the source code of a website or application and creating a duplicate with little modifications is easy.
“The strength of any source code depends on the expertise of the software developers and web developers hired by an agency to design an application or website,” he said. “Many government agencies have websites that are literally copy-paste models, with their source codes almost entirely borrowed from others. They can be easily replicated.”
He added that the Kanpur cloning has clearly exposed the vulnerability of Aadhaar as far as cyber security is concerned, and that it was high time the Unique Identity Development Authority of India came out of its state of denial.
UIDAI’s statement
In its statement, besides claiming that its inbuilt safeguards were responsible for foiling the racket, the Unique Identification Authority of India drew attention to its efforts to put an end to malpractices. It said it conducts regular field investigations, and based on these investigations, operators and supervisors found involved in malpractices are blacklisted for up to five years, and even fined. It added that in the past nine months it has blacklisted around 49,000 operators for corrupt practices and fined 6,566 operators for overcharging to issue Aadhaar numbers.

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