Centre for Internet and Society

Workshop Report - UIDAI and Welfare Services: Exclusion and Countermeasures

vanya — 2019-03-16T04:34:11Z

This report presents summarised notes from a workshop organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) on Saturday, August 27, 2016, to discuss, raise awareness of, and devise countermeasures to exclusion due to implementation of UID-based verification for and distribution of welfare services.

Introduction

The Centre for Internet and Society organised a workshop on "UIDAI and Welfare Services: Exclusion and Countermeasures" at the Institution of Agricultural on Technologists on August 27 in Bangalore to discuss, raise awareness of, and devise countermeasures to exclusion due to implementation of UID-based verification for and distribution of welfare services [1]. This was a follow-up to the workshop held in Delhi on “Understanding Aadhaar and its New Challenges” at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, JNU on May 26th and 27th 2016 [2]. In this report we summarise the key concerns raised and the case studies presented by the participants at the workshop held on August 27, 2016.

Implementation of the UID Project

Question of Consent: The Aadhaar Act [3] states that the consent of the individual must be taken at the time of enrollment and authentication and it must be informed to him/her the purpose for which the data would be used. However, the Act does not provide for an opt-out mechanism and an individual is compelled to give consent to continue with the enrollment process or to complete an authentication.

Lack of Adherence to Court Orders: Despite of several orders by Supreme Court stating that use of Aadhaar cannot be made mandatory for the purpose of availing benefits and services, multiple state governments and departments have made it mandatory for a wide range of purposes like booking railway tickets [4], linking below the poverty line ration cards with Aadhaar [5], school examinations [6], food security, pension and scholarship [7], to name a few.

Misleading Advertisements: A concern was raised that individuals are being mislead in the necessity and purpose for enrollment into the project. For example, people have been asked to enrol by telling them that they might get excluded from the system and cannot get services like passports, banks, NREGA, salaries for government employees, denial of vaccinations, etc. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has ordered Aadhaar not be mandatory, yet people are being told that documentation or record keeping cannot be done without UID number.

Hybrid Governance: The participants pointed out that with the Aadhaar (Targeted delivery of financial and other subsidies, benefits and services) Act, 2016 (hereinafter referred to as Aadhaar Act, 2016 ) being partially enforced, multiple examples of exclusion as reported in the news are demonstrating how the Aadhaar project is creating a case of hybrid governance i.e private corporations playing a significant role in Governance. This can be seen in case of Aadhaar where we see many entities from private sector being involved in its implementation, as well as many software and hardware companies.

Lack of Transparency around Sharing of Biometric Data: The fact how and why the Government is relying on biometrics for welfare schemes is unclear and not known. Also, there is no information on how biometric data that is collected through the project is being used and its ability as an authenticating device. Along with that, there is very little information on companies that have been enlisted to hold and manage data and perform authentication.

Possibility of Surveillance: Multiple petitions and ongoing cases have raised concerns regarding the possibility of surveillance, tracking, profiling, convergence of data, and the opaque involvement of private companies involved in the project.

Denial of Information: In an RTI filed by one of the participant requesting to share the key contract for the project, it was refused on the grounds under section 8(1) (d) of the RTI Act, 2005. However, it was claimed that the provision would not be applicable since the contract was already awarded and any information disclosed to the Parliament should be disclosed to the citizens. The Central Information Commission issued a letter stating that the contractual obligation is over and a copy of the said agreement can be duly shared. However, it was discovered by the said participant that certain pages of the same were missing , which contained confidential information. When this issue went before appeal before the Information Commissioner, the IC gave an order to the IC in Delhi to comply with the previous order. However, it was communicated that limited financial information may be given, but not missing pages. Also, it was revealed that the UIDAI was supposed to share biometric data with NPR (by way of a MoU), but it has refused to give information since the intention was to discontinue NPR and wanted only UIDAI to collect data.

Concerns Arising from the Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on Implementation of PAHAL (DBTL) Scheme

A presentation on the CAG compliance audit report of PAHAL on LPG [8] revealed how the society was made to believe that UID will help deal with the issue of duplication and collection as well as use of biometric data will help. The report also revealed that multiple LPG connections have the same Aadhaar number or same bank account number in the consumer database maintained by the OMCs, the bank account number of consumers were also not accurately recorded, scrutiny of the database revealed improper capture of Aadhaar numbers, and there was incorrect seeding of IFSC codes in consumer database. The participants felt that this was an example of how schemes that are being introduced for social welfare do not necessarily benefit the society, and on the contrary, has led to exclusion by design. For example, in the year 2011, by was of the The Liquefied Petroleum Gas (Regulation of Supply and Distribution) Amendment Order, 2011 [9], the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas made the Unique Identification Number (UID) under the Aadhaar project a must for availing LPG refills. This received a lot of public pushback, which led to non-implementation of the order. In October 2012, despite the UIDAI stating that the number was voluntary, a number of services began requiring the provision of an Aadhaar number for accessing benefits. In September 2013, when the first order on Aadhaar was passed by court [10], oil marketing companies and UIDAI approached the Supreme Court to change the same and allow them to make it mandatory, which was refused by the Court. Later in the year 2014, use of Aadhaar for subsidies was made mandatory. The participants further criticised the CAG report for revealing the manner in which linking Aadhaar with welfare schemes has allowed duplication and led to ghost beneficiaries where there is no information about who these people are who are receiving the benefits of the subsidies. For example, in Rajasthan, people are being denied their pension as they are being declared dead due to absence of information from the Aadhaar database.

It was said that the statistics of duplication mentioned in the report show how UIDAI (as it claims to ensure de-duplication of beneficiaries) is not required for this purpose and can be done without Aadhaar as well. Also, due to incorrect seeding of Aadhaar number many are being denied subsidy where there is no information regarding the number of people who have been denied the subsidy because of this. Considering these important facts from the audit report, the discussants concluded how the statistics reflect inflated claims by UIDAI and how the problems which are said to be addressed by using Aadhaar can be dealt without it. In this context, it is important to understand how the data in the aadhaar database maybe wrong and in case of e-governance the citizens suffer. Also, the fact that loss of subsidy-not in cash, but in use of LPG cylinder - only for cooking, is ignored. In addition to that, there is no data or way to check if the cylinder is being used for commercial purposes or not as RTI from oil companies says that no ghost identities have been detected.

UID-linked Welfare Delivery in Rajasthan

One speaker presented findings on people's experiences with UID-linked welfare services in Rajasthan, collected through a 100 days trip organised to speak to people across the state on problems related to welfare governance. This visit revealed that people who need the benefits and access to subsidies most are often excluded from actual services. It was highlighted that the paperless system is proving to be highly dangerous. Some of the cases discussed included that of a disabled labourer, who was asked to get an aadhaar card, but during enrollment asked the person standing next to him to put all his 5 fingers for biometric data collection. Due to this incorrect data, he is devoid of all subsidies since the authentication fails every time he goes to avail it. He stopped receiving his entitlements. Though problems were anticipated, the misery of the people revealed the extent of the problems arising from the project. In another case, an elderly woman living alone, since she could not go for Aadhaar authentication, had not been receiving the ration she is entitled to receive for the past 8 months. When the ration shop was approached to represent her case, the dealers said that they cannot provide her ration since they would require her thumb print for authentication. Later, they found out that on persuading the dealer to provide her with ration since Aadhaar is not mandatory, they found out that in their records they had actually mentioned that she was being given the ration, which was not the case. So the lack of awareness and the fact that people are entitled to receive the benefits irrespective of Aadhaar is something that is being misused by dealers. This shows how this system has become a barrier for the people, where they are also unaware about the grievance redressal mechanism.

Aadhaar and e-KYC

In this session, the use of Aadhaar for e-KYC verification was discussed The UID strategy document describes how the idea is to link UIDAI with money enabled Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) to the beneficiaries without any reason or justification for the same. It was highlighted by one of the participants how the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) believed that making Aadhaar compulsory for e-KYC and several other banking services was a violation of the Money Laundering Act as well as its own rules and standards, however, later relaxed the rules to link Aadhaar with bank accounts and accepted its for e-KyC with great reluctance as the Department of Revenue thought otherwise. It was mentioned how allowing opening of bank accounts remotely using Aadhaar, without physically being present, was touted as a dangerous idea. However, the restrictions placed by RBI were suddenly done away with and opening bank accounts remotely was enabled via e-KYC.

A speaker emphasised that with emerging FinTech services in India being tied with Aadhaar via India Stack, the following concerns are becoming critical:

With RBI enabling creation of bank accounts remotely, it becomes difficult to to track who did e-KYC and which bank did it and hold the same accountable.
The Aadhaar Act 2016 states that UIDAI will not track the queries made and will only keep a record of Yes/No for authentication. For example, the e-KYC to open a bank account can now be done with the help of an Aadhaar number and biometric authentication. However, this request does not get recorded and at the time of authentication, an individual is simply told whether the request has been matched or not by way of a Yes/No [11]. Though UIDAI will maintain the authentication record, this may act as an obstacle since in case the information from the aadhaar database does not match, the person would not be able to open a bank account and would only receive a yes/no as a response to the request.
Further, there is a concern that the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System being implemented by the National Payment Corporation of India (NCPI) would allow effectively hiding of source and destination of money flow, leading to money laundering and cases of bribery. This possible as NCPI maintains a mapper where each bank account is linked (only the latest one). However, Aadhaar number can be linked with multiple bank accounts of an individual. So when a transaction is made, the mapper records the transaction only from that 1 account. But if another transaction takes place with another bank account, that record is not maintained by the mapper at NCPI since it records only transactions of the latest account seeded in that. This makes money laundering easy as the money moves from aadhaar number to aadhaar number now rather than bank account to bank account.

Endnotes

[1] See: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/uidai-and-welfare-services-exclusion-and-countermeasures-aug-27.

[2] See: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/report-on-understanding-aadhaar-and-its-new-challenges.

[3] See: https://uidai.gov.in/beta/images/the_aadhaar_act_2016.pdf.

[4] See: http://scroll.in/latest/816343/aadhaar-numbers-may-soon-be-compulsory-to-book-railway-tickets.

[5] See: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/linking-bpl-ration-card-with-aadhaar-made-mandatory/article9094935.ece.

[6] See: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/After-scam-Bihar-to-link-exams-to-Aadhaar/articleshow/54000108.cms.

[7] See: http://www.dailypioneer.com/state-editions/cs-calls-for-early-steps-to-link-aadhaar-to-ac.html.

[8] See: http://www.cag.gov.in/sites/default/files/audit_report_files/Union_Commercial_Compliance_Full_Report_25_2016_English.pdf.

[9] See: http://petroleum.nic.in/docs/lpg/LPG%20Control%20Order%20GSR%20718%20dated%2026.09.2011.pdf.

[10] See: http://judis.nic.in/temp/494201232392013p.txt.

[11] Section 8(4) of the Aadhaar Act, 2016 states that "The Authority shall respond to an authentication query with a positive, negative or any other appropriate response sharing such identity information excluding any core biometric information."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/workshop-report-uidai-and-welfare-services-august-27-2016

Workshop on Democratic Accountability in the Digital Age (Delhi, November 14-15)

sumandro — 2016-12-15T09:27:22Z

IT for Change, along with Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), is organising a two day workshop on ‘Democratic Accountability in the Digital Age’. The workshop will focus on evolving a comprehensive policy approach to data based governance and digital democracy, grounded in a rights and social justice framework. It will be held at the United Service Institution of India, Delhi, during November 14-15, 2016. The CIS team to participate in the workshop includes Sumandro Chattapadhyay (speaker), Amber Sinha (speaker), Vanya Rakesh (participant), and Himadri Chatterjee (participant).

The workshop aims to:

Discuss the institutional norms, rules and practices appropriate to the rise of ‘governance by networks’ and ‘rule by data’ that can guarantee democratic accountability and citizen participation, and
Articulate the steps to claim the civic-public value of digital technologies so that data and the new possibilities for networking are harnessed for a vibrant grassroots democracy.

We hope the workshop can create a civil society coalition that can build effective strategies for legal and policy reform to further participatory democracy in the digital age. On the first day, the workshop will set the context through knowledge sharing and thematic presentations and discussions. On the second day, we aim to concretize strategies for collective action to further democratic accountability in the digital age.

Workshop Agenda (PDF)

Background Note (ODT)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/workshop-on-democratic-accountability-in-the-digital-age-delhi-november-14-15

With digitisation at the forefront, government departments need to be cautious about digital security

praskrishna — 2017-05-20T08:33:37Z

The huge leak of Aadhar data from four websites belonging to a central ministry and the Andhra Pradesh government has been on the government radar for a while. The leak, caused by poor security protocols, had left around 130 million numbers and their allied information, like bank and post office account details, open to access for several months. As the last website finally plugged loophole, violation echoed in Supreme Court.

The blog post by Manas Pratap Singh was published by NDTV on May 4, 2017.

Deliberate revelation of Aadhaar can lay people open to financial fraud and it is a punishable offence and this is what the Electronics and Information ministry has reminded all government departments.

"Aadhaar numbers and demographic information and other sensitive personal data" collected by "ministries/departments, state departments" have been published online, read a letter from the ministry dated April 24.

Such publishing, it added, "is in clear contravention of the provisions of the Aadhaar Act 2016 and constitutes an offence punishable with imprisonment upto 3 years". Such outing of financial information is also a violation of IT Act, it said.

Besides asking web managers to sensitise the ministries, the letter also said that display of such information be stopped immediately.

On May 1, a report by non-profit research organisation Centre for Internet & Society said two of the websites from where the data leak took place, belongs to the Union Ministry of Rural Development.

One stored data for the MNREGA - the mammoth Central scheme for rural employment which caters to 25.46 crore people. The other was the National Social Assistance Programme, another Central scheme under which pension is provided to the elderly people, widows and persons with disabilities.

Amber Sinha, co-author of the CIS report, told NDTV, "For portals that had not masked data, we informed the relevant authorities and asked them to take down the available information."

The Rural Development ministry has now decided to form an expert group on IT and cyber security, which will be headed by Kiran Karnik, a former chief of Nasscom. The ministry, however, is yet to comment on the data leak.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ndtv-may-4-2017-manas-pratap-singh-government-knew-of-mega-aadhaar-leak-ministries-were-warned

Will Only Legal Backing For Aadhaar Suffice?

praskrishna — 2016-03-16T02:31:52Z

Aadhaar is set to become mandatory, but the opponents of the scheme are not amused. Concerns about privacy of the Aadhaar number and the authenticity of the biometric data being collected have been expressed by people right from the beginning. But the government has not done much to address these issues.

The article was published in New Indian Express on March 14, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

“It does not matter what legislative backing they give it, it is still a surveillance programme. How can you have a privacy Bill for a surveillance programme? Legislative backing would be band-aid. I do not agree with it,” says Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of The Centre for Internet and Society. The society is a Bengaluru-based organisation looking at multi-disciplinary research and advocacy.

Abraham says that ever since the Aadhaar scheme was implemented, there was a massive degradation of civil liberties. “It is an opaque technology. Why should the government have such a database?” he asks.

Abraham says that the keys to the data should not have rested with the government where it is vulnerable. Instead, the government should have explored the concept of introducing smart cards issued to the citizen with the data stored on it.

Access to this data could not be had without the permission of the citizen, he says. At present, if something goes wrong or if the data is compromised, the government can always blame a lapse in technology, Abraham adds.

He questions the government’s logic where it assumes that only the poor section of society can misuse the benefits and says that it is well known that the problem exists in the supply chain and that the government has done nothing to address this.

Mathew Thomas of The Fifth Estate, an NGO, wonders what advantage the BJP suddenly found that they decided to pursue Aadhaar rather than send it to the trash bin as they had promised before the general elections.

Thomas says Aadhaar is flawed and is a fraud on the Constitution and the government has taken the money bill route simply to avoid a debate on it.

“Just passing a Bill is meaningless. This is radically wrong and we all know that protection of privacy is nonsense. How do they plan to plug the leakages? Have they even conducted a study, because there is no evidence of it. The correct beneficiary can get an LPG cylinder, but what is stopping the person from using it for an auto or for his car? That the government can lie to its own people is terrible,” he says.

A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, which is hearing the matter on privacy concerns about Aadhaar, is expected to have a hearing by the end of this month.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/new-indian-express-march-14-2016-will-only-legal-backing-for-aadhaar-suffice

Will Aadhaar leaks be used as an excuse to shut out scrutiny of welfare schemes?

Anumeha Yadav — 2017-05-20T07:09:51Z

Aadhaar data of all 23 crore beneficiaries of Direct Benefit Transfer schemes could be publicly available, says a report by Centre for Internet and Society.

The blog post by Anumeha Yadav was published on Scroll on May 20, 2017.

In the past three months, there have been several reports about caches of Aadhaar data being publicly displayed on government websites across the country.

Personal information associated with the biometric-based 12-digit unique identification number, which the government wants every Indian resident to have, is mandated to be confidential under the Aadhaar Act, 2016.

But exactly how much Aadhaar data has been compromised by negligent government departments?

On May 2, researchers at the non-profit Centre for Internet and Society released a comprehensive report on the extent of the data breaches. They documented four government portals using Aadhaar for making payments and found that sensitive personal and financial information of nearly 13 crore people was being displayed on them, including details of about 10 crore bank accounts.

Two of the portals, for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the National Social Assistance Programme, belong to the Union rural development ministry. The others are run by the Andhra Pradesh government for the workers’ insurance scheme Chandranna Bima and for filing Daily Online Payment Reports of MNREGA.

The researchers estimated that Aadhaar data of all 23 crore beneficiaries of the central government’s various Direct Benefit Transfer schemes could be publicly available. This means nearly a fifth of India’s population is potentially exposed to irreversible privacy harm, and financial and identity fraud.

The Unique Identification Authority of India, the agency which manages the Aadhaar database, however, and had earlier denied any breach of confidential data, has now reportedly said that such a data leak could only be the result of a potentially illegal hack attack and asked CIS to provide details of the persons involved in the data theft.

The rural development ministry, on its part, has changed how its MNREGA database is accessed, redacting Aadhaar numbers and bank account details of the beneficiaries. Senior officials of the ministry, however, denied making systemic changes in the wake of the Centre for Internet and Society report.

“The researchers claimed that financial information of over 10 crore individuals was available publicly, on pension and MNREGA portals,” said Nagesh Singh, additional secretary in the ministry, “but bank account details were displayed only on two state department websites of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as these states are far advanced in transparency practices.”

“For all other states,” Singh added, “financial information and Aadhaar numbers were removed or masked last year. For pension schemes we masked the data in June 2016, and for MNREGA this data was removed in December. Even if any data was showing, it would only be for the particular block the resident is in, not for any other state workers.”

All this was done, he said, “because the UIDAI communicated to us that this information is sensitive and should not be displayed and the Aadhaar regulations prohibit display of Aadhaar numbers”. The Aadhaar (Sharing of Information) Regulations were introduced last September.

Contrary to Singh’s claims, social activists outside Andhra Pradesh and Telangana confirmed they could access bank account details of MNREGA workers until May 3. Only on May 4, two days after the Centre for Internet and Society report was released, did the details stop showing on the Management Information System.

“We could no longer access the electronic muster roll, and it started returning error messages,” said Ashish Ranjan of Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan, a registered union of unorganised workers in Araria, Bihar. But until early May, he added, the Management Information System allowed anyone in any state to access the personal information of workers, even from other states.

Activists and beneficiaries relied on this system for two things. “Several of the new bank accounts have errors, and accessing this information directly helped get the discrepancies corrected without going to block level officials,” Ranjan explained. “It also helped track where the wages of workers were stuck.”

When activists asked why the data was no longer accessible, Ranjan said, rural development department officials said the Management Information System was changed “on the directions of the Supreme Court and the Union cabinet secretary.”

“This has been the pattern with the MNREGA MIS for long,” Ranjan said, referring to the information system. “Senior officials change access to a feature as they wish without clear processes or explanations.”

James Herenj, an activist with NREGA Watch, a non-profit which monitors the implementation of MNREGA in Jharkhand, had the same experience. “Bank account details were removed from the website last week,” he said, “this is a problem as we can no longer help MNREGA workers get data entry errors corrected.”

The Centre for Internet and Society researchers too contested the rural development ministry’s claim that Aadhaar numbers and bank account details were displayed only on Andhra Pradesh and Telangana government websites. They released a video clip showing them accessing bank account details and Aadhaar numbers of 801 MNREGA workers of Agara panchayat in Bengaluru through an internet search on March 25.

Screenshot of a Chandigarh Union Territory website displaying Aadhaar information.

Consent, please?

The Aadhaar Act, 2016 requires both government and private agencies to take informed consent before using a person’s Aadhaar for authentication, but there is little evidence that consent is sought before Aadhaar is seeded with personal and financial information.

Indeed, when the Supreme Court first permitted the voluntary use of Aadhaar for MNREGA in October 2015, Aadhaar numbers of 2.36 crore workers had already been seeded to their bank accounts, without the consent of over 99% of them.

The rural development ministry’s data shows that until June 2016, only about 4,10,000, or less than 1% of the 10.7 crore MNREGA workers, had agreed to Aadhaar-based payments. The ministry worked around this by organising “consent camps” to retrospectively collect proof of consent.

Poor standards

Writing in The Economic Times, Ram Sewak Sharma, chairperson of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and former director general of the Unique Identification Authority of India, argued that the reports about “Aadhaar leaks” on government websites failed to account for provisions of the Right to Information Act, 2005. Section 4 of this law provides for proactive disclosure of government decisions while Section 8 mandates public authorities to publish all information on welfare schemes, including details of beneficiaries.

This has created a situation, Sharma pointed out, where the transparency law may require even Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries to be made public even though the Aadhaar Act mandates them to be confidential.

Right to Information activists, however, said the authorities were anything but devoted to the transparency law. Crucial information they seek on the efficacy of Aadhaar in welfare schemes is routinely denied.

“The government is willfully manipulating information systems to subvert details of biometric failures,” said Amrita Johri, a member of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information and an activist with the Right to Food campaign, which has petitioned the Delhi High Court against Aadhaar being mandatory for food rations. “We have come across instances of ration cardholders being turned back because of fingerprints being falsely rejected, or network failure, but on the Delhi government’s website, this is shown as the beneficiaries not having come to the ration shop at all.”

“Similarly, the government claims it has removed bogus ration cards through Aadhaar,” Johri added, “but they do not show any administrative action if such bogus cards were really found through Aadhaar even though Section 4 of the RTI Act requires disclosure of such decisions.”

Jharkhand Directorate of Social Security displayed Aadhaar numbers, bank accounts numbers and transaction details of over 15 lakh pensioners.

Johri is concerned that the “Aadhaar leaks” could become an excuse to deny people “other useful information”. “When we requested officials to display how many biometric transaction were not successful, they told us that in a few days, they will remove the entire MIS as there had received orders from the food ministry to not display demographic data associated with Aadhaar,” she said. “But we pointed out that it was the creation of a single identification number that is the problem. Why should information on all other government schemes be removed?”

The Centre for Internet and Society report points out that while the law now makes Aadhaar numbers confidential, the government has failed to specify data masking standards. Section 6 of the Aadhaar Regulations lays down that no government or private agency should publish Aadhaar numbers unless they are redacted or blacked out “through appropriate means”.

But this is too vague, the report points out. “In some instances, the first four digits are masked while in others the middle digits are masked,” Srinivas Kodali, one of the authors of the report, explained, “which means someone with access to different databases can use tools for aggregation to reconstruct information hidden or masked in a particular database.”

Kodali said that for information other than Aadhaar numbers, each ministry and department is required to classify the data that is sensitive, restricted or open, which they have failed to do. “The National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, 2012 requires securing information of sensitive and restricted data but it does not recommend the ways to do it,” he said. “The standards around information disclosure and control do not exist, and the Ministry of Statistics expert committee on this was unable to suggest one last month.”

“Even for MNREGA data,” Kodali continued, “the Ministry of Rural Development’s chief data officer should have classified the financial information as restricted or open when the database was first created. But did they do this.”

Nagesh Singh, the additional secretary, however said his ministry “does not have a chief data officer to do this”. “The ministry’s economic advisor is the official responsible for categorising data and advises us on this,” he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/scroll-may-20-2017-anumeha-yadav-will-aadhaar-leaks-be-used-as-an-excuse-to-shut-out-scrutiny-of-welfare-schemes

Will Aadhaar Act Address India’s Dire Need For a Privacy Law?

nehaa — 2016-04-05T16:01:06Z

The article was published by Quint on March 31, 2016.

The passage of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 (will hereby be referred to as “the Act”) has led to flak for the government from privacy advocates, academia and civil society, to name a few.

To my mind, the opposition deserves its fair share of criticism (lacking so far), for its absolute failure to engage with and act as a check on the government in the passage of the Act, and the events leading up to it.

The government’s introduction of the Act as a ‘money bill’ under Article 110 of the Constitution of India (“this/the Article”) is a mockery of the constitutional process. It renders redundant, the role of the Rajya Sabha as a check on the functioning of the Lower House.

Article 110 limits a ‘money bill’ only to six specific instances: covering tax, the government’s financial obligations and, receipts and payments to and from the Consolidated Fund of India, and, connected matters.

The Act lies well outside the confines of the Article; the government’s action may attract the attention of the courts.

Political One-Upmanship


Finance Minister Arun Jaitley (left) listens to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan. (Photo: Reuters)

In the past, the Supreme Court (“the Court”) has stepped into the domain of the Parliament or the Executive when there was a complete and utter disregard for India’s constitutional scheme. In recent constitutional history, this is perhaps most noticeable in the anti-defection cases, (beginning with Kihoto Hollohan in 1992); and, in the SR Bommai case in 1994, on the imposition of the President’s rule in states.

In hindsight, although India has benefited from the Court’s action in the Bommai and Hollohan cases, it is unlikely that the passage of the Aadhaar Act as a ‘money bill’, reprehensible as it is, meets the threshold required for the Court’s intervention in Parliamentary procedure.

Besides, the manner of its passage, the Act warrants

Censure for its process
Its (in)compatibility with fundamental rights
The failure to incorporate the suggestions of the Yashwant Sinha-led Standing Committee to UPA’s NIDAI Bill
The possibility of surveillance that it presents
The lack of measures to protect personal information
Its inadequate privacy safeguards
The questions around the realisation of its stated purpose.

Instead, a part of the Aadhaar debate has involved political one-upmanship between the Congress and the BJP, pitting the former’s NIDAI Bill against the latter’s Aadhaar Act.

While an academic comparison between the two is welcome, its use as a tool for political supremacy would be laughable, were it not deeply problematic, given the many serious concerns highlighted above.

Better Than UPA Bill?


The Act may have more privacy safeguards than the earlier UPA Bill. (Photo: iStockphoto)

And while the Act may have more privacy safeguards than the earlier UPA Bill, critics have argued that they not up to the international standard, and instead, that they are plagued by opacity.

Additionally, despite claims that the Act is a significant improvement over the UPA Bill, it fails to address concerns, including around the centralised storage of information, that were raised by civil society members and others.

Perhaps most problematically, however, the Act takes away an individual’s control of her own information. Subsidies, government benefits and services are linked to the mandatory possession of an Aadhar number (Section 7 of the Act), effectively negating the ‘freedom’ of voluntary enrollment (Section 3 of the Act). This directly contradicts the recommendations of the Justice AP Shah Committee, before whom the Unique Identification Authority of India had earlier stated that enrollment in Aadhaar was voluntary.

To make matters worse, the individual does not have the authority to correct, modify or alter her information; this lies, instead, with the UIDAI alone (Section 31 of the Act). And the sharing of such personal information does not require a court order in all cases.


Kanhaiya Kumar speaking in JNU on 3 March 2016. (Photo: PTI)

It may be authorised by Executive authorities under the vague, ill-understood concept of ‘national security’, (Section 33(2) of the Act) which the Act does not define. We would do well to learn the dangers of leaving ‘national security’ open to interpretation, in the aftermath of the recent events at JNU.

These recent events around Aadhaar have only underscored the dire urgency for comprehensive privacy legislation in India and, the need to overhaul our data protection laws to meet our constitutional commitments along with international standards.

Meanwhile, constitutional challenges to the Aadhaar scheme are currently pending in the Supreme Court. The Court’s verdict may well decide the future of the Aadhaar Act, with the stage already set for a constitutional challenge to the legislation. The BJP’s victory in this case may be short-lived.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-quint-march-31-2016-nehaa-chaudhari-will-aadhaar-act-address-indias-dire-need-for-a-privacy-law

Why We Should All Worry About The Mandatory Imposition Of Aadhaar

praskrishna — 2017-03-27T15:02:10Z

It appears that with each passing day, the government is linking an increasing number of benefits and government services to the 12-digit biometric-based Aadhaar number for Indians, despite growing concerns around its data privacy and security.

The article by Rimin Dutt and Ivan Mehta was published by Huffington Post on March 24, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Aadhaar, which collects among other information, citizens' iris scans and fingerprints and stores them into a centralised database for a prolonged time with only loose guidelines and no pre-existing laws to ensure the privacy of that data, is now linked to no less than 38 government schemes, including the government's latest directive –- that Aadhaar become mandatory for tax filing and securing PAN numbers -- introduced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley earlier this week.

Jaitley openly admitted on Wednesday in the Parliament that the government, in effect, would be forcing people to get Aadhaar in an effort to increase tax compliance.

Aadhaar's use, by no means, is restricted to government agencies alone. A growing number of private financial institutions are now fulfilling their "Know Your Customer" or e-KYC formalities by making Aadhaar compulsory. The government is also in the process of making Aadhaar the basis of all financial transactions.

While the timing of the government's aggressive push of Aadhaar, in itself, is raising eyebrows among political observers, there are some serious concerns about this unique experiment that deserve stronger scrutiny.

Why disregard the Supreme Court?

In making Aadhaar mandatory for filing taxes and securing core taxpayer identity, the government has openly gone against a Supreme Court order from last year that explicitly stated that the Aadhaar Card scheme is "purely voluntary" and cannot be made mandatory until the court has decided on this.

The government has defended its move, saying it is allowed to do so under the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act 2016.

However, as Gopal Krishna, a member of the Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties, writes in Business Today, the passage of the Act by the Parliament "does not automatically imply that any agency can make UID/Aadhaar compulsory disregarding the Supreme Court's orders."

According to Krishna, in doing so, the government is "clearly stepping beyond" the mandate of the Aadhaar Act, and also acting in contempt of the Parliament, according to him.

In addition, if tax evasion was the driving factor behind the move, it begs the question — wouldn't forcing people to get Aadhaar actually do the opposite by adding another layer of hassle?

Indeed, tax experts have noted how this requirement may hinder tax collection. Archit Gupta, Founder & CEO ClearTax.com, a tax service provider told HuffPost India, "The [Aadhaar] announcement is likely to be a dampener to tax filers, specially first-timers ... FY 2016-17 filing is expected to see a large number of first-time filers due to demonetisation efforts, and this move may make them more guarded."

Why not strengthen PAN?

The government already has an extensive mandate for the Permanent Account Number (PAN) cards, which are required to validate several important services or for undertaking transactions such as buying and selling property or jewellery worth over ₹2 lakhs. Last year, the government, in fact, said that the National Pension System (NPS) scheme would accept PAN cards over Aadhaar cards to validate new customers.

On Wednesday, however, Jaitley said PAN cards have been misused by certain people to evade taxes, and there are reports that Aadhaar may become the ultimate authenticating document. However, the continued and growing use of PAN along with Aadhaar adds an extra layer of formalities for citizens to access government services, which are their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

How safe is Aadhaar anyway?

Depending on who you talk to, the safety concerns of Aadhaar come up as a pressing issue, especially in the wake of a recent security incident when the Unique Identification Authority of India initiated police action against entities associated with Axis Bank including Suvidhaa Infoserve and e-sign provider eMudhra, which had allegedly engaged in unauthorised authentication and impersonation by illegally storing Aadhaar biometrics.

Earlier this month, in a separate incident, security researcher Srinivas Kodali warned Indian authorities of a website that was leaking Aadhaar demographic data of over five lakh minors, as well as the existence several parallel databases that had key identification data linked to Aadhaar, Scroll reported.

In the absence of any privacy laws in India, these security concerns have assumed even greater significance.

UIDAI, the authority behind Aadhaar, has maintained the technology behind Aadhaar is robust and that it uses advanced encryption to transmit and store data. It specifically denied that any breach of centralised data took place in the Axis Bank incident, saying the case was an isolated incident.

However, in a rather ironic twist in the Aadhaar Act, which itself contains no provisions to address privacy concerns, any legal action against any misuse or theft of Aadhaar data can only be initiated by UIDAI, leaving citizens with no legal recourse should a breach occur.

That represents an obvious conflict of interest as it gives exclusive power to the very authority that is responsible for the security and confidentiality of identity information and authentication records, PRS Legislative Research, has noted.

In addition, the controversial Aadhaar Act contains several other inherent dangers such as the potential to profile citizens based on the linking of other databases with Aadhaar by studying patterns of behaviour.

"Techniques such as running computer programmes across datasets for pattern recognition can be used for various purposes such as detecting potential illegal activities...However, these can also lead to harassment of innocent individuals who get identified incorrectly as potential threats," noted PRS Legislative.

There are currently no safeguards to prevent inappropriate profiling, instances of which could increase as more and more private organisations link their data to Aadhaar, and potentially exploit data for commercial purposes without the consent of citizens.

The US, in comparison, has laws in place that require agencies that collects data to submit an annual report to US Congress on all such data mining activities.

Other unresolved concerns

There are several other concerns related to the widespread use of Aadhaar card and the power it is afforded under the Aadhar act. The act allows UIDAI to collect biometric information beyond iris and fingerprint scans, for example, to include other bio-data such as DNA, noted PRS.

The act also allows private agencies to use Aadhaar, which contradicts an earlier stated objective of the scheme that sought to restrict the use of Aadhaar for only government expenditures.

"It allows private persons to use Aadhaar as a proof of identity for any purpose. This provision will enable private entities such as, airline, telecom, insurance, real estate etc. companies, to require Aadhaar as a proof of identity for availing their services," PRS has noted.

There's also the worrying prospect of Aadhaar being used as a surveillance tool by the government, instead of an e-governance technology, Sunil Abraham, executive director of research organisation, Centre for Internet and Society, told the The Hindu Business Line, adding biometrics only make citizens transparent to the state and not the state transparent to citizens.

"We warned the government six years ago, but they ignored us," said Abraham.

Krishna has a more dire warning: "The JAM Trinity -- Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile numbers -- may well be a fish bait to trap unsuspecting citizens into the world's biggest transnational biometric database to turn them into subjects under surveillance forever in the name of a set of welfare and anti-poverty policies.

What has been done to address the security concerns?

It is unclear what the government or UIDAI may have done in the wake of the security incident to upgrade its systems. According to an expert HuffPost Post India talked to, many third party apps that are using Aadhar data may not be screened or audited for security, which is a huge worry.

Kodali told HuffPost India that Aadhaar has potential design issues when it comes to information security.

"By design it allows anyone store information of the Aadhaar holder through [application programming interface]. This is creating many parallel databases with Aadhaar as a key," he said.

He notes that security is an afterthought for many institutions and companies.

"UIDAI and the architects of Aadhaar do not accept that data can be a liability instead of an asset," he said. "The mandatory nature of Aadhaar without the right infrastructure and skilled workforce is not just a cyber security issue, but a national security issue."

When will India get privacy laws?

No one quite knows. But there's a growing call for a need for strict privacy laws, given the move towards digital financial transactions and growing e-commerce use. Most advanced economies including the US, the UK, France, Australia and New Zealand have enacted privacy laws.

However, in India, the right to privacy still doesn't exist despite it being recognised by even the UN charter of human rights. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

The potential for cyber criminals to misuse citizen data isn't lost on even prominent IT industry experts.

Recently, the chief of IT industry body Nasscom R Chandrashekhar told PTI that personal data of online consumers can never be fully secure, emphasising the need for strict consumer protection laws. "More than 3 million credit card data details were misused recently. Let us face it, these kind of security breaches will take place. There is nothing called fully perfect security in IT," he said.

To be sure, Aadhaar has been lauded by several prominent experts and economists, and it is, undoubtedly, an ambitious project to potentially aid financial inclusion for a large population that has historically been outside of a formal financial services net. India also has one of the lowest tax compliance rates, making tax collection a priority for the government.

Recently, Paul Romer, World Bank's chief economist told Bloomberg, "The system in India is the most sophisticated that I've seen ... It's the basis for all kinds of connections that involve things like financial transactions. It could be good for the world if this became widely adopted."

But given the sensitivity of citizen biometrics data and potential for misuse, the government ought to be held accountable for its proper use and ensure enough safeguards are put in place before its imposition on each citizen.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-rimin-dutt-ivan-mehta-march-24-2017-why-we-should-all-worry-about-the-mandatory-imposition-of-aadhaar

Why is the UIDAI cracking down on individuals that hoard Aadhaar data?

praskrishna — 2016-04-17T16:16:26Z

Private firms' offer to print Aadhaar details on plastic card a breach of law.

The article by Alnoor Peermohamed was published by Business Standard on April 13, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The billion-strong citizen identification system, Aadhaar, has given rise to businesses keen on illegal harnessing of this private data, say the authorities.

Outfits are offering services to print the Aadhaar details on plastic cards, something the Union information technology ministry warned against on Monday. These entities charge anywhere between Rs 50 and Rs 600, and are listed on e-commerce websites, apart from own online presence.

Under the Aadhaar law, collecting and storing of the data by private companies without the user’s consent is a crime. Monday’s warning from the ministry to e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart and eBay to disallow merchants from collecting and printing such details was a result of this.

This newspaper could not find any listings of Aadhaar printing services on Flipkart but there was one on Amazon (taken down) and no less than five such listings on eBay.

PrintMyAadhaar is one of the more well organised outfits operating in this space. “Get your E-Aadhaar printed on a PVC card for easier handling,” reads their website. Users are prompted to fill their Aadhaar details on the website, pay Rs 50 and have the card sent to their houses. PrintMyAadhaar even offers discounts for bulk orders.

“Collecting such information or unauthorised printing of an Aadhaar card or aiding such persons in any manner may amount to a criminal offence, punishable with imprisonment under the Indian Penal Code and also Chapter VI of The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016,” read the statement from the ministry.

Currently, Aadhaar stores a person’s name, date of birth, sex and address, apart from their biometric data.

While the biometric data isn’t available to these PDF printing shops, the rest of the information is, according to Srikanth Nadhamuni, chief executive officer of Khosla Labs and a former head of technology at the Unique Identification Authority of India. However, collecting this data poses no security risk to the Aadhaar infrastructure, he added.

“Allowing somebody to accumulate large amounts of data from Aadhaar users in general is not a good practice. We should ensure that the Aadhaar details of people remain private and it should only be up to the discretion of the end-user to share this,” said Nadhamuni.

Some security experts say Aadhaar does pose a security risk, as it makes available an individual's details in the public domain. Several institutions are treating Aadhaar just like any other proof of identity.

“Transactions that should have been conducted using biometric authentication are being conducted just by presentation of paper documents. What is happening most commonly is that people are giving a printout or photocopy of their Aadhaar acknowledgement as their proof of identity to get a SIM card. The risk here is that somebody can get a mobile number against your name,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the non-profit Centre for Internet and Society.

He says the other technical issue with Aadhaar is the lack of a smart card that stores a person’s information, as in a digital signature. Due to the lack of this, people don’t know what information to keep private and what to make public. Conventional security techniques would have had a person keeping their PIN private (as with a bank account). If this personal PIN would have been saved on a smart card, which users wouldn’t have had much to worry about.

“In the case of Aadhaar, the authentication factor and the identification factor are in the public domain, because many people might have your UID number and people release their biometric data everywhere. Due to this broken technological solution, we are now through policy putting band-aids, saying people should not disclose their UID number unnecessarily,” added Abraham.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-alnoor-peermohamed-april-13-2016-why-is-uidai-cracking-down-on-individuals-that-hoard-aadhaar-data

Why experts are worried about Aadhaar-based authentication

praskrishna — 2016-08-07T02:16:29Z

As private companies are increasingly using Aadhaar data, is the privacy and security of personal data really at risk? What do those defending Aadhaar have to say?

The post was published in Citizen Matters on August 2, 2016. Amber Sinha was quoted.

The Unique Identification numbers of Aadhaar card holders are being extensively used by government and private agencies for authentication purposes, as we have already seen in an earlier article.

There are 246 registered Authentication User Agencies in India, both government and private, which are helping organisations and individuals in executing the authentication process. In simple terms, they help the organisation that has placed the authentication request, to confirm the identity of a person during hiring, lending loans or while implementing welfare schemes.

But all does not seem well with the Aadhaar authentication process. Concerns have been raised about the privacy and security aspects and, loopholes in the law.

The amended Aadhaar Bill (now, Aadhaar Act) has a clause that allows the UIDAI to respond to any authentication query “with a positive, negative or any other appropriate response.” This move has drawn a lot of criticism from the activist fraternity. They have questioned the government on framing an Act that places the security and privacy of individual citizens at risk.

Even before the Bill was passed, legal scholar Usha Ramanathan had, in an article published in Scroll.in, expressed concern over private agencies using the Aadhaar database for authenticating the identity of an individual.

“Very little was heard about the interest private companies would have in this information data base. It is not until the 2016 Bill was introduced in Lok Sabha that we were told, expressly, that just about any person or company may draw on the Aadhaar system for its purposes. There are no qualifications or limits on who may use it and why. It depends on the willingness of the Unique Identification Authority of India, which is undertaking the project, to let them become a part of the Aadhaar system,” she wrote.

What’s crucial in the entire process is how the government is allowing private players to use Aadhaar-based information, putting the privacy of Aadhaar-holders at stake. The government is technically allowed to share the Aadhaar information with other agencies, only if the holder has given consent to sharing his information, during enrollment.

The guidelines for recording Aadhaar demographic data states: “Ask resident’s consent to whether it is alright with the resident if the information captured is shared with other organisations for the purpose of welfare services including financial services. Select appropriate circle to capture residents response as - Yes/No.”

In 2011, Citizen Matters had published a report on how people wanting to register for Aadhaar were not asked if they would agree to share their personal information. Citizens seemingly were unaware of the provision for sharing information with a third party and data operators had reportedly not asked them for their consent before marking ‘yes’ for the consent option.

There remains a regulatory vacuum

In less than four months of the enactment of the Aadhaar Act, the number of private agencies using Aadhaar database for identity authentication too has grown long. Amber Sinha, Programme Officer at the Center for Internet and Society expresses concern over the privacy implications that a project of this magnitude would lead to.

“The original idea of Aadhaar was to use it for providing services under welfare schemes. But the Aadhaar Act lets private agencies avail the Aadhaar authentication service. The scope of the Act itself doesn’t envisage sharing the data with private parties, but if any third party wants to authenticate the identity of an individual, they can use the UIDAI repository for the purpose,” he points out.

In the process, Amber says, the CIDR has to send a reply in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ format, for any request seeking to confirm the identity of an individual. The new legislation gives scope for the authorities to respond to a query with a positive, negative or any other appropriate response.

“The Aadhaar enrollment information includes demographic and biometric details. So at this stage, we do not know what that “other appropriate response” stands for. Further, while there are requirements to take the data subject’s consent under the Act, there is lack of clarity on the oversight mechanisms and control mechanisms in place when a private party collects information for authentication. The UIDAI is yet to frame the rules and the rules will probably determine this. Until the rules are framed, some of the issues will exist in regulatory vacuum,” Amber observes.

Under the current circumstances, Amber says, the responsible thing to do for UIDAI is not to make such services available until the rules are framed.

But why has the Authority then started the authentication process even before the rules have been framed? Assistant Director General of the Authentication and Application Division of UIDAI, Ajai Chandra says the rules when framed will have retrospective effect, from the date the Act was enacted.

Activists have also questioned the UIDAI for allowing private agencies to use and authenticate Aadhaar data, when the Supreme Court has restricted the use of Aadhaar. In its last order dated 15 October 2015, the Apex Court allowed the government to use Aadhaar in implementing selective welfare schemes such as PDS, LPG distribution, MGNREGS, pension schemes, PMJDY and EPFO. It makes no mention about the UIDAI using the Aadhaar data repository to provide services to private agencies.

“When the Supreme Court has restricted the use of Aadhaar number to a few specific government programmes only, how can UIDAI allow the data to be used for any other programmes, let alone by private agencies?” Amber asks.

In a very brief conversation, Reena Saha, Additional DG, UIDAI told Citizen Matters that UIDAI was acting as per the Supreme Court’s order dated October 15th. “We aren’t sharing the data with private agencies,” she said.

‘Authentication happening only with consent’

Srikanth Nadhamuni, CEO of Khosla Labs - a registered Authentication User Agency, who was also the Head of Technologies at UIDAI, rejects the accusations on the security aspect, saying that the authentication system is completely secure and foolproof.

“We have made a secure system so that there is no man in the middle taking the biometric information. The biometric information shared on the application is encrypted and neither the AUA nor the Authentication Service Agency (an intermediary between the AUA and the CIDR) can open it. Both the AUA and ASA will sign on the packet and forward it to the data repository as it is. There is no way that we can figure out what is inside the packet. Once the request reaches the data repository, they will unlock the signatures, run the authentication and reply in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or with an error code,” Srikanth explains.

ADG Chandra says that at present the CIDR is replying to authentication requests in an “yes/no” format. “We aren’t sharing the data with any agencies. Upon receiving the request for authentication, be it demographic, biometric or one time pin (OTP), a notification is sent to the registered mobile / email address of the Aadhaar holder,” he says. So if the Aadhaar holder has changed the address, phone number, email ID etc after Aadhaar enrollment, he/she should update the data with UIDAI by placing a request online or through post. This will avoid any confusion that may occur during the authentication.

Ajai Chandra further clarifies, “the private agencies seeking authentication (the Authentication User Agency) are not given direct access to the database. On receiving the request, the intermediary Authentication Service Agencies first examine the format of the authentication request. The request is forwarded to the CIDR only if it complies with the format.”

Apart from authentication, the eKYC (Know Your Customer) option also allows companies to retrieve eKYC data of the Aadhaar holder. This data includes photo, name, address, gender and date of birth (excludes mobile number and email ID). But in this case too, “eKYC data can be retrieved only with the consent of the Aadhaar card holder, the person has to be adequately informed about the retrieval and the data cannot be shared with a third party,” says Chandra.

Though Aadhaar Act allows the UIDAI to perform authentication of Aadhaar number, subject to the requesting entity paying the fee, UIDAI at present is providing the service free of cost. “We will provide free service till December 2016 and may levy the fee thereafter,” the ADG says.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bangalore-citizen-matters-august-2-2016-akshatha-why-experts-are-worried-about-aadhaar-based-authentication

Why did Nandan Nilekani praise a Twitter troll?

praskrishna — 2017-06-12T01:34:53Z

As the Supreme Court upholds the linking of ‘Aadhar’ with PAN, questions around ex-UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani praising iSPIRT head Sharad Sharma Twitter troll and ‘Aadhar’s privacy properties will continue to be asked.

The article by Kiran Jonnalgadda was published in the Indian Express on June 10, 2017.

Last month, Sharad Sharma, the head of the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT) Foundation, an organisation that promotes Aadhaar to industry, was outed as the operator of at least two anonymous Twitter troll accounts that viciously harassed and defamed critics of Aadhaar. The shocking revelation was first met with denial by iSPIRT, and then followed by what may be understood as a reticent apology from Mr Sharma.

In a bizarre sequence of events, the apology received praise from several quarters. iSPIRT’s Guidelines and Compliance Committee (IGCC) investigated Mr Sharma and the ‘Sudham’ team that coordinated the trolling campaign. Two members of the investigating committee subsequently resigned, although only one confirmed.

The committee’s findings, confirming that Mr Sharma was responsible, were summarised for the public by Mr Sharma himself, who then announced that his role as a public spokesperson would now be handled by Sanjay Jain. Mr Jain was once with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), launched by Nandan Nilekani, is currently a director at Nandan Nilekani’s EkStep Foundation, and a close confidante of Mr Sharma. The two have often pitched iSPIRT’s IndiaStack initiative together.

In an internal email questioning this decision, an iSPIRT member asked whether Mr Jain was a part of the ‘Sudham’ team, and whether he was also “at least partially culpable for the [troll] campaign and the violation of the code of conduct.”

The victims of the trolling have received no report, and the two apologies posted by Mr Sharma were both for having “condoned uncivil behaviour”, but not for personally orchestrating the attacks. Among those who praised him was Nandan Nilekani, former chairman of UIDAI and chief mentor of iSPIRT.

Critics have been pointing out for years that Aadhaar lacks sufficient checks and balances, and that claims of benefits are overstated. These concerns have been met with denial, condemnation of critics, and often outright refusal to engage in debate. This has unfortunately only served to alienate an even larger section of the population, turning ordinary citizens into activists.

We can gain an insight into how Aadhaar is promoted by examining iSPIRT. The organisation was founded in 2013 by volunteers who had been working together on the sidelines of the NASSCOM Product Conclave. These volunteers felt the need for an independent grassroots organisation to represent tech entrepreneurs who were building products for India and the world. iSPIRT has grown phenomenally influential over its few years, largely by the work of volunteers who were truly interested in building a mutual assistance community.

Level playing fields are a recurring topic. Just as there is a desire to lower bureaucratic hurdles to give every entrepreneur a fair chance, there is also the question of how a startup can compete against a foreign competitor that has the advantage of a stronger home market.

Flipkart and Ola are two prominent examples in their fight to defend their market share against Amazon and Uber, competitors armed with global experience, more capital, and better trained talent. iSPIRT’s take is that for Indian companies to thrive they must have a supportive ecosystem that enables rapid growth, and so iSPIRT must step up as an “activist think tank”.

One aspect of this activism is IndiaStack, which seeks to help startups by promoting a suite of ‘public goods’: Aadhaar and eKYC for id verification, eSign and Digilocker for digital contracts and certificates, and UPI for payments. If one accepts at face value that these services are well intentioned, then IndiaStack is on a noble quest. The details, unfortunately, are less pristine.

iSPIRT is a private non-profit, but its volunteers include several former members of UIDAI. The guidance and compliance committee (IGCC) investigating the trolling included a current member of government. iSPIRT helped build and evangelise the UPI (United Payments Interface) platform and BHIM app for NPCI, but the level of involvement and terms of the agreement are not public.

For an organisation that claims to champion public goods, iSPIRT is opaque on the level of influence they wield with government (Mr Sharma once claimed some influence but no control), and on who exactly built the various components of IndiaStack, within or outside of government.

They showed a remarkable degree of influence when foisting UPI on a change-resistant banking sector. They have funding from four banks (IDFC, SBI, Bank of Baroda and Axis Bank) and from fintech startups. Despite this level of responsibility, they also have no accountability since they are a pro bono volunteer force, allowing them to distance themselves from failures (UPI failures are NPCI’s problem and Aadhaar failures are UIDAI’s problem, etc) and unpleasant incidents such as the ‘Sudham’ trolling project. (No one has accepted responsibility for operating a troll account.)

At the core of IndiaStack is ‘Aadhaar’, which as it currently stands has serious concerns from its technical architecture to institutional safeguards. Aadhaar lacks publicly verifiable audits, a data breach disclosure policy, or an engagement process for researchers to report concerns.

For reasons best known to them, the promoters of ‘Aadhaar’ are in a tearing hurry to impose it everywhere, in every aspect of an Indian’s life, out of an apparent fear that it will die if adoption slows down. This is eerily reminiscent of startup mantras like “fake it till you make it” and “move fast and break things”.

But ‘Aadhaar’ already has a billion enrollments and the backing of legal measures pushed by the Union Government. There is no threat of imminent demise. And yet, as the Twitter trolling shows, this fear continues to exist for ‘Aadhaar’s proponents, so much so that critics must be silenced at any cost.

Where trolling failed to work, subtler attacks are sure to follow. There have been some in the recent past.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is facing one such attack for its report on the leak of 130 million Aadhaar numbers. The report received wide coverage and was followed by new rules from MEITy (ministry of Electronics & Information Technology) regarding the handling of Aadhaar numbers, but instead of commending CIS for its role in improving safeguards, UIDAI is accusing it of hacking, demanding the identity of the researcher so that he or she may be individually prosecuted.

When Sameer Kochhar demonstrated that previously captured fingerprints were being reused because Aadhaar’s API lacked technical safeguards, UIDAI responded by prosecuting him. A News18 journalist was also prosecuted for demonstrating how double application for enrollment was possible using different names.

As of September 30, 2017, ‘registered’ devices will be mandatory as the current devices are not secure against fingerprint reuse, and an unknown number of fingerprints have already been captured and stored. This sort of forced technological upgrade will happen again as more problems surface into public consciousness, with more researchers and critics harassed for pointing these out.

‘Aadhaar’ pursues inherently contradictory goals. The process of ‘inorganic seeding’, for instance, allows a database to be seeded with ‘Aadhaar’ numbers, to help a service provider identify and eliminate duplicates without the individual’s cooperation. (Inorganic seeding is an official UIDAI scheme.) And yet, the law prohibits using and sharing ‘Aadhaar’ numbers without the individual’s consent.

‘Aadhaar’ aims to be an inclusive project, providing an identity for everyone, and yet easily lends itself to being an instrument of exclusion. There is technical exclusion when biometrics fail to match, and there is institutional exclusion when Aadhaar is made mandatory and an individual is then blacklisted from a service or denied Aadhaar enrollment.

Aviation minister Jayant Sinha recently announced a proposal to use digital id for just this purpose. ‘Aadhaar’ in its current state makes it extraordinarily simple for an organisation to demand it for authentication, but what of the necessary safeguards to protect an individual’s rights? Or of ensuring that grievance redressal mechanisms are in place and actually functional? These are not solved by a technical API integration.

Just as we’ve seen with nuclear power, weak institutions which are sensitive to criticism and fail to ensure effective oversight amplify the risks of the underlying technology. Aadhaar’s supporting institutions, whether government bodies like UIDAI or private bodies like iSPIRT, are immature for the mandate they carry. All technology improves with time, but weak institutions hamper their benefit to society.

As the leading promoter of Aadhaar, founding chairman of UIDAI, and chief mentor of iSPIRT, Mr Nilekani must step up and commit to improving the institutions he commands, and take responsibility for their failures. Condemning critics instead does not help build institutions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/indian-express-kiran-jonnalgadda-june-10-2017-why-did-nandan-nilekani-praise-a-twitter-troll

Why Aadhaar leaks should worry you, and is biometrics really safe?

praskrishna — 2017-05-12T15:48:48Z

What’s worrying is that the UIDAI seems to always be in denial mode over security concerns.

The blog post was published by the News Minute on May 4, 2017. Amber Sinha was quoted.

If you’ve paid the slightest bit of attention to news about Aadhaar, you’ll have heard about a series of leaks of Aadhaar data from multiple government websites. Some of the latest government websites to leak Aadhaar and demographic data, were the Jharkhand Directorate of Social Security and the Kerala government’s pension department.

Shockingly, a report by The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) revealed that the Aadhaar details along with demographic details and financial information of around 135 million people in the country has been leaked by four government portals. And this could just be the tip of the iceberg.

However, the public response to these revelations has been muted. The government and the UIDAI, the authority behind Aadhaar, have retreated behind the defence that only Aadhaar numbers have been leaked, and not biometric details, and hence there is no major problem.

However, experts warn that Aadhaar numbers by themselves pose a sufficient risk when leaked, and that the UIDAI has been consistently underplaying the risks of such leaks and overplaying the security of biometric identification.

Amber Sinha, who co-authored the CIS report, points out that it’s not just Aadhaar numbers that have been leaked on government websites, but also demographic information as well as financial details. Various such bits of data can be aggregated by fraudsters and used to steal identities and commit financial fraud online or through phones.

“We see a lot of examples of social engineering techniques where fraudsters collect data from various sources and impersonate people,” he says. The report points out that one of the most common techniques is to call persons impersonating bank officials requiring sensitive information, and provide Aadhaar and demographic details to make the bid for this information convincing.

Amber also points out that in online and phone verifications, it is possible to impersonate other persons with such information.

“Somebody can call the bank pretending to be me, and he could also authenticate himself as me if he has all the data about me. The bank will ask him some four questions and if he has all that information, then the bank has no reason to believe that he is not me,” he explains.

Co-Founder of HasGeek, Kiran Jonnalagadda, an active voice on net neutrality, freedom of speech and privacy, points out that one of the main problems is that the Aadhaar system assumes biometric verification in every transaction, but Aadhaar cards are often used as identity documents without biometrics particularly for many non-financial transactions.

“Somebody can apply for a SIM card with your Aadhaar number, and if the place that is issuing the SIM card didn't do a biometric verification then your card is good enough, because now they can do anything they want in your name,” Kiran said. In such cases, he points out, impersonation is almost ridiculously easy because the Aadhaar card, just a colour printout with no security features, can be faked by almost anyone.

He points out that, particularly in cases of online verifications, the problem of fraud is acutely heightened. “The thing is that if they have your number and your demographic details, if the government does a verification online, the details will match. Which means that the ID is not fake. It's just that you didn't actually authorise any of this. In a perfect world, everybody would do biometrics. The problem is that that does not exist right now.”

One of the major flaws of the current security practices of Aadhaar is that the UIDAI only takes responsibility for the security of data stored within its Central Identities Data Repository. However, explains Amber, over the last five years, the UIDAI has proactively seeded Aadhaar data across multiple government databases. However, the UIDAI has not exercised strict disclosure controls on these government databases, and there are no clear standards for publicity of information.

The CIS report points to the example of the Andhra Pradesh portal of the NREGA, which carries information on Aadhaar numbers and disbursal amounts on a simple text file, with no encryption or other security measures. The report argues that this system could easily be exploited to transfer illegal sums of money into these accounts, making beneficiaries liable for them.

Importantly, Amber points out that the recent publications of Aadhaar details cannot properly be called leaks. A leakage occurs, he points out, when information is treated as secret and stored accordingly and then breached from the outside or leaked by abusing access.

“Here the websites that we looked at are designed in such a way that anybody without any technical knowledge can access information. They are available for download as spreadsheets, how much simpler could it get?” he asks.

Even with the much-vaunted infallibility of biometric verification, experts warn, there are some scarily large loopholes present. While the UIDAI regularly goes to town with the claim that the biometric data stored in the CIDR is well protected behind multiple firewalls, detractors point out that biometric data collected at each transaction point is not similarly secure.

Other kinds of financial transactions such as card transactions , explains Amber, use two-factor authentication (a physical card and a pin number or card details and an OTP, for instance). With Aadhaar, however, authentication is possible with just biometrics.

This is risky because biometric data is not duplication-proof. When biometric data is collected for authentication, he says, there are ways in which this data can be stored for re-use. “At the end of the day, the way the biometric authentication works is by comparing two images. There is a copy of an image which is collected at the time of enrolment which is stored by the UIDAI, and every time you authenticate yourself you give a fresh image. As far as the CIDR is concerned, it has nothing to do with how that image is being created at that stage,” says Amber.

This can and has led to what is called a “replay attack”, where stored biometric images are used to complete transactions without the presence of the actual owner of the biometric data. This is what happened in the case involving Axis Bank, Suvidha Infoserve and eMudhra in February.

Such situations arise, says Kiran, because Aadhaar confuses two very separate functions–authentication (establishing that I am who I am) and authorisation (certifying that I want an action done in my name). “It’s the difference between signing a cheque and showing a photo ID to prove that you are who you are,” explains Kiran. The problem with biometrics is that both processes are combined in one, and there is nothing to verify that the person to whom the biometrics belongs to is actually present for each transaction.

While the UIDAI has now proposed registered and encrypted biometric devices to overcome this problem, some detractors argue that a way around this is not impossible to find either.

“The larger problem is that the UIDAI constantly plays a game of denial and catch up. They keep pretending like other people are stupid and their system will never be broken. And other people keep pointing out that they've forgotten the most obvious things about security in any information system. They are currently in denial mode, where they insist such things are not possible until after it happens, and then they say oh it's happening, let's go do something to fix it,” Kiran says.

What’s more, Kiran and Amber point out that biometrics can even be physically duplicated. On iris scans, Amber argues, “Now, with a lot of CCTV cameras, if their resolution is high enough it is possible to capture things like an iris scan. So the means for biometric authentication can be used covertly, and that is a technological truth,” he asserts.

Duplicating fingerprints, says Kiran is even easier, pointing out to attendance fraud carried out by students of the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai. These students used a resin adhesive to make copies of their fingerprints, which their friends used to give them proxy attendance in the biometric attendance system.

“Lifting fingerprints is ridiculously easy. Anything you touch will leave fingerprints on it. All it requires is some cello-tape to make a copy of your fingerprints. And then you can apply some wax to it and you get an actual impression of your finger. You can go place that on any fingerprint reader and it'll be fooled,” says Kiran.

It’s not as if such duplication is not possible with devices like credit cards. However, says Kiran, there are two key differences. Firstly, credit card companies have built up elaborate checks and balances over years to tackle fraud. Secondly, and far more importantly, credit cards that have been compromised can be cancelled. “Revocability is a feature in the credit card system. In Aadhaar you can't revoke anything. If fraud happens, you are stuck with fraud for the rest of your life,” explains Kiran.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-news-minute-rakesh-mehar-may-4-2017-why-aadhaar-leaks-should-worry-you-and-is-biometrics-really-safe

What You Need To Worry About Before Linking Your Mobile Number With Aadhaar

Admin — 2017-11-26T05:55:49Z

As part of the directive issued by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) dated March 23, 2017, major telecom service providers have issued a deadline of February 6, 2018, for linking mobile numbers with Aadhaar as part of the E-KYC verification.

The blog post by Roopa Raju and Shekhar Rai was published in Youth Ki Awaaz on November 8, 2017

The landmark case referenced by the DoT in the circular was the order issued by the Supreme Court on February 6, 2017, delivered by Justice JS Khehar (the erstwhile Chief Justice of India) in the case of Lokniti Foundation vs Union of India. The petitioner contended that terrorists, criminals and anti-social elements frequently used SIM cards to commit atrocious, organised and unorganised crimes across the country. The petition called for ensuring 100% verification on the identity of telecom service subscribers in public interest under Article 32 of the Constitution of India. The PIL added that unverified SIM cards pose a serious threat to the country’s security as they are routinely used in criminal and terrorist activities, thereby affecting a citizen’s right (as ensured under Article 21 of the Constitution). As per the CAG report tabled at the Parliament in 2014, the identities of 4.59 crore mobile users still remained unverified.

Article 21 of the Constitution of India, 1949, states that – “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” While there is a threat to the common public interest through increased acts of terrorism and atrocities due to unverified SIM cards, the safety of information provided and linked to Aadhaar are increasingly being questioned.

In a study dated May 1, 2017, published by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based organisation, it was observed that data of over 130 million Aadhaar card-holders were leaked from just four government portals dealing with the National Social Assistance programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the Chandranna Bima Scheme and the Daily Online Payment Reports of NREGA.

On October 25, 2017, the chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, also strongly opposed the government’s plan to link mobile numbers with Aadhaar cards. She said that it was a breach of privacy and that the ruling government was intruding upon the citizen’s right to personal freedom. However, the Supreme Court questioned the state government’s right to challenge the Centre and asked her to file a plea with the court in her individual capacity.

As per the data published by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on September 14, 2017, India’s telecom subscriber base dipped by 1.3 lakh to 121.07 crore in July 2017. Moreover, only three operators – Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and the state-run BSNL – reported additions to their subscriber base.

Month	Telephone subscriber base (in million)	Growth rate
Mar-17	1194.58	–
Apr-17	1198.89	0.36%
May-17	1204.98	0.51%
Jun-17	1210.84	0.49%
Jul-17	1210.71	-0.01%

(Source: TRAI monthly subscription data)

The dip in the subscriber count for various telecom operators can be accredited to the phasing of registration of SIM cards through E-KYC for new mobile numbers. While there is a the possibility of addition of genuine subscribers in the following months, the direct subscriber acquisition cost (DSAC) has been significantly reduced owing to the overall reduction in subscriber addition (assuming exclusion of sunk cost).

Prior to the DoT directive, telecom service providers relied heavily on the documents provided by the subscribers for SIM registration. The two-fold impact of this was the delay in SIM activation, owing to the transfer of documents from the retailer to the distributor to the company and the possibility of documents not matching with the usage timeline of usage. Additionally, tracking the ever-changing retailers was difficult for the service providers – and with the subscriber documents being collected and stored at one location by the service providers, verification of dummy subscribers was difficult.

With the introduction of Aadhaar linkage for mobile numbers, subscribers are held accountable for its usage, thereby tagging responsibility for any acts arising as a result. Savings from the digitisation of documents and paper should also be considered.

However, an increased number of job losses is possible, owing to the ‘optimisation’ of the process by way of document verification, servicing costs and reliance on third parties (to name just a few). Increased compliance costs are also an issue of concern.

The key question that looms prominently with the approaching deadline is how secure public data will be, given that it may possibly be linked with bank account numbers and income tax returns. With retailers using fingerprints of the subscribers to validate Aadhaar numbers with the mobile numbers at the time of SIM registration, there is an increased risk of exposure to identity theft.

While the government is increasingly trying to bring in a seamless process to assimilate data for transparency in analysing consumer patterns, it is suggested that they also allocate funds for enhancing the cyber-security of the data consolidated from this directive. Furthermore, cyber security regulations can be strengthened to avoid data leakages to third party organisations. Severe penalties should also be implemented to ensure robust compliance to these measures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/youth-ki-awaaz-roopa-sudarshan-what-you-need-to-worry-about-before-linking-your-mobile-number-with-aadhaar

What privacy? 13 crore Aadhaar numbers accessible on government portals

praskrishna — 2017-05-03T14:39:46Z

At least 13 crore Aadhaar numbers and 10 crore bank account numbers are readily accessible on government portals, a report claims.

The blog post by Anusha Ravi was published in Oneindia on May 2, 2017.

The centre for internet and society, in its report, has claimed that Aadhaar numbers with sensitive personal financial information were publicly available on four government portals built to oversee welfare schemes. The report said that the government portals made it easy to access sensitive details, despite it being illegal. "It is extremely irresponsible on the part of the UIDAI [Unique Identification Authority of India], the sole governing body for this massive project, to turn a blind eye to the lack of standards prescribed for how other bodies shall deal with such data, such cases of massive public disclosures of this data, and the myriad ways in which it may be used for mischief," said Amber Sinha and Srinivas Kodali, the authors of the report.

Apart from accessing a person's details, the portals made it possible for anyone to get data on beneficiaries of welfare schemes. In many cases, it included bank account numbers of beneficiaries. The report suggests that close to 23 crore Aadhaar number could have been leaked if most of the government portals connected to direct benefit transfers used the 'same negligent standards for storing data as the ones examined'. "The document shows that the breaches are an indicator of potentially irreversible privacy harm and the data could be used for financial fraud," the authors said in the report. The report was documented after authors studied the National Social Assistance Programme, National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Andhra Pradesh government's Chandranna Bima Scheme and Andhra Pradesh's Daily Online Payment Reports of NREGA.

The report said that sensitive personal identity information such as Aadhaar number, caste, religion, address, photographs and financial information were easily available with a few clicks and suggested how poorly conceived these initiatives were. The report highlights that it was illegal to make personal data public and also refers to # #AadhaarLeaks, a campaign on twitter aimed at exposing the loopholes in the Aadhaar system.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/one-india-may-2-2017-anusha-ravi-what-privacy-13-crore-aadhaar-numbers-accessible-on-governmental-portals

Watch: Aadhaar has become a whipping boy: Nandan Nilekani

praskrishna — 2017-05-19T09:54:52Z

India certainly needs a modern data privacy and protection law, Nilekani said in an interview.

The Alnoor Peermohamed and Raghu Krishnan was published in the Business Standard on May 13, 2017.

As debate rages over Aadhaar being a privacy and surveillance liability, its architect Nandan Nilekani says the unique identity programme has become a “whipping ward”. In an interview with Alnoor Peermohamed and Raghu Krishnan, he says we need a data protection and privacy law with adequate judicial and parliamentary oversight. Edited excerpts:

There is concern we are losing our privacy because of Aadhaar...

Privacy is an issue the whole world is facing, thanks to digitisation. The day you went from a feature phone to a smartphone the amount of digital footprint you left behind went up dramatically. The phone records your messages, it knows what you are saying, it has a GPS so it can tell anybody where you are, the towers can tell anybody where you are because they are constantly pinging the phone. There are accelerometers and gyroscopes in the phone that detect movement.

Internet companies essentially make money from data. They use data to sell you things or advertisements. And that data is not even in India, it is in some country in some unaccountable server and accessible to the government of that foreign country, not ours.

Then increasingly there is the Internet of Things. Your car has so many sensors, wearables have sensors and all of them are recording data and beaming it to somebody else. Then there are CCTV cameras everywhere, and today they are all IP-enabled.

So privacy is a global issue, caused by digitisation. Aadhaar is one small part of that. The system is designed not to collect information, because the first risk to privacy is if someone is collecting information. Aadhaar is a passive ID system, it just sits there and when you go somewhere and invoke it, it authenticates your identity. By design itself, it is built for privacy. I believe India needs a modern data privacy and protection law.

Why is Aadhaar being used as a proxy for the privacy and data protection issues?

It is a motivated campaign by people who are trying to find different ways to say something about it. Privacy is a much bigger issue. I have been talking about privacy much before anyone else. In 2010, when it was not such a big issue, I had written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying we needed a data protection law. You could see what was happening, the iPhone came out on June 30, 2007, Android phones came around the time we started Aadhaar, so we could see the trend. I asked Rahul Matthan, a top intellectual property and data lawyer, to help and we worked with the government to come out with a draft law. And then there was the AP Shah Committee. The UIDAI’s DDG Ashok Pal Singh was a part of that committee, so we helped shape that policy.

When a banking application uses Aadhaar, the system does not know what the bank does. It is deliberately designed so that data is kept away from the core system.

I am all for a data protection law but we should look at it in context, look at the big picture. If people want to work together to create a data privacy law then it is a great thing. But if they want to use it to just attack Aadhaar, then there is some other interest at work.

Now that the government is linking Aadhaar to PAN and driver’s licences, will that not lead to Aadhaar being used as a surveillance tool?

Surveillance is conducted through a 24x7 system that knows what you are doing, so from a technology perspective the best surveillance device is your phone. The phone is the device you should worry about.

Aadhaar is not a 24x7 product. I buy one SIM card a year and do an e-KYC, the driver’s licence sits in my pocket and only sometimes someone asks for it. With the PAN card I file my returns only once a year.

But with all that data being linked, can the government not use it?

It is a valid concern and has to be addressed through a legal and oversight process. Aadhaar is just one technology. You do not attack the technology, you look at the overall picture.

The US has the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under which special courts issue warrants to the FBI for surveillance. This is absolutely required and it should be a part of the data protection law (in India) which says under what circumstances the government can authorise surveillance.

Today mobile phones are being tapped by so many agencies. In the US, the FBI is under the oversight of the Senate. In India, Parliament does not have oversight of any intelligence agency. I remember (former Union minister) Manish Tewari had introduced a Bill six or seven years ago saying Intelligence agencies needed to be under the oversight of the Parliament, but nothing happened.

Is there any way to stop Aadhaar being used as a surveillance tool?

Today a person can be identified with or without Aadhaar. US systems can identify a person in a few milliseconds using big data. All that is part of what we have to protect. Aadhaar by itself is not going to add anything to that. What is important is that the infrastructure of surveillance comes under judicial oversight as well as parliamentary oversight.

Would the Aadhaar narrative have been different if this were a Congress-led government?

I think most people making this noise are against the government, so it is a political argument and Aadhaar has become a convenient whipping ward. Lots of different agendas are at work here. But my understanding is this - whether it is data protection and privacy, surveillance or security, these are all broad issues that apply to technology in general and if you are serious about solving the issues you should fix it at the highest level and have a data protection and privacy law which includes, mobile phones, CCTV cameras and Aadhaar.

A report by the Centre for Internet and Society says 130 million Aadhaar identities have been leaked...

It is because of the transparency movement in the last 10 years. In 2006, we passed the RTI Act and MNREGA Act. Section 4 of the RTI Act says that data about benefits should be made public. At that time it was all about transparency. Since then, governments have been publishing lists of MNREGA beneficiaries and how much money is being put into their bank accounts. At that time it was applauded. Now the same thing is coming back as privacy being affected.

These are not leaks; governments have been consciously putting out the data in the interest of transparency. The message from this is we have to strike a balance between transparency and privacy. And that is a difficult balance because Section 4 of the RTI Act says if a benefit is provided by the government it is public information, so the names of beneficiaries should be published because it is taxpayers’ money.

There is something called personally identifiable information. You should strike a balance between transparency and not revealing personally identifiable information. That is a delicate balance, and people will have to figure this out. The risk you have now is governments will stop publishing data - look, you guys have made a big fuss about privacy, we will not publish. In fact, the transparency guys are now worried that all the gains are being lost.

If Aadhaar is voluntary, why is the government forcing it on to various schemes?

There are two things, benefits and entitlements and government-issued documents. There the government has passed a law, the Aadhaar Bill of 2016, which is signed by the President. In that, there is a clear protocol that the government can use Aadhaar for benefits and what process they should follow.

The second thing is Aadhaar for government documents. There are three examples - PAN cards, driver’s licences and SIM cards.

The government has modified the Finance Bill and made Aadhaar mandatory for a PAN card. Why has it done that? Because India has a large number of duplicate PAN cards. India has something like over 250 million PAN cards and only 40 million taxpayers. Some of those may be people who have taken PAN cards just as ID but not for tax purposes, but frankly it is also because a lot of people have duplicate PAN cards. Why do people have duplicates? That is a way of tax evasion. The only way you can eliminate duplicate PAN cards is by having Aadhaar as a way of establishing uniqueness.

The second thing is mobile phones. Here the mobile phone requirement came from the Supreme Court, where somebody filed a PIL saying so many mobile phones are being given to terrorists and therefore you need to do an e-KYC when the SIM is cut and the government said they would use Aadhaar and they have been asked to do it by 2018.

The third thing is driver’s licences. As (Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari has said, 30 per cent of all driver’s licences are fakes. Now why is this important? Because when you have fake driver’s licences or multiple drivers’ licences, even if you are caught, you can give your fake licence and continue to drive. Today India is the country with the largest number of deaths on highways. Lack of enforcement, fake licences are all a problem. So in the latest Motor Vehicle Bill which was passed the government said Aadhaar was necessary to get a licence. So that you have just one driver’s licence, whether it is issued in Karnataka or Bihar, you have just one.

The government is also talking about using Aadhaar for the mid-day meal scheme...

If you talk to people on the ground, and I have spoken to people on the ground, a big part of the leakage is mid-day meals. It is not reaching children. So it is important that all this has to happen so children get what they need.

You engaged with governments and civil servants when you initiated the Aadhaar process. In hindsight, would you say you should have also engaged with civil society?

I do not think there is any other programme in history which reached out to every stakeholder in the country. When we started Aadhaar we met governments, regulators and even parliamentarians. I gave a talk in Parliament and we engaged deeply with civil society. In fact, we had one volunteer only to engage with civil society.

You said you were engaged with the previous government about the data protection law. Are you engaging with the current one too?

I am not really engaging. I know that people are working on it and recently the attorney-general has made a statement in the Supreme Court that the government will bring in a data protection law by Diwali.

We have heard of several instances of people not being able to get their biometric authentication done. Is there a problem with Aadhaar?

The seeding of data in the Aadhaar database has to be done properly and that is a process. Authentication has been proven at scale in Andhra Pradesh. Millions of people receive food with Aadhaar authentication in 29,000 PDS outlets. In fact, now they have portability -- a person from Guntur can go to Vijayawada and get his rations. It is empowering. We keep forgetting about the empowering value.

What has the Andhra Pradesh government done? They have used fingerprints, but they also have used iris scans, OTP on phone, and they have a village revenue officer if none of the above works. When you design the system, you have to design it in a way that 100 per cent of the beneficiaries genuinely get the benefit. Andhra Pradesh has shown it can be done.

The government needs to package the learning and best practices of Andhra Pradesh and take it to every other state. It is an execution issue.

Activists have raised concerns over the centralised Aadhaar database...

How else would you establish uniqueness? If you are going to give a billion people a number, how else would you do it? Is there any other way of doing it? Every cloud is centralised, then we should not have cloud systems.

How do you ensure security standards and software are updated?

There are very good people there. The CEO is very good. There is a three-member executive board with chairman Satyanarayana and two members, Anand Deshpande and Rajesh Jain. I have no doubt that they will continue to improve things.

On security, you keep improving. It is a constant race everywhere in the world. They are now coming out with registered devices that will make it more difficult to spoof.

But without a centralised database, how do you establish that an identity is not two people? If you look at the team that designed this, cumulatively they have a few hundred years of experience of designing large systems around the world. Every design decision has been taken consciously looking at the pros and cons. Why did we have both fingerprints and iris scans? There are two reasons. One is to ensure uniqueness. The second is inclusion. We knew that fingerprints in India do not work all the time because of age and manual labour. So we included iris scans. I can give you a document from 2009 that says all of this. All of these things were thought through.

If you are given a chance to design Aadhaar today what would you do differently?

I would do exactly the same thing. Go back and look at the design document. Every design has been articulated, the pros and cons are written down, published on our website, and it is a highly transparent exercise. It is the appropriate design for the problem we are trying to solve. We are forgetting about the huge benefits people are getting. Crores of people are getting direct benefit transfer without hassle. They can go to a village business correspondent and withdraw money using Aadhaar. They can get their SIM card and open a bank account using e-KYC.

You are also forgetting that people are getting empowered. That portability has ensured the bargaining power has shifted from the PDS shop owner to the individual. If a PDS guy treats him badly, the individual can choose another shop, earlier he could not do that. The empowerment of millions of people to buy rations at the shop of their choice is extraordinary.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-may-13-2017-alnoor-peermohamed-and-raghu-krishnan-aadhaar-has-become-a-whipping-boy-nandan-nilekani

Vulnerabilities in the UIDAI Implementation Not Addressed by the Aadhaar Bill, 2016

Pooja Saxena and Amber Sinha — 2016-03-21T08:33:53Z

In this infographic, we document the various issues in the Aadhaar enrolment process implemented by the UIDAI, and highlight the vulnerabilities that the Aadhaar Bill, 2016 does not address. The infographic is based on Vidushi Marda’s article 'Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India,' and is designed by Pooja Saxena, with inputs from Amber Sinha.

Download the infographic: PDF and PNG.

Credits: The illustration uses the following icons from The Noun Project - Thumpbrint created by Daouna Jeong, Duplicate created by Pham Thi Dieu Linh, Copy created by Mahdi Ehsaei.

License: It is shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/vulnerabilities-in-the-uidai-implementation-not-addressed-by-the-aadhaar-bill-2016