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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.
>"You know, it's ridiculous that there are people that conflate identification with surveillance."
Of course you need identification systems. But surveillance isn't possible or meaningful without identification. The problem comes when an ID system becomes mandatory or essentially mandatory for things it shouldn't be needed for in the first place. Making things worse is the technology now involved making things recorded, permanent, searchable, and sharable; all at little cost. For example, you should not need to prove WHO you are to buy alcohol. You only need to show an ID that a cashier can use to determine you are of age (and that the ID is reasonably of you and real) and the transaction is through and essentially anonymous. But somehow that is now morphing into SCANNING that ID, and STORING your full identification information. There is a huge difference. Once people get used to that, then the next stages kick in- full ID storage for OTC medications, then things that "might" be dangerous, then everything.
So it is not necessarily the presence of an ID system that is the problem, it is how it is used or when it is required to be used. In this article, it isn't just the ID, but the combination of that with biometrics, and then its [mis]use by big business that shows the path it is taking. It won't take long before just about ANYTHING an Indian citizen wants to do- government or private, in person or online, they will have to be ID'ed. Before the age of insanely powerful computers, massive networks, and ultra cheap storage, such ID'ing would be just an inconvenience. But IN that age, it is a privacy (and ultimately freedom) nightmare.