Slashdot Mirror
India To Put All Citizen Info In a Central Database
Oracle Goddess writes "As part of a project to issue ID cards for all 1.1 billion of its citizens, India has announced plans to place information on every single citizen in what will be the world's second largest citizens' database. The government believes the scheme will aid the delivery of vital social services to the poorest people who often lack sufficient identification papers. It also sees the scheme as a way to tackle increasing amounts of identity fraud and theft, and, at a time of increased concern over the threat of militant violence, to boost national security and help police and law officials. 'This could be used as a security measure by the government which leaves migrant workers, refugees and other stateless people in India in limbo, without access to public services, employment and basic welfare,' said Charu Lata Hogg, an associate fellow of the Asia program at Chatham House."
When I read "Your Rights Online: India To Put All Citizen Info In a Central Database" I was horrified, But then I read further and realized that, while bad, it wasn't nearly as bad as the headline makes it sound.
Turns out they're only planning on putting some data about the citizens in the database. But it looks like people will still be allowed to keep their own grocery lists and address books etc. and manage them however they wish.
For now at least.
--MarkusQ
If you think REALID is dead it will live again as healthpass or some other nicely named system, but bet univeral healthcare will be the excuse used.
Hey dammit, we had the idea of reducing everyone to a number long before you did, and we're the only ones that should have to suffer with that kind of stupidity. You can steal our jobs, but don't steal our retarded government ideas -- as a patriot, I simply must draw the line there!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Sort of like the IRS? They have how much money you make, where you live, what you own, who you're married to, and who are your kids.
India currently has no real way of identifying a person uniquely - other than a passport. Most formal government identification systems are uncontrolled and easily available in exchange for money. So we dont really have a credit system, no social security number etc. One recent change was PAN cards - a tax identification number.
So this could will help a lot in uniquely identifying a person - especially in a country where there are 28 languages, and where migration of labor has started increasing substantially.
This is also being led by Nandan Nilekini of Infosys fame.
[An estimated 100M id cards will be rolled out in 3 years]
I think it's not terrible that a government have a working list of its citizens, especially if they put vital medical and other data on it. This can save lives and can get us more accurate reporting about how important it is to, say, find a cure for AIDS over a cure for cancer.
Having an easy way to contact or locate any citizen is also important.
We're so accustomed in the West to distrust of government that we've lost sight of the basic truth: it matters who you get into government, and how willing they are to fight back corruption (entropy). We can't regulate government into sanity. But we can pick sane people, although mass media democracy isn't so good at that.
Instead of fighting back at any recordkeeping, we might consider the following:
People like to have something tangible and external to blame. It wasn't my fault; God did it. It wasn't my fault; The 1984 Government did it. Leftists claim government is capitalist and dominated by white men; Rightists claim government is socialist and against white men. It seems every group is projecting its fears outside of itself in order to claim innocence.
Futurist Traditionalism
Issuing ID cards is an old tactic dating from the colonial period to suppress national security - as in, regular serial bomb attacks. Both the British and new local governments used it, either to suppress independence movements, or to suppress communist/breakaway movements post-independence.
Regular bombings is not something that happens nowadays in the West, obviously. The United States, which is generally free of persistent domestic terrorism, may not have excuses to implement national ID and databases, but other countries may need it. Don't export your conceptions on first-world freedom to places where first-world safety don't exist.
I think I know how this will work out.
I already have a national ID card which lets me vote, I have a PAN number which tracks literally every economic transaction of significance I make. They know everything about my vehicles and my travel arrangements.
Now, they're going to pay someone to build a system which correlates all this into some useless information. It'll take six years to build & cost tons of money for the government, half of which will end up being passed under the table as kickbacks and the rest with the contractors. Eventually, the system will be built and works fairly decently, but has no information about anyone who does not really volunteer it first-hand.
It'll be done, but completely useless. Some people will become rich and ... as the general attitude will be "I want less corruption or more opportunity to participate in it". A complete waste of tax payer's money, but not quite the invasion of my privacy that most people imagine.
But hell yeah, I'm going to protest. Even their incompetence can't be depended up on :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
After all the outsourcing we have done there, I'm fairly sure they have all the US citizens info in one database too. Now that they have perfected it, time to pull in their own citizens info.
We know that the project will be given to the lowest bidder, so that takes Indian coders out of the picture. So who's gonna code it? Africans?
They will need to hire China to administer it (lower IT costs there).
Before I read TFA, I kinda thought Google had the largest "citizens'" database...
As a citizen of India, I whole-heartedly welcome this measure. One of the benefits (amongst many) is that native Indian citizens will not be marginalized by hordes of illegal immigrants who have crossed the borders of our country. That might sound callous, and yes, it indeed is, but the harsh reality is that many regions of our country have had their demographics completely changed by vast, un-checked immigration from Bangladesh and Burma. These immigrants zealously bring their religion with them - the one with the conspicuous lack of family planning or birth control and outdated ideas regarding education and treatment of women. (I assume you can guess which one)
For a country like India which is already heavily overpopulated with a severe lack of natural resources, such immigration is just breaking the elephant's back. A national identity card system will go a long way to address this severe problem.
I am aware that Americans strongly believe in individual privacy and are only too eager to shudder and sneer at such measures. Privacy is a valid concern, but the need for privacy is stronger in the West and lesser in the East - one f those strange cultural differences - it simply matters less to us here. And in the hierarchy of needs, the rights of basic citizenship and access to government resources matters more than an individual need for privacy.
Will the system be fool-proof? Of course not. It will be hacked - I expect it will be hacked both socially (corruption) and through technology and will definitely be misused a number of times for fake identities. The risk of misuse, however, is not a sufficient argument against the very real need for introduction of such an identity system in our country.
Instead of wasting $2 billion tax payers money on this UID project, Govt of India should have compulsorily issued PASSPORTS to all Indians at a nominal fee of 10 rupees, OR could have created bank accounts for Indians because 85% of them do not have them.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
India is a corrupt democracy.
The more rules and laws are present, the more corrupt the government becomes.
I bet my ass that billions of dollars will be spent to implement it, with doubtful results.
The really criminal and refugees will escape by paying the local officials and politicians.
The poor lower end will get their cards after they pay some money.
The middle class will be harassed since most move around the contry.
The uber-rich will not care.
In short another fiasco to add to the many fiascos called government programmes.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Look, privacy is gone. You want to see the future? Read CFR monographs.
If you use the net (even if you think you're being tricky with Tor and Pgp and steg), your secrets are already revealed. And stored. Not to mention available for later analysis. People who think they're crypto experts will laugh at the RIAA but never realize that what applies to the RIAA applies equally to their own SEKRIT information.
Sometimes I think that the only reason why the average citizen isn't much more painfully aware of this, is because the people who have these capabilities generally have bigger fish to fry.
Even Tor doesn't do so well against an adversary who can view the entire network (and thus see both endpoints). I would be quite surprised if various governments did not have this ability.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
BTW, ACs have an uid of 666.
An md5 hash of IP address, user agent and some random salt held in a cookie would do, wouldn't it? You could delete the cookie and have anonymousness back, and thanks to the random salt it shouldn't be easily possible to brute-force your IP address out of the md5.
Or maybe just create and publish a one-time PGP public key and sign your posts with the corresponding private key, which you'd discard after you consider the discussion finished.
Or maybe... Just maybe... Maybe simply log in?
I worry if they will have enough funds to maintain the database while people are dying of starvation.
... is that *actually* we all would like to have a government that does not know anything about us and doesn't care who we are and what we do as long as we don't act as criminals or work in sensible areas.
This is a very simple thing to understand: As long as you don't mess around with your neighbours they don't need to know anything about you. As long as you don't mess around with your larger community it does not need to know anything about you. As long as you don't mess around with your government it does not need to know anything about you. In an ideal world you could be born, live and die without your government even knowing about you as long as you don't try to do something that harms the government or the community the government cares for.
Of course it doesn't work this way because there will always be a minority of people trying to get away from what they've done or who switch identities to be able to plot and steel and murder without being caught. And the more complex and mobile a society becomes the less you can rely on people not being able to exploit this. Nowadays and in the future this means that "leave me alone as long as I leave you alone" won't work anymore (if it ever did).
So, yes: There is no way around databases of citizens, identity cards and all this shit. The sooner we accept this, the better. Because once you have accepted this you can start to look at the real problem and the real problem is securing all this against abuse and tampering both by the government and interested third parties. The real problem is not someone knowing everything about you, the real problem is *you* knowing nothing about everyone else and the government (or corporations) having both the power and the freedom to abuse what they have.
And there are no simple solutions to all these problems. Todays highly virtualized, mobile and complex societies create totally new problems which need new solutions. We're not made for this and we have no build-in solutions to these problems. Every solution the ape in you suggests is probably wrong. Don't trust your first thoughts. We are building this world as we go and we can only try to do it as best as we can.
Good luck with that. the cost of maintaining such a huge database will probably be higher than their freaking budget, at least after you take out all the bribes and shit.
In soviet india, money steals you!
weinersmith
Their faith and acceptance of the old media is astounding. I could care less what AP/Routers/NY Times has to say: they've consistently biased the news to fit the establishment, promoted trivia over news (fark,) and stagnated with the aging baby boomers.
Opinion aside, they don't even acknowledge that newspapers could *not* post their material online. If they don't want it linked to, they don't have to make it available.
All they care about is the existing news gathering revenue levels remaining the same, so the "quality" can remain the same.
Old Media is dead. It just doesn't know it yet. New generations, with new technology, will create new ways to learn about the world, and it'll center around a "web of trust" (or social graph) not the old media establishment tell you the "truth."
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
I read the news and was quite impressed by it. It seems like a great idea, having basic information about the citizens available, and being able to provide better service using it. And if implemented it will be a great help for the people too, being able to have a single ID to serve as their Ration cards, Voter ID, PAN cards, Driving license, Electricity bill payments etc.
The most immediate problem however is that the infrastructure to utilize this kind of information is absent, and is not going to be widely available for several years to come. The vital social services that the govt. intends to provide to the poorest are not in a very good shape, and identity information is the least of the problems. The IT infrastructure required to facilitate interactions via IDs is limited to big cities.
I don't have much concern about the breach of privacy. I expose several orders of magnitude greater information about myseff on internet and social networks than what the govt. plans to collect. And this information has been collected through National Population Census since several decades. It will just be more accessible now.
Also, how are they going to generate and distribute these ID cards? In a country of over a billion people, where a significant portion of the population doesn't even have voter ID cards, its going to add several layer of more bureaucracy, corruption and red tape. As someone already pointed out, they don't have any means to enforce it on those who don't want it, and the middle class will be the one to suffer the most.
At the risk of sounding defeatist, I still maintain, its a nice idea, but both impractical and premature.
Parent poster is the reason why such a National ID Card is a bad idea for India.
This card will become a means to make people prove their "Indianness".
This is a very bad idea in a nation as diverse and full of competing ethnic/religious/language groups as India.
People should not have to prove that they are Indian.
Making people do so will poison the soul of this nation and cause existing divisions in society to deepen rather than be healed.
An ID card scheme here in Pakistan since, I guess, the 70's. My father has had three different NIC over the time, the current being a "Computerised" NIC that is linked to the "NAtional Database and Registration Authority"(NADRA). And that in turn links to everything.
For example, if I need to buy a mobile SIM, get into an institute or handle any sort of official paperwork, I need my CNIC.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
You are one of the privileged few who generate enough income to be above the threshold to pay taxes.Not the entire population of India has a PAN number or a ration card or any form of id whatsoever. The central idea of the national id is NOT to track citizens. Its main aim is to counter the major malpractices that thwart the efficacy of public welfare programs, where government provided benefits are usurped fraudulently by intermediate crooks (some of whom are a part of the govt machinery) Its the pessimism of the likes of you that holds us back.The kickbacks and under the table aspects are one of the major reasons why this has been entrusted to Nilekani. Get your facts right. After a long long time we have a government that is trying to sincerely uplift the masses. If you cant support them, at least dont hinder them.
If you intend to be a responsible citizen in India, you need a licensed Beretta Pistol and NOT an Unique Identification Number.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Its not an accident that the both the ruling party and the opposition party are hyping this as a panacea for citizen convenience and national security. These scum that have come into power by election fraud want to retain power at all costs and control citizens. Read George Orwells 1984 and tell me you think this is an innocent development.
Do you know that India cannot provide basic health and education to its citizens. And these floozies claim, that having a citizen database will solve the common mans problems. How about they spend this money on cutting down the government and making it more efficient. One reason for the lack of transparency in India is that the government is so huge, that no one knows what is going on !!
If my country ever got invaded, I'd sure hope we didn't have a central database of citizens the bad guys could get ahold of.
expandfairuse.org
Boomers aren't the only ones fond of the New York Times. 'Old media' refers to the medium of delivery, not the content, the editorial stance, or the use of polysyllabic words. I for one like the old overlords.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.