Slashdot Mirror
Story Of a Country Which Has Built a Centralized Biometrics Database Of 1.1B People But Appears To Be Mishandling It Now (mashable.com)
In a bid to get more Indians to have a birth certificate or any sort of ID card, India announced Aadhaar project in 2009. At the time, there were more Indians without these ID cards than those with. As a result of this, much of the government funding for the citizens were disappearing before they could see them. But according to several security experts, lawyers, politicians and journalists, the government is using poor security practices, and this is exposing the biometrics data -- photo, name, address, fingerprint, iris info -- of people at risk. More than 1.1 billion people -- and 99 percent of all adults -- in India have enrolled themselves to the system. From a report: "There are two fundamental flaws in Aadhaar: it is poorly designed, and it is being poorly verified," Member of Parliament and privacy advocate, Rajeev Chandrasekhar told Mashable India. Another issue with Aadhaar is, Chandrasekhar explains, there is no firm legislation to safeguard the privacy and rights of the billion people who have enrolled into the system. There's little a person whose Aadhaar data has been compromised could do. [...] "Aadhaar is remote, covert, and non-consensual," he told Mashable India, adding the existence of a central database of any kind, but especially in the context of the Aadhaar, and at the scale it is working is appalling. Abraham said fingerprint and iris data of a person can be stolen with little effort -- a "gummy bear" which sells for a few cents, can store one's fingerprint, while a high-resolution camera can capture one's iris data. The report goes on to say that the Indian government is also not telling how the data is being shared with private companies. Experts cited in the story have expressed concerns that those companies (some of which are run by people who were previously members of the team which designed the framework of Aadhaar) can store and create a parallel database of their own. On top of that, the government is making Aadhaar mandatory for availing several things including registration for nation-wide examinations, but in the beginning it promised Aadhaar will be used only to help poor get grocery at subsidized prices.
The bureaucracy in India is so incompetent that it's borderline malicious. I had a colleague that had been in the U.S. for a long time but was going to move back to India to help with the care of his aging parents who were having some medical problems, but was delayed and prevented from returning for an extended periods because his own government didn't believe he was who he claimed to be because apparently someone had stolen his identity and had been voting in years worth of elections while he was in the U.S.
Beautiful country and nice people, but I think they spend so much of their time being conquered and ruled by other groups that the local populace never developed an ability for efficient governing.
I worked alongside one of the biggest consulting firms in the world, they might not be great programmers, but when you throw 300 of them at a project the project gets completed. Buggy as shit, convoluted (so you HAVE to go back to them) but it gets the job done. THAT is all management give a shit about, because it's their bonus on the line. Once they have their bonus they wander off and leave us to maintain the stinking pile of poo.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Problem is that India has multiple ID cards, and Adhaar card just adds to it. You forgot to mention the PAN card, which is a photo-ID card w/ a chip, and which could easily have co-opted everything the Adhaar card is supposed to do, and more. A PAN card ought to work as a voter ID card, but that's again different. Also, the first Adhaar 'card' was just a slip of paper with the person's name: nothing that couldn't be scrawled by anybody. That's what's made up this whole mess.
If the Indian government simply consolidates the Aadhar card, the Voter ID card, the PAN card and the Ration card all into one, it would solve their problem. They could put it in an actual server, maybe hosted by the NCERT or some other organization that does have serious computing resources, and then run things from there.
This!!! In the US, one needs a Social Security number to do anything - open accounts to do any tracking, but it's a stupid piece of paper that legally is not supposed to be laminated. In the meantime, you have controversies over cities issuing driving licenses to illegals, and thereby making the appearance of legalizing them. As well as the proposal by the TSA to require everybody to carry their passports w/ them in some jurisdictions.
Better idea: why not make SS cards like DL cards, which would include photos, personal details (eye color, hair color, et al, like in DLs, but not addresses), and then a chip that includes details like a person's legal status (citizen/GC/visa type, state in which one can vote, et al) and make that the ID that they are required to show anywhere? That way, DL would no longer be proof of anything aside from the authorization to drive, and the SS card can be used for things like Voter ID, travelling on planes, e-Verify, et al. Then cities that issue DLs to illegals would no longer be changing anything about their legal status to be here, only whether they can legally drive or not. Which shouldn't be an issue - one could legally go from Juarez to El Paso, get a TX DL and then drive anywhere in TX on a tourist visa, but not be mistaken for a legal resident of the US.