Slashdot Mirror
'Big Brother' In India Requires Fingerprint Scans For Food, Phones, Finances (nytimes.com)
The New York Times reports of the Indian government's intent to build an identification system of unprecedented scope. The country is reportedly "scanning the fingerprints, eyes and faces of its 1.3 billion residents (alternative source) and connecting the data to everything from welfare benefits to mobile phones." Here's an excerpt from the report: Civil libertarians are horrified, viewing the program, called Aadhaar, as Orwell's Big Brother brought to life. To the government, it's more like "big brother," a term of endearment used by many Indians to address a stranger when asking for help. For other countries, the technology could provide a model for how to track their residents. And for India's top court, the ID system presents unique legal issues that will define what the constitutional right to privacy means in the digital age. The government has made registration mandatory for hundreds of public services and many private ones, from taking school exams to opening bank accounts.
Technology has given governments around the world new tools to monitor their citizens. In China, the government is rolling out ways to use facial recognition and big data to track people, aiming to inject itself further into everyday life. Many countries, including Britain, deploy closed-circuit cameras to monitor their populations. But India's program is in a league of its own, both in the mass collection of biometric data and in the attempt to link it to everything -- traffic tickets, bank accounts, pensions, even meals for undernourished schoolchildren.
Technology has given governments around the world new tools to monitor their citizens. In China, the government is rolling out ways to use facial recognition and big data to track people, aiming to inject itself further into everyday life. Many countries, including Britain, deploy closed-circuit cameras to monitor their populations. But India's program is in a league of its own, both in the mass collection of biometric data and in the attempt to link it to everything -- traffic tickets, bank accounts, pensions, even meals for undernourished schoolchildren.
India still has a caste system going nice and strong--several of the things that 'Big Brother' here is intended to do would work very, very well for ensuring people will have a very difficult time attempting to escape their preordained proper place (such as daring to want to have a job that wasn't dirty, dangerous and demeaning), punish those who try anyway, and probably also cull the population.
Oh, and they've got problems like people being legally dead when they're not being deceased. Admittedly, this system will ensure that such errors are quickly fixed...by blocking the legally dead person from access to the basic necessities of life.
Any system which makes it so the state can (intentionally or by accident) prevent you from being able to obtain basic necessities for yourself is not a good one, especially if it'd be possible to pretend your genocide is just a massive clerical error that merely happened to take you years to correct.
RTFAing says that one of the benefits they're claiming is that this will fix India's endemic government corruption. The only way to get rid of corruption in the state is to ensure that corrupt officials are likely to be caught, that the penalty is significant, and that there is as little benefit to being corrupt as possible. (The more power they have, the better the odds need to be of a corrupt official being the guest of honor at a surprise necktie party.)
Each new Indian government seems to obsessed with showing the rest of the world that India is an advanced, leading-edge country. And every new Indian government neglects doing anything much about the conditions of more than 600 million (and growing) Indian citizens who lack access to such basic services as running water, electricity and sanitation. Really strange, and unfair to those unfortunate Indians.