Slashdot Mirror
India's Billion User Biometric Odyssey
mask.of.sanity writes "A bold new biometric identity system is being deployed across India in a bid to combat rampant welfare fraud. The mammoth system will collect the iris and fingerprint records on a voluntary basis of every one of India's 1.2 billion men, women and children. The Aadhaar project runs three trillion biometric identity matches every day — all on a small data center of commodity blade servers."
This system is guaranteed to fail. As I understand it, the problem it is meant to address is welfare fraud - criminals collecting the welfare of the poor for themselves.
Best case, this works for a year or two as the criminals figure out how to spoof the biometrics. Maybe local gangsters force the poor people to give up their biometrics - take their prints and photos of their irises and then use copies (ala the recent iphone hack and the similar spoof via a photograph of the original iris). If the scanners at the welfare locations are manned, they just need to bribe the guy manning them into letting them use the spoofs. Undoubtedly the guy manning the system is going to be some low-paid peon anyway.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
They are able to scan 1M people in one day(!), so it takes over 3 years to scan all 1200M people.
One scan takes about 5 megabytes, so 1200M scans takes 6000 terabytes:
http://searchbusinessintelligence.techtarget.in/feature/Aadhaar-project-data-collection-An-interview-with-Mindtrees-CEO
Architecture details:
http://www.biometrics.org/bc2012/presentations/UIDAI/UID%20BSP%20update%20Kris%20ver%202%201040.pdf
"Bid to control welfare fraud"... that is just the cover story, considering that the system is full of intentional loopholes and bugs. The real reason why the ruling congress party wants this, is due to its relying on the muslim vote bank. Muslims vote en masse in India, based on whichever party is promising more benefits to them, but as of yet muslim citizens of India are a minority in the country.
Congress is trying to change this by using this scheme as a backdoor method of providing legitimate identity papers(and thus citienship) to millions of illegal muslim immigrants from neighbouring bangladesh and thus inflating their vote bank. The nearest oppositional rival party BJP has a more pro-hindu stance.