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India To Issue Over a Billion Biometric ID Cards
angrytuna writes "The Unique Identification Authority is a new state department in India charged with assigning every living Indian an exclusive number and biometric ID card. The program is designed to alleviate problems with the 20 current types of proof of identity currently available. These problems range from difficulties for the very poor in obtaining state handouts, corruption, illegal immigration, and terrorism issues. Issuing the cards may be difficult, however, as less than 7% of the population is registered for income tax, and voter lists are thought to be inaccurate, partly due to corruption. The government has said the first cards will be issued in 18 months."
I hope they don't have to stand in a queue!
also for all those people who are 1 in a million there are a thousand identical biometric cards.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
For Bangladesh having 1093 people / square km, India with 349 people / square km is a paradise.
You know, there is a big world out there outside the US.
Absolutely. After getting hit with the billy club, you would have a new face. The old mold would be useless!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
America has over 50 types of commonly used ID, and that's not even counting the several types of ID cards and drivers licenses that some states have, nor does it count military IDs, civilian-government-employee IDs, university-issued IDs, passports, and more.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Unique Identification Authority
Huh. Did they have a contest to come up with the most Orwellian sounding name? Are they a section of the Department Of Bureaus? :)
Leaving aside the technicalities of the project for a moment, these are strange priorities. India is not the only country to have lots of starving people and homeless, but instead of feeding them or building homes, they are to piss billions of Dollars giving them ID cards for the New World Order to track them.
I think they aim for this move to benefit the poor as well. When they have an ID number it's going to be easier for them to use their rights, such as voting or obtaining state handouts.
Not that I look forward to being in a huge database, but I am curious how long it will take given that things are so chaotic in India.
Some years ago when the government decided to issue voter cards for everyone eligible to vote, everyone in my family who qualified went to get photographed etc and some months later the cards turned up... with everyone's data mixed up. So my father was not only a woman but the daughter of my sister who happened to be the wife of my mother and so on. And pretty much every family in the neighborhood had their's screwed up as well.
So one billion people and at least two trials.. I would give the program at least 10 years - and that is being optimistic, I think.
Given the corruption they have now, what makes them think corruption won't continue?
Stealing someones biometric data will mean an increasing arms race for technology to identify someone. It will eventually fail as corrupt agencies and criminals have the same methods to read biometry data and create the id cards. As a way to slow this down - do not give the biometric data to the person, explained thus:
Instead, people should be issued replaceable, hard to fake credentials (ID cards) - that do NOT have biometric readings on them, rather just a long random number. These would be easy to read - and the random number identifies the holder.
Creation and issuing of credentials would be done only based on government-run biometric scans. The identifying agency keeps the biometric data secret at the time of issue or re-issue, and links the biometric data to the replaceable credentials/random number.
This way if an ID is stolen or in dispute, the person comes in, gets scanned again and a new credential/card/random number is issued and the old one is cancelled.
This allows one upside: no big, central DB of biometric data - each local area keeps their own. By removing a central identity DB, corrupt officials will have smaller targets to break.
Its an attempt to improve delivery of social services (e.g. food supplies to the poor), subsidies and also to address security concerns. Or did you think those things happen only in the US?
Trick is making countries buy technologies which they can`t afford (including nukes) and ask them to give up a resource when the loan pay day comes.
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hitman-Perkins-John/dp/B001GG67CC/
"For many years he worked for an international consulting firm where his main job was to convince LDCs (less developed countries) around the world to accept multibillion-dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ended up at Halliburton, Bechtel, Brown and Root, and other United States engineering and construction companies."
This one serves to NWO too, double evil ;) ID Card guys will say "look, even India uses them" to suspicious govt. guys.
They have problems with people trying to get INTO India? I thought everyone wanted to get out!
Illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Nepal
Terrorists from Pakistan
Refugees from Sri Lanka (and to a tiny extent, Burma)
You need to get out of your little well once in a while.
Except that if Illinois is like many states, the fact that your photograph is on your license doesn't do the DMV any good when you have lost your license. Most states don't have your photograph on file. They send you a renewal form. You sign it and send it back along with the fee for renewal. They send you a form that you take to the appropriate location where your picture is taken and a license is printed with your picture on it. This picture never enters the state's database.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If the cards were piled on top of each other they would be 150 times as high as Mount Everest -- 1,200 kilometres.
India's legions of local bureaucrats currently issue at least 20 proofs of identity, including birth certificates, driving licences and ration cards. None is accepted universally and moving from one state to the next can easily render a citizen officially invisible -- a disastrous predicament for the millions of poor who rely on state handouts to survive.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Theres only so much you can do for poverty. Programs are already in place for them.
Its no different in the rest of the world. Government makes priorities and budgets. Id hate to see an entire nation held back because there will always be poor people. Cannibalizing the good parts of government to just hand out meals is never a sustainable policy.
That said, there can be social goods from good accounting like this. More people paying taxes, better census, jobs created, better tracking of migrations, identification of criminals, etc etc.
Spot on - the UK recently gave up on ID cards because it was (amongst other reasons) too costly.
How on earth is India going to afford it with 20 times the population and 51 times less per capita GDP? Something's not right here.
From the article: The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
I guess it would be more accurate to say, "The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 until he signed the Real ID Act into law in 2005."
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
2^30 = 1,073,741,824
Every single person...
And what about married persons?
1976 presidential elections say otherwise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_1976
Without proper identification, it becomes to difficult to serve state services (such as unemployment, relaxed microloans, susidized food to lots of 'starving and homeless' people you mentioned in your message, and so on). In my opinion, this should have been implemented several decades ago. US/Canada have Social Security/Social Insurance number and it makes it easier for government to provide state services using that number. India doesn't have anything of that sort (yet).
very badly. Considering there are different cards for almost everything in which you need an identification check, this was long required. I have card A for casting my vote, B for getting my LPG supply for cooking, C for getting subsidized food. If I lose any one of them, I have to go through the entire process again which involves around four to five working days and bribing corrupt government officials who are not ready to work. For getting a thing as simple as cellphone connection, I have to submit at least 3 identification documents - my voter card, my driving license and a college confirmation letter (in case you are a student). This has been done to check the use of mobile phones by terrorists, but since there is no standardized identification, it hurts the common man who just needs to get his work done. We are all looking forward to this. Lets just hope it gets through.
Watch your Overlords as they beta test your future in 3rd world or smaller countries.
China, New Zealand, Finland, Thailand: Internet Censorship under different pretexts.
India: Biometric IDs.
Feel free to add to the list.
In a perfect world, DNA is reliable. The world isn't perfect. There are problems with collection and contamination, problems with human error and incompetence, and the fact that we rely on only a partial DNA sampling rather than a complete sequencing. This is further complicated by mutations within our own bodies and the occasional case of a person with more than one DNA, either due to a congenital issue, organ or bone marrow transplant, or other issue.
IMHO every supposed DNA match should be confirmed with an "extract all the data you can from the sample then compare it to the suspect's DNA, then explain any deviations or rule him out as a suspect.
Even with all these problems, in many cases it is more reliable than eyewitness identification, fuzzy video cameras, and non-DNA forensics. In the US criminal justice system, we have "beyond a reasonable doubt" as a standard rather than "beyond an absolute doubt." For non-death-penalty cases, society has decided it's better to imprison a few innocent people than let a few BIGNUM go free. For death penalty cases attitudes are swinging to "if you aren't 100% sure don't kill him."
In any case, DNA should be preserved indefinitely after a conviction so it can be re-tested as more refined tests become available. What may be a "1 in a million chance he's not the man" today may be come "he's definitely not the man" 15 years from now, but only if evidence is preserved.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's India. If you don't understand, spend some time there, and not just going to touristy sites. It just has no chance of succeeding as a universal replacement IMO.