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.

Comments

"revolutionary" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

It's already gone too far in China

[clovis]

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.

Re:It's already gone too far in China

[clovis]

This article tells us how far the surveillance state has already gone.

Here's an AI doing something "useful"

Since the spring of 2017, the information has been used to rank citizens' "trustworthiness"

Who are us to tell the Indians what they ought to do?

If the Indians want to be ranked for 'trustworthiness' it's their right to do so !!

That is so true, it is their right to do so, and likewise for China. If that is what they want to do to solve their problems, then that is indeed their business.
But, and it's a big but, what constitutes the "they" who want to do these things?
The average man on the street in Mumbai or Beijing? or some government agency?

But first of all, I'm interested in all this for the implications it has for my country, and not so much other places.
We've got the same problem in the USA. There have always been (I'm talking historically) those in power who do things to us that we don't want "they" to do, even though we are part of that they.
And I don't doubt for one second that there's people in power in the USA that thinks putting the owner's QR code on every gun in the USA is a good idea. That one is already being bandied about in California in an indirect fashion.
And consider the push to put backdoors into all encryption. They definitely want that, but that they is not the they that I want to be part of.

And the new law, that underwear must be changed every half hour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Surveillance state? Yeah, right.

[mveloso]

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?

Re:Surveillance state? Yeah, right.

[markdavis]

>"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.

Re:Surveillance state? Yeah, right.

[robot5x]

The problem comes when an ID system becomes mandatory or essentially mandatory for things it shouldn't be needed for in the first place

Excellent point, this is exactly the problem here. The legislation text itself says nothing at all about it being mandatory (although government lawyers in the 2017 Supreme Court case have argued that it should be). However, there are now at least 50 official schemes that require Aadhaar to utilise - anything from receiving social welfare payments, applying for a scholarship, opening a bank account, making any payment above a threshold (INR 50,000) or receiving treatment for - for example - HIV. So it isn't mandatory, but you basically need it to do anything remotely useful.

Not only this, but details of 130 million people and 100 million bank accounts have been leaked via four *government* websites, and a handy little backdoor has turned up (under the 'ExpressLane' programme) which allows the CIA real-time access to unencrypted Aadhaar data.

In short, it's a gigantic shit show.

Re:Surveillance state? Yeah, right.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Of course you need identification systems. But surveillance isn't possible or meaningful without identification

You'd be surprised. Companies like Facebook are able to build detailed profiles of people who have never even had an account with them. They might even have the right name attached to it. Surveillance like that in the physical world has little to do with ID or biometric database in itself; it's about what is being scanned, stored and queried. If you show your ID to the store clerk at the off-license, he might remember your name but whatever, that's not surveillance. If he has to scan your ID and the info on it gets stored (probably attached to a list of your purchases) and shared with others, that's another matter. But if you're not asked to show ID because you're an old fuck like me, clearly over 18, the security camera will have a picture of your mug anyway; good enough for identification especially when cross referenced with other data points. Is the store camera footage shared with police or as security firm? Some of it is, and we've no idea what they do with it. You can be tracked without ID just fine.

A national ID system does not constitute a surveillance state, and it is not an essential ingredient of one either. It can help, and I agree that we should absolutely resist the tendency to ask for ID at every opportunity, because of "security", or convenience, or because "what do you have to hide?", but attacking national ID itself like the article does is missing the point.

The US has been a perfect surveillance state

[aepervius]

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.