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, March 17, 2018

12982 - Aadhaar Articles Dated 16th March 2018



Economic Times
A senior executive of a VC firm, which has multiple investments in the fintech space, said: “Companies can do the Aadhaar-based KYC at less than may be Rs 25, but in the past if paper-based KYC had to be done it would cost as much as Rs 500.” Then there is also security risk. If paper documents are ...






TechRadar
The french security research, Baptiste Robert (alias Elliot Alderson on Twitter), brought India's data security issues into the limelight again. This time he hacked into the Aadhaar app, bypassing the programs password protection protocol within a minute. The Internet has been in an uproar about how ...






The Paypers (press release) (blog)
Currently, more than 1.1 billion Indian citizens and residents have Aadhaar IDs, making this the largest exercise of this kind the world has ever seen. There are many potential benefits of such a scheme, but there are also concerns and pitfalls. Besides the advantages, this article also focuses on some of ...




Inc42 Media
Inspired by the popular award-winning cybersecurity-based American TV series Mr. Robot's protagonist Elliot Alderson's quote “A bug is never just a mistake. It represents something bigger. An error of thinking that makes you who you are,” an anonymous hacker has now rebuked the Aadhaar security of ...





Livemint
New Delhi: Following the Supreme Court's interim order indefinitely extending the deadline for linking Aadhaar to various services, the chief executive officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Ajay Bhushan Pandey attempts to clear the confusion on mandatory use of Aadhaar.





Firstpost
On Day 18 of the Aadhaar hearings, senior counsels KV Vishwanath, Arvind Grover and Meenakshi Arora presented their arguments on behalf of the petitioners. The issues raised included that the entire Aadhaar project is beyond the Act's objectives, the excessive data collection under KYR+ and State ...






Business Today
Aadhaar procrastinators around the country could not stop gloating yesterday, after the Supreme Court indefinitely extended the March 31 deadline for mandatory linking of the UID number to various services and facilities, barring subsidies and benefits. But then, in a late evening tweet, the Unique ...





Live Law
On Day 18 of the Aadhaar final hearing, Senior Counsel KV Viswanathan resumed his submissions on the point that the government has been unable to satisfactorily prove how Aadhaar-Based Biometric Authentication (ABBA) has contributed towards savings and the plugging of leakages in social ...






The Hindu
The attempt to regulate the quantum of rice drawn by beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System (PDS) has not met with much success. Neither Aadhaar seeding of ration cards nor the introduction of 'smart cards', which were supposed to remedy this situation, helped. In February 2017, the quantity of ...






NewsClick
Several families have been denied a ration card — primarily because of lacking Aadhaar — despite meeting the criteria for inclusion in the Public Distribution System under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013. Debashish, a sarpanch from Koraput in Odisha, said that out of the 1,393 households ...




NDTV
Yavatmal, Maharashtra: A group of youth found hundreds of Aadhaar cards dumped in a well in the district while they were cleaning it, an official said ... On opening the bags, to their surprise, they found hundreds of original Aadhaar cards, mostly of the residents of Lohara village, located on the city's ...





Firstpost
On Day 17 of the Aadhaar hearing on 14 March, senior counsel KV Vishwanath continued his arguments for the petitioners. The validity of Section 59 as a validating provision of the Aadhaar Act, the de facto mandatory nature of Aadhaar, and the arbitrary and disproportionate collection and storage of ...






The Tribune
When asked, the operator said since he did not have a facility to print Aadhaar cards at his counter, he had to save all files on his laptop. “We take the biometrics of people, create pdf files of their Aadhaar cards and save these in our laptops. As we do not have the facility of a printer, we print it later at a ...






Gadgets Now
No IT systems across the world can claim to be safe, including Aadhaar, due to rise in complexity of cyber attacks, Indian arm of London Stock ... When asked his view on Aadhaar, which claims to be completely safe and secure, he said "in terms of vulnerabilities, no one can claim that his system is 100 ...






Live Law
On Day 17 of the Aadhaar hearing, senior counsel KV Viswanathan continued his submissions on behalf of the petitioners in context of Section 59 of the Aadhaar Act of 2016, which lays down that all actions taken or anything done prior to the coming into force of the Act shall be deemed to have been ...






Business Standard
The Committee also discussed the issues about expediting the process of the issuance of Aadhaar card and asked the concerned officials that maximum efforts be made for the age group of 0-5 age where only 8 per cent children are covered so far, the spokesperson said. Legislators Vibodh Gupta ...






Moneycontrol.com
The Supreme Court order to indefinitely extend the deadline for linking Aadhaar to bank accounts and phone number has become a setback for mobile wallet companies, according to a report by The Economic Times. Customers might be wary of sharing KYC details with mobile wallet companies such ...






MediaNama.com
Aadhaar card data continues to be available publicly on the internet, as can be seen from a simple google search for “mera aadhar meri phechan filetype:pdf”. Not only are printable Aadhaar cards available publicly, many results are found on government and private domains that have no business ...






MediaNama.com
Mr. Vishwanathan submitted that the presumption of criminality inherent in the collection of identity information that is the premise of the Aadhaar system is ... He said that in case of Aadhaar, biometric data of individuals is collected by enrollment agencies who are private entities. said that there is no ...