Slashdot Mirror
India's Biometric Database Is Creating A Perfect Surveillance State -- And U.S. Tech Companies Are On Board (huffingtonpost.in)
Big U.S. technology companies are involved in the construction of one of the most intrusive citizen surveillance programs in history, HuffingtonPost notes in a new report. From the story: For the past nine years, India has been building the world's biggest biometric database by collecting the fingerprints, iris scans and photos of nearly 1.3 billion people. For U.S. tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, the project, called Aadhaar (which means "proof" or "basis" in Hindi), could be a gold mine. The CEO of Microsoft has repeatedly praised the project, and local media have carried frequent reports on consultations between the Indian government and senior executives from companies like Apple and Google (in addition to South Korean-based Samsung) on how to make tech products Aadhaar-enabled. But when reporters of HuffPost and HuffPost India asked these companies in the past weeks to confirm they were integrating Aadhaar into their products, only one company -- Google -- gave a definitive response.
That's because Aadhaar has become deeply controversial, and the subject of a major Supreme Court of India case that will decide the future of the program as early as this month. Launched nine years ago as a simple and revolutionary way to streamline access to welfare programs for India's poor, the database has become Indians' gateway to nearly any type of service -- from food stamps to a passport or a cell phone connection. Practical errors in the system have caused millions of poor Indians to lose out on aid. And the exponential growth of the project has sparked concerns among security researchers and academics that India is the first step toward setting up a surveillance society to rival China.
That's because Aadhaar has become deeply controversial, and the subject of a major Supreme Court of India case that will decide the future of the program as early as this month. Launched nine years ago as a simple and revolutionary way to streamline access to welfare programs for India's poor, the database has become Indians' gateway to nearly any type of service -- from food stamps to a passport or a cell phone connection. Practical errors in the system have caused millions of poor Indians to lose out on aid. And the exponential growth of the project has sparked concerns among security researchers and academics that India is the first step toward setting up a surveillance society to rival China.
Does the bhagavad gita have any passages similar to the book of revelation's number of the beast bit?
Just wondering.... for a friend.
> as a simple and revolutionary way to streamline access
Germany called, they want to remind you of a little time in history called WW I and II. Kind of ironic the companies involved in providing such services then, are still around today. IBM for example.
War and enslavement are extremely profitable.
And many of them are much, much, much worse than and do significantly less defensible things with that tech than India's regime. Saudi Arabia for example.
Not worth $10. Useless for surveillance anyway.
It was replaced with a program that displays everyone's status as "defecating on a sidewalk" which is accurate for predictive models.
This article tells us how far the surveillance state has already gone.
https://www.economist.com/brie...
Here's an AI doing something "useful"
Since the spring of 2017, the information has been used to rank citizens’ “trustworthiness” using various criteria. People are deemed trustworthy, average or untrustworthy depending on how they fit into the following categories: 15 to 55 years old (ie, of military age); Uighur (the catalogue is explicitly racist: people are suspected merely on account of their ethnicity); unemployed; have religious knowledge; pray five times a day (freedom of worship is guaranteed by China’s constitution); have a passport; have visited one of 26 countries; have ever overstayed a visa; have family members in a foreign country (there are at least 10,000 Uighurs in Turkey); and home school their children. Being labelled “untrustworthy” can lead to a camp.
And your identity card will contain your "reliability status"
Next, the records associated with identity cards can contain biometric data including fingerprints, blood type and DNA information as well as the subject’s detention record and “reliability status”.
How shall we gather the information? This is way beyond Orwellian.
To complete the panorama of human surveillance, the government has a programme called “becoming kin” in which local families (mostly Uighur) “adopt” officials (mostly Han). The official visits his or her adoptive family regularly, lives with it for short periods, gives the children presents and teaches the household Mandarin. He also verifies information collected by fanghuiju teams. The programme appears to be immense. According to an official report in 2018, 1.1m officials have been paired with 1.6m families. That means roughly half of Uighur households have had a Han-Chinese spy/indoctrinator assigned to them.
Have a cellphone?
Because the government sees what it calls “web cleansing” as necessary to prevent access to terrorist information, everyone in Xinjiang is supposed to have a spyware app on their mobile phone. Failing to install the app, which can identify people called, track online activity and record social-media use, is an offence. “Wi-Fi sniffers” in public places keep an eye, or nose, on all networked devices in range.
Don't have a phone? How you'll be tracked.
In Hotan and Kashgar there are poles bearing perhaps eight or ten video cameras at intervals of 100-200 metres along every street; a far finer-grained surveillance net than in most Chinese cities. As well as watching pedestrians the cameras can read car number plates and correlate them with the face of the person driving. Only registered owners may drive cars; anyone else will be arrested, according to a public security official who accompanied this correspondent in Hotan.
Wondering about controlling weapons?
In butchers and restaurants all over Xinjiang you will see kitchen knives chained to the wall, lest they be snatched up and used as weapons. In Aksu QR codes containing the owner’s identity-card information have to be engraved on every blade.
... this thing might create that perfect surveilance state, except lots of people said so right from the start.
Told you so!
Good followup to the recent https://it.slashdot.org/story/... on Slashdot.
National ID systems can be very dangerous; combining it with biometrics, even more dangerous; allowing business in on the situation, still more dangerous. Nothing erodes privacy and freedom more than being constantly tracked, cataloged, watched, recorded, post-judged, and pre-judged. And this all follows with the systematic destruction of anonymity that such systems create. It is the proverbial "mark of the beast"- that which gives government and/or large corporate interests the ability to control the populous completely. Suppression of decent, lack of free thought, destruction of creativity, lack of risk-taking, constant paranoia, no way to really change or atone for mistakes- these are not things that are compatible with a "free" society. And yet we keep marching in that direction in the apparent quest of some utopic "safe" society. If that is what it means to be "safe", I think "dangerous" is far more acceptable and far more human.
There are major problems in India that Aadhar can solve
1. Frauds in subsidy that govt offers. E.g. cooking gas used to be diverted to commercial use.
2. Frauds in income tax.
3. Criminal fingerprinting
However, the same surveillance is likely to go against near-innocent people. Caught in an unnecessary violation, don't expect the Govt officer to use any kind of common sense. The general attitude is the book a case and then the pathetically slow legal process starts.
There are other problems. Take a new mobile connection, and get advertisement calls 5 times a day, during your office hours. Your number is simply leaked and all the DND etc. is utter rubbish and a big execution failure.
More than Government, I am worried the private companies and business houses will misuse it more.
Now, in terms for worrying about misuse on common people, I think that's not easy in India. Because of democracy, any kind of mass misuse also means losing election in the next term :-)
Once again, say it with me: tech companies are not your 'friend'.
You know, it's ridiculous that there are people that conflate identification with surveillance.
Establishing a person's identity is a fundamental part of any modern society. Are you who you say you are?
Otherwise, how can you tell one Singh from another?
In any case, what Liberal critics forget is that it's the intent. Why would the Indian government want to know what its citizens are doing? Is it a totalitarian state, like China? Not really. Could it be? Maybe, but India doesn't really have a history of strongman-type rule.
So why the whining?
Subject changed: India -> China
Let me know when they start collecting prints of your anus. It's easy to steal fingerprints. Anus prints are a tad harder to come by.
*US* need to be protected from *THEM*.
This is always true, in a free society *US* are protected from *THEM* by the socially agreed contract on MAJORITY. In the press you see "Lone attacker" or "Lone Gunman" because he was one, not many. The majority of people enforce the agreed laws of the majority.
So you want fair leadership, the way to get that is via a government of the majority of people. If you have minority governments, then how the minority is selected becomes fought over, and factions fight to take control.
China's leadership was an appointee by a majority, and now he has locked himself in and become a majority of one. He cannot rely on the majority of the people to enforce the laws he invents, because he doesn't represent the majority. So he turns to technology to enforce those laws.
This is particularly true among annexed provinces. China is threatening its neighbours around the Pacific currently, building a big island in the middle of them, armed with missiles. Effectively its a flag stuck in the middle of them to say "this is my territory".... a flag nearer to them than the China.
Once it annexes SE Asia, it will face a huge problem with terrorism and defiance of the invasion, so it will need all the technology it can to track people, monitor them and control their words and deeds.
The solution for most countries to control (including the USA) is democracy, majority rules, majority decides.
IN USA Trump was rejected by the majority, the majority made the demonstrably correct decision. Gun control is a popular with the majority, again demonstrably correct. The problems with the US are the distortions it faces to the majority rules.
It is identical here in Australia. Started with unemployment benefits.
Now anything to do with the government, they've made it difficult to not use my.gov.au,
so far I've escaped the future.
Go well
I find it amazing that the tyrannical elites, that have so little faith in human nature, can have such faith in technical tools to control the masses. Anyone with any actual exposure to software knows that the accuracy, reliability, repairability, etc of large software systems is not something you can count on to truly keep the guys with pitchforks and torches away forever. For every peon they squeeze with their controls systems is another dude scamming the system. Until it all falls down on them.
"For U.S. tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, the project, called Aadhaar could be a gold mine. The CEO of Microsoft has repeatedly praised the project," Let's build a massive AI network to surveil and control humanity on a global scale but don't you dare not provide a transgender bathroom! This is the thinking of the folks who are going to 'lead' us in the next generation folks
the government and pro-American apologists are pretending that no, nuh-uh sir, we would never do a thing like that. Whatever is done in India and China is done for benefit and order, while in America it's just raw surveilance, building profiles on people, and catching dirt on someone who may eventually turn out to be an issue.
But India not. Let me clarify why I say that : those biometric stuff in the India ID card ? There are nigh a reader in India, and for all practical intent and purpose you cannot "observe" what somebody is doing without sensor. What you can is associated identity.
Now the US has 1) cellphone and cellphone ship every where perfect for position surveillance 2) CC usage every where perfect again to watch over somebody 3) internet/wifi/cellular usage watching over yeah they are supposed to only do it on foreigner but hey it is in place.
The US has a far better possibility to do state surveillance than India with its biometrics.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You can see that from the threatening behavior to Vietnam and Philippines over the island. Clear threat, clear intent. Inevitable future conflict. Xi Jinping did not start a fight with these countries with the intent of backing down. That pin they stuck in the middle of the ocean far away from China, draw a circle around it, smooth the edges to the land, and that is the countries he intends to annex. My guess is he'll go after Vietnam first. Reassure Thailand it's only about the island and he won't invade them, then attack Thailand once Vietnam is secured, Cambodia will crumble, Burma will too.... Philippines is fragmented islands, he only needs a few islands and a few bases to secure that. Probably later.
"The PRC would rather just lead the economic bloc and get the money."
ASEAN, is the economic grouping of countries without China, and it is focussed on Indonesia, a large population semi industrial country. NOT CHINA. China's neighbours don't want to become economically dependant on China and in turn hand over power by economic necessity. China is not the big player in Asia outside of China.
America was the balance for that, the trans-pacific-partnership tried to lock those countries into the west $$$ trade system, and military deals/bases with Vietnam and Thailand and Phillipines were to stop Xi's threats. That's deadish now, literally the PR need to do a deal with the North Korean leader, caused Trump to cancel military exercises at the snap of his moronic fingers. So the big scary military exercises, intended to send clear signals, instead send signal of weak President in desperate need of PR coup to prove he's up to the job. TPP is cancelled, not just the bad bits like corporate sovereignty, the whole thing.
I would say Trump is really the shark jump point.
this needs to be a government only database because it serves a very strong need for the poor who can't maintain other forms of ID for whatever reason.
Just another second banana
the 2010s - When humans started using technology for pure evil. Forced spying, this and many other things.
Cell phones aren't necessarily tied to any name. I can buy a $20 phone for cash and activate it. Accessing cell phone data requires a legal warrant which showed probable cause. The govt doesn't have direct access.
I don't have a monthly plan for any cell service.
In the USA, there are effectively 3 possible "national IDs" - SSN, Passport, and if you work for the federal govt, your govt ID.
Passports are generally locked up, not carried.
SSN isn't tied to your photo.
and less than 5% of people in the USA have a Federal ID.
Credit card records require a legal warrant which showed probable cause. The govt doesn't have direct access. Plus, It is easy NOT to use a credit card for months. Quite easy.
Local and state govts do have traffic cameras, but only on busy roads. I ran a red light (is was 10x shorter that 1 time) and I got a fine and a link to a video showing my vehicle running the light. It also showed the green was less than 2 seconds when normally it is over 25 sec. Anyways, There are only 3 red-light cameras in my city of 500K people. There are lots of traffic video cameras, but the resolution is poor so reading a license plate isn't possible.
Because I used to work for the feds, they have my finger prints. They do no have iris scans, but Korea does. I suppose a few other countries do too. I don't recall which required scanning at immigration points.
I have a passport and just got a replacement last year, so the Feds have a recent photo too. I'm not exactly worries about passport information being abused.
I am much more worried about companies, with which I have zero interaction and have never used, being allowed to have any data without my permission. Google, Facebook, twitter, snapchat, pretty much any cloudy web service. I go out of my way to avoid those services and self-host everything I can possibly self-host. I even host my own email server.
I don't worry about the FBI leaking my finger prints. They aren't available over the general internet. India is using OwnCloud to store all this data. OwnCloud ... built with php. Idiots.
There's a huge difference between what India is doing and what the USA does.
Wish I had mod points. I used to fear a massive electronic surveillance state. Then I worked with H1Bs. We'll be lucky if the lights stay on and ATMs keep working.
Practical errors in the system have caused millions of poor Indians to lose out on aid.
Please tells us more. Is it a failure of the authenticating systems to read the signatures of millions of users maybe? Hopefully they have not used something similar to those cell phone fingerprint readers at least, or assumed uninterrupted power and network connection.
As far as I know, India hasn't ever had the potential to create a reliable and comprehensive population registry before this, although the British might have dreamed about it. It's so easy to not to understand the scale of the problem by looking at it from a small, industrialized country with biometric IDs, short distances and a country-wide, reasonably reliable infrastructure.
And they think exactly the same of you, Mr A. Murika. That is why you get so many calls from Microsoft Support, the IRS, and so on. PS - they have a plan, it also is working and so far, it is winning too. All well protected under the guise of "immigration" and PC non-discrimination, (list all the tricks of the Left). Putin and Mao/Xi are rolling in the aisles laughing, waiting for the End Game, while the blinded fools stumble towards another "election" year.
Try to stay on topic, troll.
We are aware of what US companies are doing, but this article isn't about that. So let's discuss India and it's database. Thanks.
Cheney and Mumbai to be exact. I went through the slums with heavy protection and poor quarter, and that's not even counting rural india with lot of place lacking internet. There is no sensor tech to watch over those people. None. They have no CC, nobody has fingerprint or iris reader, they use cash only. At best you are speaking of the middle class which is still a minority in India (depending on who you ask middle class is 30 million to 300 million folk out of 1.3 billion folk). face it, yes india has made bound and leap, but they have done it very unequally. And biometric sensor tech spread is as far as it can be. At msot it is in the main city maybe spreading to the rural area, and only to make sure identity are correct. But for surveillance you need to be able to watch over people and that mean sensor and a way to read them. At the moment impossible in India Far more possible in the US.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I love Indians mans.
prod and tack'em up.
I've been watching the cameras grow on every traffic light in the city for the past 3-5 years. While not every pole has them yet, mapping out the dead zones and sticking to them well enough not to be tracked would be quite difficult. And since these cameras are run by corporations, not the government (despite using government infrastructure and being contracted to the government!) they try and claim they do not fall until 9th or other law/amendment privacy protections, because those only qualify for direct agents of the government, or some other tenuous excuse.
As it is right now, if I ever gave the government a reason to scrutinize me or a desire to destroy me, they will have far more information than they need to find a law I've broken, an ideal time to plant evidence, or all my associates to stop me from going to ground.
Undesireables in Germany at least had a chance that someone could shelter them if they were lucky and nobody noticed their association or when they went inside to hide. Today they would have location data leaving them with a small area to search and ease enough of doing door to door to capture and convict you, and them for harboring you.