Centre for Internet and Society

Is Aadhaar Essential To Achieve Error-Free Electoral Rolls?

praskrishna — 2018-12-25T01:21:45Z

The Election Commission’s plans to link Aadhaar with electoral rolls may have stirred a hornet’s nest.

The article was published in Bloomberg's Quint on December 16, 2018. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The commission plans to undertake the exercise to clean up electoral rolls—which need to be updated frequently to avoid duplication and errors, The Economic Times newspaper reported citing people aware of the matter. But with privacy concerns raised against the Aadhaar, is this the best way to achieve error-free voter data?

Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, doesn’t think so. Using Aadhaar data without the consent of the user poses legal problems, he told BloombergQuint in a conversation. “For the Election Commission to link Aadhaar with citizens’ voter ID would require amending the law.”

It is questionable whether this will fall within the bounds that the SC has set for usage of Aadhaar.

Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director, Centre for Internet and Society

The former legal advisor of the Election Commission SK Mendiratta, however, brushed aside privacy concerns relating to the process. The Election Commission, according to him, is a constitutional body and can use information with the government to ensure purity of the electoral roll.

Reetika Khera, associate professor at Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, said this could be bad for voters. She cited the mass deletion of voters from electoral rolls in Telangana ahead of the recent elections, and urged that due process must be followed.

There are serious problems with the use of algorithmic approaches in various spheres. Aadhaar as a tool to clean up the electoral rolls is the problem.

Reetika Khera, Associate Professor, IIM Ahmedabad

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bloomberg-quint-december-16-2018-is-aadhaar-essential-to-achieve-error-free-electoral-rolls

Intelligence agencies will not have open access to Aadhaar data: UIDAI chief

praskrishna — 2016-10-21T01:32:56Z

Intelligence agencies will not have free access to Aadhaar data, a top government official said on Thursday, looking to assuage fears of abuse of personal information.

The article by Aloke Tikku was published in the Hindustan Times on October 20, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which issued identity cards to 1.07 billion Indians, last month decided to retain data related to the verification of Aadhaar-enabled transactions for seven years, leading to security concerns over data safety.

As reported by HT on Monday, privacy experts expressed concerns that transaction data retained for so long could be accessed by the security establishment for surveillance on individuals without sufficient grounds.

“This fear is completely misplaced,” ABP Pandey, UIDAI’s chief executive officer told HT in an interview.

Security agencies can access the data only in case of national security after they get the nod of an oversight committee headed by the cabinet secretary. This committee has to clear every order made by the designated joint secretary-level officer before the information is shared, he said.

“You cannot have any legal protection stronger than this,” Pandey added.

Aadhaar transaction data is not only protected by the most powerful, contemporary law to restrict access but also by strong cryptography.

“Even if someone attempts, the 2048-bit encryption is so strong that it will take them millions of computers and billions of years to decrypt the data,” he said.

A vocal critic of Aadhaar’s design, Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) suggested he wouldn’t rely too much on the legal framework. “You cannot put a legal band-aid on a broken technological solution. You need to get privacy and security right by design,” the director of the Bengaluru-based research body said.

Abraham said the problem could have been averted if the UIDAI did not store the data in a centralised form. Instead, it could have used its digital signature to sign proof of authentication that could be stored by the authenticating agency and the citizen on a smart card.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-aloke-tikku-october-20-2016-intelligence-agencies-will-not-have-open-access-to-aadhaar-data

Indian Cricket Board Exposes Personal Data of Thousands of Players

Admin — 2018-05-18T05:01:50Z

The IT security researchers at Kromtech Security Center discovered a trove of personal and sensitive data belonging to around 15,000 to 20,000 Indian applicants participating in cricket seasons 2015-2018.

The blog post was published on Hack Read on May 15, 2018.

The authority responsible for protecting this data was The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) but it was left exposed to the public in two misconfigured AWS (Amazon Web Service) S3 cloud storage buckets.

According to the analysis from Kromtech researchers, the data was divided into different categories of players including those under 19 years old. The data was accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and basic knowledge of using AWS cloud storage.

The data was discovered earlier this month and included names, date of birth, place of birth, permanent addresses, email IDs, proficiency details, medical records, birth certificate number, passport number, SSC certificate number, PAN card number, mobile number, landline and phone number of the person who can be contacted in case of emergency.

Screenshot of one of the files that were exposed (Image credit: Kromtech)

At the time of publishing this article, the BCCI was informed by Kromtech researchers and both misconfigured buckets were secured. However, this is not the first time when such sensitive information was leaked online. In 2017, Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) found that names, addresses, date of birth, PAN card details, Aadhaar card numbers and other relevant details of millions of Indian citizen could be found with just a simple Google search.

On the other hand, lately, AWS buckets have been making headlines for the wrong reasons. Until now, there have been tons of cases in which misconfigured AWS buckets have been found carrying highly sensitive and confidential data such as classified NSA documents or details about US Military’s social media spying campaign.

In two such cases, malicious hackers were able to compromise AWS buckets belonging to Tesla Motors and LA Times to secretly mine cryptocurrency. Therefore, if you are an AWS user make sure your cloud server is properly secured.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hack-read-waqas-may-15-2018-indian-cricket-board-exposes-personal-data-of-thousands-of-players

India’s Supreme Court hears challenge to biometric authentication system

praskrishna — 2017-05-20T06:44:02Z

Two lawsuits being heard this week before India’s Supreme Court question a requirement imposed by the government that individuals should quote a biometrics-based authentication number when filing their tax returns.

The post by John Riberio, IDG News Service was mirrored by IT World on May 3, 2017.

Civil rights groups have opposed the Aadhaar biometric system, which is based on centralized records of all ten fingerprints and iris scans, as their extensive use allegedly encroach on the privacy rights of Indians. “Aadhaar is surveillance technology masquerading as secure authentication technology,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based research organization, the Centre for Internet and Society.

The Indian government has in the meantime extended the use of Aadhaar, originally meant to identify beneficiaries of state schemes for the poor, to other areas such as filing of taxes, distribution of meals to school children and payment systems.

Hearings on the writ petitions, challenging the amendment to the Income Tax Act, are going on in Delhi before a Supreme Court bench consisting of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan.

Tax payers are required to have the Aadhaar number in addition to their permanent account number (PAN), which they have previously used to file their tax returns. Their failure to produce the Aadhaar number would lead to invalidation of the PAN number, affecting people who are already required to quote this number for other transactions such as buying cars or opening bank accounts.

The stakes in this dispute are high. The petitioners have argued for Aadhaar being voluntary and question the manner in which the new amendment to the tax law has been introduced. The government has said both in court and in other public forums that it needs a reliable and mandatory biometric system to get around the issue of fake PAN numbers.

The lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, Shyam Divan, has argued for the individual’s absolute ownership of her body, citing Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which protects a person from being “deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” The government has countered by saying that citizens do not have absolute rights over their bodies, citing the law against an individual committing suicide as an example.

The Supreme Court in another lawsuit looking into privacy issues and the constitutionality of the Aadhaar scheme had ruled in an interim order in 2015 that the biometric program had to be voluntary and could not be used to deprive the poor of benefits.

"The production of an Aadhaar card will not be condition for obtaining any benefits otherwise due to a citizen," the top court ruled.

The government holds that the Aadhaar Act, passed in Parliament last year, provides the legal backing for making the biometric identification compulsory.

The current lawsuits against Aadhaar have not been argued on grounds of privacy, reportedly because the court would not allow this line of argument, which is already being heard in the other case. The Supreme Court has made current petitioners “fight this battle with one arm tied behind their backs!,” wrote lawyer Gautam Bhatia in a blog post Wednesday.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/idg-news-service-john-riberio-may-3-2017-indias-supreme-court-hears-challenge-to-biometric-authentication-system

India’s National ID Program May Be Turning The Country Into A Surveillance State

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T12:49:30Z

For seven years, India’s government has been scanning the irises and fingerprints of its citizens into a massive database. The once voluntary program was intended to fix the country’s corrupt welfare schemes, but critics worry about its Orwellian overtones.

The blog post by Pranav Dixit was published by BuzzFeedNews on April 4, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

An abridged version of the blog post containing Sunil Abraham's quotes are reproduced below:

“You can’t change your fingerprints”

Sunil Abraham, the CIS director, calls himself a “technological critic” of the Aadhaar platform. For years, he’s been warning of the security risks associated with a centralized repository of the demographic and biometric details of a billion or so people.

“Aadhaar is a sitting duck,” Abraham told BuzzFeed News. That’s not an unreasonable assessment considering that India’s track record for protecting people’s private data is far from stellar. Earlier this year, for example, a security researcher discovered a website that was leaking the Aadhaar demographic data of more than 500,000 minors. The website was subsequently shut down, but the incident raised questions about Aadhaar’s security protocols — particularly those around data shared with third parties.

Abraham’s concerns are not without global precedent. In 2012, Ecuadorian police jailed blogger Paul Moreno for breaking into the country’s online national identity database and registering himself as Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. In April 2016, hackers posted a database containing names, national IDs, addresses, and birth dates of more than 50 million Turkish citizens, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; later that month, Mexico’s entire voter database — over 87 million national IDs, addresses, and more — was leaked onto Amazon’s cloud servers by as-yet-untraced sources; and in the Philippines, more than 55 million voters had their private information — including fingerprints — released on the Dark Web.

“When this database is hacked — and it will be — it will be because someone breaches the computer security that protects the computers actually using the data.”

“What is the price that we pay as a nation if our database of over a billion people — complete with all 10 fingerprints and iris scans — leaks?” Abraham asked. The consequences, he said, will be permanent. Unlike a password, which you can reset at any time, your biometrics, if compromised, are the ultimate privacy breach. “You can’t change your fingerprints.”

The UIDAI claims that the Aadhaar database is protected using the “highest available public key cryptography encryption (PKI-2048 and AES-256)” and would take “billions of years” to crack.

“Encryption like this doesn’t typically get broken, it gets circumvented,” security researcher Troy Hunt told BuzzFeed News. “For example, the web application that sits in front of it is compromised and data is retrieved after decryption.” Or alternatively, he said, the encryption key itself is compromised. “Naturally, governments will offer all sorts of assurances on these things, but the simple, immutable fact is that once large volumes are centralized like this, there is a heightened risk of security incidents and of the data consequently being lost or exposed,” he added.

Cryptographer and cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier echoed Hunt’s assessment. “When this database is hacked — and it will be — it will be because someone breaches the computer security that protects the computers actually using the data,” he said. “They will go around the encryption.”

Nilekani — who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ requests for comment — recently dismissed concerns around the project’s privacy implications as “hand-waving.” In an interview with the Economic Times, he repeatedly stressed how secure Aadhaar’s “advanced encryption technology” was. “I can categorically say that it’s the most secure system in India and among the most secure systems in the world,” he said.

Abraham is unconvinced by such assurances. He believes Aadhaar fundamentally changes the equation between a citizen and a state. “There’s a big difference between you identifying yourself to the government, and the government identifying who you are,” he said.

Aadhaar’s opponents say the program’s implementation has left India’s poorest people with no choice but to use it. “If you link people’s food subsidies, wages, bank accounts, and other crucial things to Aadhaar, you hit them where it hurts the most,” Ramanathan argued. “You leave them with no choice but to sign up.”

“Can you imagine if the United States passed a law that said that every person who wished to get food stamps would need their fingerprints registered in a government-owned database?” a journalist turned Aadhaar activist who did not wished to be named told BuzzFeed News. “Imagine what a scandal that would be.”

For Nilekani, such criticism is just overstatement and drama. “I think this so-called anti-Aadhaar lobby is really just a small bunch of liberal elites who are in some echo chamber,” he said during a recent interview with Indian business news channel ET Now. “The reality is that a billion people are using Aadhaar. A lot of the accusations are just delusional. Aadhaar is not a system for surveillance. [The critics] live in a bubble and are not connected to reality.”

Abraham laughed off Nilekani’s comments. “The Unique Identification Authority of India will become the monopoly provider of identification and authentication services in India,” he said. “That sounds like a centrally planned communist state to me. I don’t know which left liberal elites he’s talking about.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/buzzfeednews-pranav-dixit-april-4-2017-indias-national-id-program-may-be-turning-the-country-into-a-surveillance-state

India’s Digital ID Rollout Collides With Rickety Reality

praskrishna — 2017-01-17T15:35:04Z

India’s new digital identification system, years in the making and now being put into widespread use, has yet to deliver the new era of modern efficiency it promised for shop owner Om Prakash and customer Daya Chand.

The article by Gabriele Parussini was published in the Wall Street Journal on January 13, 2017. Hans Varghese Mathews was quoted.

At first, it drove both men up a tree.

The system, which relies on fingerprints and eye scans to eventually provide IDs to all 1.25 billion Indians, is also expected to improve the distribution of state food and fuel rations and eventually facilitate daily needs such as banking and buying train tickets.

But Mr. Prakash couldn’t confirm his customers’ identities until he dragged them to a Java plum tree in a corner of his village near New Delhi’s international airport. That was the only place to get the phone signal needed to tap into the government database.

“I hopped on a chair and put my finger in the machine,” said Mr. Chand, a 60-year-old taxi driver. Getting his state food ration “used to be much easier,” he said.

In a system so vast, even small glitches can leave millions of people empty-handed.

The government began building the system, called Aadhaar, or “foundation,” with great fanfare in 2009, led by a team of pioneering technology entrepreneurs. Since then, almost 90% of India’s population has been enrolled in what is now the world’s largest biometric data set.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who set aside early skepticism about the Aadhaar project after taking power in 2014, is betting that it can help India address critical problems such as poverty and corruption, while also saving money for the government.

But the technology is colliding with the rickety reality of India, where many people live off the grid or have fingerprints compromised by manual labor or age.

Panna Singh, a 55-year-old day laborer in the northwestern state of Rajasthan who breaks stones used to build walls, says the machine recognized his scuffed-up fingerprints only a couple of times.

“I’ve come twice today,” he said at a ration shop in the village of Devdungri. “That’s a full day of work, gone.”

Iris scans are meant to resolve situations where fingerprints don’t work, but shops don’t yet have iris scanners.

Ajay Bhushan Pandey, chief executive of the government agency that oversees Aadhaar, said kinks will be ironed out as the system is used, as is the case with software rollouts. It works 92% of the time, and that will rise to 95%, he said.

“On the scale of what [Aadhaar] has achieved, the rollout has been remarkably smooth,” said Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys co-founder who spearheaded the project. “I don’t see any issues that are disproportionate to the size of project.”

An Aadhaar ID is intended to be a great convenience, replacing the multitude of paperwork required by banks, merchants and government agencies. The benefits are only just beginning, backers say, as the biometric IDs are linked to programs and services.

But in rural areas, home to hundreds of millions of impoverished Indians dependent on subsidies, the impact of technical disruptions has already been evident.

After walking for two hours across rough underbrush in Rajasthan to get kerosene for the month, Hanja Devi left empty-handed because the machine couldn’t match her fingerprint with her Aadhaar number.

“It’s always so difficult” using the system, said Ms. Devi, who lives with her husband and a nephew on 1,500 rupees ($22) a month.

Ranjit Singh, who operates the shop, said five of the 37 customers before Ms. Devi also left the shop empty-handed, a failure rate of over 15%.

A shop manager in a neighboring village said identification had failed for a similar portion of his 500 customers.

Any biometric recognition system of Aadhaar’s size is bound to show duplicates, meaning some people’s biometric identifiers will match someone else’s when they try to enroll.The new system hasn’t eliminated attempts at fraud. In August, police in Rajasthan accused two shop managers of linking their fingerprints to a multitude of cards and stealing for months the rations of dozens of clients.

Hans Varghese Mathews, a mathematician at the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society, used the results of a test run by Aadhaar officials on a sample of 84 million people to extrapolate the figure for India’s total population. The error level is less than 1%, but in the world’s second-most populous country, the snag would still affect about 11 million people, he said.

Government officials disputed the calculation, saying the number of duplicates would be much smaller—and that it would take only seven analysts to manage the error caseload.

As for trouble connecting to the registry, better infrastructure, including steadier internet connections, will eventually also help, Mr. Pandey said.

For now, Mr. Prakash has found a way to cope without climbing trees. After scouring the village, he set up a shack in a spot with enough bandwidth for his fingerprint scanner to work. It is hardly efficient. He issues receipts in the morning at the shack, then goes back to his shop to hand out the grains. Customers have to line up twice, sometimes for hours.

Mr. Prakash has applied to the government to operate without biometric identification, but his request was turned down, he said. “They said: ‘You have to keep trying.’ ”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/wall-street-journal-gabriele-parussini-january-13-2017-indias-digital-id-rollout-collides-with-rickety-reality

India’s Data Protection Regime Must Be Built Through an Inclusive and Truly Co-Regulatory Approach

amber — 2018-01-01T16:18:54Z

We must move India past its existing consultative processes for rule-making, which often prompts stakeholders to take adversarial and extremely one-sided positions.

The article was published in the Wire on December 1, 2017.

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology released a white paper by a “committee of experts” appointed a few months back led by former Supreme Court judge, Justice B.N. Srikrishna, on a data protection framework for India. The other members of the committee are Aruna Sundararajan, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Ajay Kumar, Rajat Moona, Gulshan Rai, Rishikesha Krishnan, Arghya Sengupta and Rama Vedashree.

With the exception of Justice Srikrishna and Krishnan, the rest of the committee members are either part of the government or part of organisations that have worked closely with the government on separate issues relating to technology, with some of them also having taken positions against the fundamental right to privacy.

Refreshingly, the committee and the ministry has opted for a consultative process outlining the issues they felt relevant to a data protection law, and espousing provisional views on each of the issues and seeking public responses on them. The paper states that on the basis of the response received, the committee will conduct public consultations with citizens and stakeholders. Legitimate concerns were raised earlier about the constitution of the committee and the lack of inclusion of different voices on it. However, if the committee follows an inclusive, transparent and consultative process in the drafting of the data protection legislation, it would go a long way in addressing these concerns.

The paper seeks response to as many as 231 questions covering a broad spectrum of issues relating to data protection – including definitions of terms such as personal data, sensitive personal data, processing, data controller and processor – the purposes for which exemptions should be available, cross border flow of data, data localisation and the right to be forgotten.

While a thorough analysis of all the issues up for discussion would require a more detailed evaluation, at this point, the process of rule-making and the kind of governance model envisaged in this paper are extremely important issues to consider.

In part IV of the paper on ‘Regulation and Enforcement’, there is a discussion on a co-regulatory approach for the governance of data protection in India. The paper goes so far as to provisionally take a view that it may be appropriate to pursue a co-regulatory approach which involves “a spectrum of frameworks involving varying levels of government involvement and industry participation”.

However, the discussion on co-regulation in the white paper is limited to the section on regulation and enforcement. A truly inclusive and co-regulatory approach ought to involve active participation from non-governmental stakeholders in the rule-making process itself. In India, unfortunately, we lack a strong tradition of lawmakers engaging in public consultations and participation of other stakeholders in the process of drafting laws and regulation. One notable exception has been the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which periodically seeks public responses on consultation papers it releases and also holds open houses occasionally. It is heartening to see the committee of experts and the ministry follow a similar process in this case.

However, these are essentially examples of ‘notice and comment’ rulemaking where the government actors stand as neutral arbiters who must decide on written briefs submitted to it in response to consultation papers or draft regulations that it notifies to the public.

This process is, by its very nature, adversarial, and often means that different stakeholders do not reveal their true priorities but must take extreme one-sided positions, as parties tend to at the beginning of a negotiation.This also prevents the stakeholders from sharing an honest assessment of the actual regulatory challenge they may face, lest it undermine their position.

This often pits industry and public interest proponents against each other, sometimes also leading to different kinds of industry actors in adversarial positions. An excellent example of this kind of posturing, also relevant to this paper, is visible in the responses submitted to the TRAI on the its recent consultation paper on ‘Privacy, Security and Ownership of data in Telecom Sector’. One of the more contentious issue raised by the TRAI was about the adequacy of the existing data protection framework under the license agreement with telecom companies, and if there was a need to bring about greater parity in regulation between telecom companies and over-the-top (OTT) service providers. Rather than facilitating an actual discussion on what is a complex regulatory issues, and the real practical challenges it poses for the stakeholders, this form of consultation simply led to the telecom companies and OTT services providers submitting contrasting extreme positions without much scope for engagement between two polar arguments.

A truly co-regulatory approach which also extends to rulemaking would involve collaborative processes which are far less adversarial in their design and facilitate joint problem solving through multiple face to face meetings. Such processes are also more likely to lead to better rule making by using the more specialised knowledge of the different stakeholders about technology, domain-specific issues, industry realities and low cost solutions. Further, by bringing the regulated parties into the rulemaking process, the ownership of the policy is shared, often leading to better compliance.

Within the domain of data protection law itself, we have a few existing models of robust co-regulation which entail the involvement of stakeholders not just at the level of enforcement but also at the level of drafting. The oldest and most developed form of this kind of privacy governance can be seen in the study of the Dutch privacy statute. It involved a central privacy legislations with broad principles, sectoral industry-drafted “codes of conduct”, government evaluations and certifications of these codes; and a legal safe harbour for those companies that follow the approved code for their sector. Over a period of 20 years, the Dutch experience saw the approval of 20 sectoral codes across a variety of sectors such as banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, recruitment and medical research.

Other examples of policies espousing this approach include two documents from the US – first, a draft bill titled ‘Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011’ introduced before the Congress by John McCain and John Kerry, and second, a White House Paper titled ‘Consumer Data Privacy In A Networked World: A Framework For Protecting Privacy And Promoting Innovation In The Global Digital Economy’ released by the Obama administration. Neither of these documents have so far led to a concrete policy. Both of these policies envisioned broadly worded privacy requirements to be passed by the Congress, followed by the detailed rules to be drafted. The Obama administration white paper is more inclusive in mandating that ‘multi-stakeholder groups’ draft the codes that include not only industry representatives but also privacy advocates, consumer groups, crime victims, academics, international partners, federal and state civil and criminal law enforcement representatives and other relevant groups.

The principles that emerge out this consultative process are likely to guide the data protection law in India for a long time to come. Among democratic regimes with a significant data-driven market, India is extremely late in arriving at a data protection law. The least that it can do at this point is to learn from the international experience and scholarship which has shown that merits of a co-regulatory approach which entails active participation of the government, industry, civil society and academia in the drafting and enforcement of a robust data protection law.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-amber-sinha-december-1-2017-inclusive-co-regulatory-approach-possible-building-indias-data-protection-regime

India’s biometric ID scans make sci-fi a reality

praskrishna — 2017-03-28T02:45:28Z

I have been thinking about my fingerprints and the secrets that may lie within my eyes — and whether I want to share them with the Indian government. I may not however have a choice.

The article by Amy Kazmin was published in the Financial Times on March 27, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

India has the world’s largest domestic biometric identification system, known as Aadhaar. Since 2010, the government has collected fingerprints and iris scans from more than 1bn residents, and each has been assigned a 12-digit identification number.

The scheme is championed by Nandan Nilekani, the billionaire co-founder of IT company Infosys. It was initially conceived to ensure poor Indians received subsidised food entitlements and other welfare benefits that were previously siphoned off by unscrupulous intermediaries. It was also seen as offering poor Indians, many of whom lack birth certificates, with a portable ID that can be used anywhere in the country.

Until now, obtaining an Aadhaar number was voluntary, though most Indians enrolled without hesitation as they see its potential benefits. But New Delhi is now enlisting Aadhaar, which means “foundation” or “base” in Hindi, in more than just welfare schemes. This would mean sharing one’s biometric details isn’t really optional any more despite a Supreme Court ruling that it should be “purely voluntary”.

Last week, the government issued a rule requiring an Aadhaar number for filing tax returns, ostensibly to improve tax compliance. It has also decided that all cell phone numbers must be linked to an Aadhaar number by 2018. Even Indian Railways has plans to demand Aadhaar from those booking train tickets online.

What was once touted as an initiative to improve delivery of welfare suddenly now seems like the foundation of a surveillance state — and I admit the prospect of putting my own biometrics in the database leaves me uneasy.

As a US citizen, I’ve never had to give my biometric data to my government. Domestically, fingerprints are only taken from criminal suspects, or applicants for government jobs, though I know foreign citizens are fingerprinted on arrival.

To me, the idea of sharing eye scans evokes the dystopian Hollywood film, Minority Report, which depicts a near future in which optical-recognition cameras allow the authorities to identify anyone in any public place. The hero on the run, played by Tom Cruise, has an illegal eye transplant to avoid detection.

In recent days, many Indian academics and activists have raised concerns about Aadhaar data security, the lack of privacy rules and the absence of any accountability structure if data are misused.

"Biometrics is being weaponised," says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. "What you need to be worried about is that someone will clean out your bank account or frame you in a crime," he says.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, director of the Centre for Policy Research, has written of the “conversion of Aadhaar from a tool of citizen empowerment to a tool of state surveillance and citizen vulnerability”.

I call Mr Nilekani, of whose honourable intentions I have no doubt. After leaving Infosys in 2009, he spent five years in government, working to get Aadhaar off the ground. He says he is “extremely offended” when his project is accused of being part of a surveillance society, a narrative he says is “completely misrepresenting” the project. “I can steal your fingerprint off your glass. I don’t need this fancy technology,” he says. “Surveillance is far better done by following my phone, or when I use a map to order a taxi: the map knows where I am. Our internet companies know where you are.”

But in a society known for ingenious means of bypassing rules, such as having multiple taxpayer ID cards to aid evasion, Mr Nilekani says biometric authentication of individuals can bring discipline and reduce cheating. “It’s like you are creating a rule-based society,” he says, “it’s the transition that is going on right now.” I hang up, hardly reassured. To me, it seems clear that in India, as in so many places these days, Big Brother is increasingly watching.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/financial-times-march-27-2017-amy-kazmin-indias-biometric-id-scans-make-sci-fi-a-reality

India's National ID Project Brings Pain to Those it Aims to Help

Admin — 2018-05-12T00:53:39Z

Poor management, corruption and fraud are threatening to derail the world’s largest national identity project.

The blog post by Aayush Soni was published in Ozy.com on May 11, 2018.

For Phoolmati, a resident of the Kusumpur Pahari slum in south Delhi, standing every month in a queue at the neighborhood fair-price shop was a trusted routine. When her turn came up, she would place her thumb on a scanning machine that confirmed her identity. But on a biting-cold morning this past January, she had to return home empty-handed because, the shopkeeper told her, the “server was down.”

The next day, it happened again. On her third try, Phoolmati thought she had gotten lucky when the machine scanned her thumb successfully. But she was in for a shock. “The shopkeeper told me that, according to the computer records, I’ve already taken my quota of wheat flour for the month,” she says. When she protested and showed her ration card, another form of identification, the shopkeeper wouldn’t accept it.

Left with no choice, Phoolmati had to buy wheat flour from the open market at 25 rupees per kilogram — more than 12 times the amount she usually paid at fair-price shops. She wasn’t alone. At a weekly meeting of slum residents in a temple courtyard in April, many women complained about the difficulty of buying subsidized food grains to the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (Alert Citizens Organization), a nonprofit that seeks accountability from government agencies. Nanno Devi, a 67-year-old homemaker whose fingers are wrinkled with age, said that she didn’t receive her quota of wheat flour for January because a fingerprint-scanning machine couldn’t detect her thumb impression.

Nor are the urban poor, like Phoolmati, the only ones with such complaints. Students with government scholarships, senior citizens with pensions, farmers entitled to subsidies, religious minorities and backward castes eligible for benefits, patients at public hospitals, young couples trying to get married and professionals updating their bank details are all on the front line of an unparalleled experiment that was meant to help them but is hurting them instead.

Theirs is the lived experience of Aadhaar, a unique 12-digit identity system that includes an individual’s biometrics and demographic data — and that must verify an individual’s identity for the government, increasingly, to even recognize their existence. First rolled out in 2010, it is modeled on America’s Social Security number system, with the aim that government subsidies and welfare programs reach the intended beneficiaries and aren’t siphoned off by middlemen.

But over the past three years, India’s Narendra Modi government has cajoled, pressured and often effectively forced people into enrolling for this ID, even though it isn’t required by law. Today, a person’s bank account risks being frozen if it isn’t linked to her Aadhaar number. Her PAN (permanent account number) card, used to file income tax, could be declared invalid. Mobile phone companies can disconnect her number if it isn’t authenticated through biometrics. An Aadhaar number (or an enrollment number, in case someone has already applied for it) is mandatory to open a new bank account, get a new passport, invest in mutual funds or register a marriage. A joke making the rounds on Twitter is that very soon, Aadhaar will be mandatory for a person to swipe right on Tinder.

In the absence of any privacy law, much of the concern within sections of India’s educated middle class has focused on questions about personal freedom, data security and mass surveillance. But a parallel tide of complaints is rising from those the program was meant to help, rooted in complications it has instead imposed upon them. This growing frustration is threatening to derail the initiative in a manner privacy can’t, in a nation where millions live in cramped city apartments with strangers, and the distinction between personal and public is often blurred.

Cases of fraud, mismanagement and corruption hurting Aadhaar beneficiaries are tumbling out into the public domain almost every week. In late March, hackers used weaknesses in the Aadhaar database to steal data from a government organization that manages more than $120 billion in the pensions and savings of millions of Indians. In January, a 10-year-old girl from the Dalit community — historically at the bottom of India’s caste ladder — was denied a school scholarship because officials had misnamed her on her Aadhaar card. Last October, a farm loan waiver program in Maharashtra state ran into trouble after officials discovered that 100 farmers had the same Aadhaar identity number.

The Modi government maintains that it takes both the security of personal data and the concerns of Aadhaar beneficiaries seriously. But it is reluctant to answer any questions about identity theft, corruption, privacy or misappropriated benefits. Neither Ajay Bhushan Pandey, the current CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which runs Aadhaar, nor Vikas Shukla, its spokesperson, responded to multiple requests for comment.

At a public rally in early May, Modi — who had himself opposed the program before he came to power in 2014 — called critics of Aadhaar “opponents of technology” unwilling to evolve with the times. Increasingly, though, many are questioning whether it’s Aadhaar’s own identity that has changed the most from when the idea first came up. “From a project of inclusion, it has become a project of exclusion,” says Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer who focuses on issues of development and poverty. Just ask Phoolmati.

Aadhaar was the brainchild of Nandan Nilekani, a former CEO of tech giant Infosys, who in a 2009 book argued that multiple forms of identification made it “difficult” to establish a “definitive identity” for India’s citizens.

A single identity linked to passports, PAN cards and other national databases, Nilekani argued, would not only solve this problem but also help eliminate the exasperating processes that India’s bureaucracy is notorious for — mountains of paper, proof of identity in triplicate and a glacial pace of work. It would help citizens avail government benefits that are rightfully theirs. Such a system would reduce a citizen’s dependence on distribution mechanisms susceptible to leakages and make “the moral scruples of our bureaucrats redundant,” Nilekani wrote. “An IT-enabled, accessible national ID system would be nothing less than revolutionary in how we distribute state benefits and welfare handouts.”

That same year, the Congress Party–led United Progressive Alliance government offered Nilekani a chance to translate his idea into reality, appointing him UIDAI chairman. Under Nilekani the UIDAI hired people from within the Indian bureaucracy as well as those outside it. The initial team of 50 included software engineers, designers and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley as well as lawyers and policy wonks who worked at the head office in New Delhi. Each of the eight regional offices had a staff of 20.

In its early-stage avatar, the team had thought out solutions to problems such as the ones the residents of Kusumpur Pahari faced, says a policy consultant who worked with the UIDAI in 2010 and spoke on condition of anonymity. “You can use old methods and physically verify a person’s name and address [by going to their house] if biometrics aren’t working,” the consultant says. “It’s built into the architecture [of Aadhaar].” In his view, the current government under Modi — whose Bharatiya Janata Party defeated the Congress Party and came to power in 2014 — and the UIDAI setup have made a “mess” of the program. He also believes that the goal has shifted from inclusion to mass enrollment. Nilekani did not respond to a request for comment.

For sure, Aadhaar has staunch supporters too, who argue that it has helped reduce the misuse of government subsidies. In July 2017, India’s junior minister for consumer affairs, food and public distribution, C.R. Chaudhary, told the country’s Parliament that Aadhaar had helped the government delete nearly 25 million fake ration cards that the poor use to access subsidized food ingredients.

“This unnecessary fearmongering around Aadhaar is uncalled for,” says Sanjay Anandaram of iSpirit, a software industry think tank. In his view, it’s “last-mile deployment challenges” like fingerprint authentication, one-time-password systems and server glitches that need to be fixed, not Aadhaar. He juxtaposes anecdotal examples of people struggling to gain benefits with the “larger purpose” he believes Aadhaar serves. “It is a revolutionary system to ensure governance improves — especially for centrally administered programs,” he says.

The UIDAI has made some efforts too, if not to improve security of personal data then at least to allow citizens to check whether their Aadhaar identity has been misused. They can go online and view any occasions when their Aadhaar identity was used to access benefits.

But for millions of Indians dependent on subsidies, pensions, scholarships and other benefits, the concerns go well beyond privacy. Getting an Aadhaar identity can be a struggle. Earlier this year, the Punjab government conceded that it can’t process nearly 200,000 farm loan waiver claims either because intended beneficiaries don’t have Aadhaar cards or because the UIDAI is still processing their applications. At the same time, not signing on to Aadhaar is increasingly not an option. In February 2017, Chaudhary’s ministry made it mandatory for individuals to have an Aadhaar card to access subsidized food grains. Then, in October, an 11-year-old girl died of starvation in the central state of Jharkhand because the local ration dealer refused to give her family food grains for six months, as they had not linked their ration cards to Aadhaar. Facing criticism, the government asked states not to deny the poor the food grains they are entitled to, but the incident underscored how the Aadhaar initiative is cutting the needy off from subsidy access, rather than helping them, suggests Ramanathan, the lawyer. “People are dying because of Aadhaar,” she says.

But the Modi government has shown no signs of rethinking either the ways in which Aadhaar appears to hurt the poorest in Indian society or its data security protocols. Instead, it has appeared keener to target whistle-blowers pointing out weaknesses in the initiative.

It cost Rachna Khaira, a reporter, only 500 rupees ($7.50) to access the entire Aadhaar database — the names, addresses, fingerprint scans, iris scans, mobile phone numbers, email addresses, postal index numbers (PINs) and Aadhaar numbers of 830 million Indians. She “purchased” the service offered by anonymous sellers on WhatsApp and transferred the money via Paytm, a popular digital wallet company, to an “agent,” who created a “gateway” for Khaira. He then gave her a log-in ID and a password to that gateway, which allowed Khaira unrestricted access to the Aadhaar database. Her report, published in January in The Tribune, one of India’s oldest English dailies, created a national stir. Instead of trying to plug the holes the report had revealed, the UIDAI filed criminal cases against Khaira and the newspaper, accusing them of breaching privacy.

Khaira’s wasn’t the first piece of evidence to expose the vulnerability of the Aadhaar database. In May 2017, a report by the Centre for Internet and Society, a nonprofit organization, claimed that 130 million to 135 million Aadhaar numbers were published on four websites: the National Social Assistance Programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and two projects run by Andhra Pradesh state. “This is the largest exercise in the world of the conversion of public information into an asset and then its privatization,” says Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama and a critic of Aadhaar.

These breaches of security highlight corruption and mismanagement that belie claims the government continues to peddle. In April 2017, Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s minister of information and technology, told Parliament that “Aadhaar is robust. Aadhaar is safe. Aadhaar is secure, and totally accountable.” The government hasn’t appeared too perturbed by privacy concerns. On July 22, 2015, Mukul Rohatgi, the then attorney general, argued before the country’s Supreme Court that “the right of privacy is not a guaranteed right under our constitution.” That set off a two-year-long hearing before a nine-judge bench of the court, which unanimously ruled in 2017 that the right to privacy was indeed a fundamental right.

The criticism from social groups Aadhaar was meant to benefit, though, has left the Modi administration on the defensive. Since the passage of the 2016 Aadhaar law, civil society activists have filed 12 petitions in the Supreme Court challenging its legality. In January, the All India Kisan Sabha, one of India’s largest farmer organizations with millions of members, petitioned the top court against government moves to link subsidies to Aadhaar identities. Some leaders from Modi’s party, the BJP, have also started questioning their own government in Parliament about cases of beneficiaries denied their due because of the Aadhaar program. The Supreme Court, which is holding regular hearings on the case, has extended indefinitely the date by which citizens must link all identity documents to their Aadhaar number, until it rules on the validity of the legislation. At stake is the trust the Indian people can place in their government.

Back in Kusumpur Pahari, much of that trust has already eroded. In his 2014 election campaign, Modi had promised to stand guard as a chaukidaar (watchman) over the country’s resources, to prevent corruption. But when someone illegally withdrew Phoolmati’s grains by using her Aadhaar identity, the watchman wasn’t able to stop the theft.

For Phoolmati and other residents of Kusumpur Pahari, their ration cards guaranteed them food, and were a rare pillar of certainty in an unstable life. The Aadhaar-linked fingerprint authentication system is a source of frustration, and they don’t want it, they make clear at their weekly meeting. They now get their ration some months, and other months they don’t. Life on the fringes of society was already tough. Aadhaar, they say, has made it harder still.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ozy-aayush-soni-may-11-2018-indias-national-id-project-brings-pain-to-those-it-aims-to-help

India's Latest Data Leak: People's Aadhaar Number And Bank Account Are Just One Google Search Away

Admin — 2018-07-13T15:18:46Z

Even Truecaller doesn't reveal this much.

The article by Gopal Sathe was published in Huffington Post on July 12, 2018.

Imagine being able to hack someone's personal data simply by entering their mobile phone number into a Google search. There is a website of the Andhra Pradesh government that's leaking people's phone numbers, Aadhaar numbers, father's names, passbook and bank account numbers, and the district and mandal where they live - all the link to all this information is the first result you get when you search for the phone numbers of people in the database.

The Andhra government has been leaking the personal data of more than 23,000 farmers who have received subsidies from the Andhra Pradesh Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Board, and organisation that encourages the growth of Ayurvedic medicines in the state. The subsidies are offered to farmers and tribals in the state, and all their personal data is available on an open database on an Andhra Government website.

The information is not behind any access control, and you can see all the records, click on them to get the details of anyone, or download everything as an Excel sheet. But what's perhaps worse is that simply by searching for the phone numbers of many of these farmers, we were able to find the detailed information about them. HuffPost India randomly chose a dozen farmers, and in each case, this database was the first result for their phone number on Google.

That's the most concerning part - in most cases, even when the information has leaked, it isn't readily apparent to people. You have to know the website address, or at the very least spend some time poring through dashboards. In the case of this latest leak, all you need is the person's phone number, and all their information is made visible. HuffPost India has reported this issue to the AP government, much like earlier leaks, although at the time of writing the data is still available online.

Who's held responsible?

This is just the latest in a long line of leaks from AP - in just the last few months, we've reported on a website that let you geo-locate homes on the basis of caste and religion; while another tracked all the medicines people buy, such as generic viagra, along with their phone numbers; and one that tracked pregnant women in ambulances in real time.

A government official we spoke to in AP Secretariat said that while all the departments have been digitised, an understanding of security - and privacy - is yet to come. "Even if you tell them, 'this data is not something you can publish', they disagree and say that it is needed for the beneficiaries to be able to access their own information," he explained.

Karan Saini, a security analyst and consultant who writes on issues of web security and privacy, told HuffPost that the various government departments are generally unresponsive when breaches like this are brought up.

"Lack of outreach is an issue with all of these organisations," said Saini. "NCIIPC is the only one that can even be found by someone looking at the surface. [These organisations] are hard to get a response from."

One reason for this, said Srinivas Kodali, a security researcher who has revealed a tremendous amount of leaks in the AP system, is that there is no official system of accountability in the government when it comes to data leaks.

In May 2017, the AP government passed the Andhra Pradesh Core Digital Data Authority Act, under which in section 37 it states that no legal proceeding shall lie against any officer or employee for anything which is in good faith done. What this means is that leaks and breaches are not something any official in the government can be held responsible for.

This act came out less than a month after the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru published a report stating that 13 crore Aadhaar numbers were leaked - of which 2 crore were from Andhra Pradesh.

A lack of (human) resources

AP officials do acknowledge the problem. "There is a major shortage of cybersecurity professionals, and hiring them is a challenge," said V Premchand, head of the Andhra Pradesh Technology Service, who is in charge of the ongoing security work in the state. AP has seen a major security audit in May this year, and a privacy audit was announced last month.

"The work is ongoing but it is not something that can happen overnight," Premchand explained. However, others argue that the government isn't doing enough to make use of existing manpower. Unlike other countries, the Indian government does not have any real bug bounty program, where security researchers are incentivised to report weaknesses to organisations for cash rewards and recognition.

Sai Krishna Kothapalli, a student at IIT Guwahati and a security researcher, told HuffPost that the government actively discourages security experts from providing their support, rather than encouraging them.

"The US Department of Defense and others have a responsible disclosure program and a lot of people from India take part in that," he said. "Our talent is being used by them instead because the government here does not reply at all."

"India's top hackers are being employed by people outside the country, even though we have the talent here, because will you spend the time and effort to be ignored here, or report issues to a US company and make thousands of dollars instead?"

However, security audits in India are only being carried out by agencies that have been empaneled, and most of the hackers active here don't have the certification, he added. "They're too busy actually doing the work, while these big companies do audits, and leave all kinds of security issues behind."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-gopal-sathe-july-12-2018-indias-latest-data-leak-is-so-basic-that-peoples-aadhaar-number-bank-account-and-fathers-name-are-just-one-google-search-away

India's biometric database crosses billion-member mark

praskrishna — 2016-04-07T02:54:08Z

India's biometric database notched up one billion members on Monday, as the government sought to allay concerns about privacy breaches in the world's biggest such scheme.

The news by AFP was published by Daily Mail, UK on April 4, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs.

The database was set up seven years ago to streamline benefit payments to millions of poor people as well as to cut fraud and wastage. Under the scheme, called Aadhaar, almost 93 percent of India's adult population have now registered their fingerprints and iris signatures and been given a biometric ID, according to the government.

IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad hailed it as "an instrument of good governance" at a ceremony in New Delhi marking the crossing of the one-billion member mark.

Prasad said the initiative, inherited from the previous left-leaning Congress government, had enabled millions to receive cash benefits directly rather than dealing with middlemen.

He said the government had saved 150 billion rupees ($2.27 billion) on its gas subsidy scheme alone -- by paying cash directly to biometric card holders instead of providing cylinders at subsidised rates.

He also said all adequate safeguards were in place to ensure the personal details of card holders could not be stolen or misused by authorities given access to the database.

"We have taken all measures to ensure privacy. The data will not be shared with anyone except in cases of national security," Prasad said.

His comments come after parliament passed legislation last month giving government agencies access to the database in the interests of national security.

It was passed using a loophole to circumvent the opposition in parliament, where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lacks a majority in the upper house.

The way it was passed, as well as the legislation itself, raised concerns about government agencies accessing private citizens' details.

Internet experts have also raised fears about the safety of such a massive database, including hacking and theft of details.

"It was as if Indian lawmakers wrote an open letter to criminals and foreign states saying, 'we are going to collect data to non-consensually identify all Indians and we are going to store it in a central repository. Come and get it!'," Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, wrote in India's Frontline news magazine.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/daily-mail-april-4-2016-afp-india-biometric-database-crosses-billion-member-mark

India's billion-member biometric database raises privacy fears

praskrishna — 2016-03-17T15:25:45Z

India's parliament is set to pass legislation that gives federal agencies access to the world's biggest biometric database in the interests of national security, raising fears the privacy of a billion people could be compromised.

The article by Sanjeev Miglani and Manoj Kumar was published by Reuters on March 16, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The move comes as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cracks down on student protests and pushes a Hindu nationalist agenda in state elections, steps that some say erode India's traditions of tolerance and free speech.

It could also usher in surveillance far more intrusive than the U.S. telephone and Internet spying revealed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, some privacy advocates said.

The Aadhaar database scheme, started seven years ago, was set up to streamline payment of benefits and cut down on massive wastage and fraud, and already nearly a billion people have registered their finger prints and iris signatures.

Now the BJP, which inherited the scheme, wants to pass new provisions including those on national security, using a loophole to bypass the opposition in parliament.

"It has been showcased as a tool exclusively meant for disbursement of subsidies and we do not realize that it can also be used for mass surveillance," said Tathagata Satpathy, a lawmaker from the eastern state of Odisha.

"Can the government ... assure us that this Aadhaar card and the data that will be collected under it – biometric, biological, iris scan, finger print, everything put together – will not be misused as has been done by the NSA in the U.S.?"

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has defended the legislation in parliament, saying Aadhaar saved the government an estimated 150 billion rupees ($2.2 billion) in the 2014-15 financial year alone.

A finance ministry spokesman added that the government had taken steps to ensure citizens' privacy would be respected and the authority to access data was exercised only in rare cases.

According to another government official, the new law is in fact more limited in scope than the decades-old Indian Telegraph Act, which permits national security agencies and tax authorities to intercept telephone conversations of individuals in the interest of public safety.

"POLICE STATE"

Those assurances have not satisfied political opponents and people from religious minorities, including India's sizeable Muslim community, who say the database could be used as a tool to silence them.

"We are midwifing a police state," said Asaduddin Owaisi, an opposition MP.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, global policy director at Access, an international digital rights organization, said the proposed Indian law lacked the transparency and oversight safeguards found in Europe or the United States, which last year reformed its bulk telephone surveillance program.

He pointed to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which must approve many surveillance requests made by intelligence agencies, and European data protection authorities as oversight mechanisms not present in the Indian proposal.

The Indian government brought the Aadhaar legislation to the upper house of parliament on Wednesday in a bid to secure passage before lawmakers go into recess.

To get around its lack of a majority there, the BJP is presenting it as a financial bill, which the upper chamber cannot reject. It can return it to the lower house, where the ruling party has a majority.

In its assessment of the measure, New Delhi-based PRS Legislative Research said law enforcement agencies could use someone's Aadhaar number as a link across various datasets such as telephone and air travel records.

That would allow them to recognize patterns of behavior and detect potential illegal activities.

But it could also lead to harassment of individuals who are identified incorrectly as potential security threats, PRS said.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, said Aadhaar created a central repository of biometrics for almost every citizen of the world's most populous democracy that could be compromised.

"Maintaining a central database is akin to getting the keys of every house in Delhi and storing them at a central police station," he said.

"It is very easy to capture iris data of any individual with the use of next generation cameras. Imagine a situation where the police is secretly capturing the iris data of protesters and then identifying them through their biometric records.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/reuters-march-16-2016-sanjeev-miglani-and-manoj-kumar-indias-billion-member-biometric-database-raises-privacy-fears

India's Aadhaar with biometric details of its billion citizens is making experts uncomfortable

praskrishna — 2017-02-14T14:57:33Z

"Indians in general have yet to understand the meaning and essence of privacy," says Member of Parliament, Tathagata Satpathy.

The blog post was published by Mashable India on February 14, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

But on Feb. 3, privacy was the hot topic of debate among many in India, thanks to a tweet that showed random people being identified on the street via Aadhaar, India's ubiquitous database that has biometric information of more than a billion Indians.

That's how India Stack, the infrastructure built by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), welcomed OnGrid, a privately owned company that is going to tap on the world's largest biometrics system, conjuring images of Minority Report style surveillance.

But how did India get here?

Aadhaar's foundation

Not long ago, there were more people in India without a birth or school certificate than those with one (PDF). They had no means to prove their identity. This also contributed to what is more popularly known as “leakage” in the government subsidy fundings. The funds weren’t reaching the right people, in some instances, and much of it was being siphoned off by middlemen.

Nearly a decade ago, the government began scrambling for ways to tackle these issues. Could technology come to the rescue? The government dialled techies, people like Nandan Nilekani, a founder of India's mammoth IT firm Infosys, for help.

In 2008, they formulated Aadhaar, an audacious project "destined" to change the prospects of Indians. It was similar to Social Security number that US residents are assigned, but its implications were further reaching.

At the time, the government said it will primarily use this optional program to help the poor who are in need of services such as grocery and other household items at subsidized rates.

Eight years later, Aadhar, which stores identity information such as a photo, name, address, fingerprints and iris scans of its citizens and also assigns them with a unique 12-digit number, has become the world's largest biometrics based identity system.

According to the Indian government, over 1.11 billion people of the country's roughly 1.3 billion citizens have enrolled themselves in the biometrics system. About 99 percent of all adults in India have an Aadhaar card, it said last month.

Today, the significance of Aadhaar, which on paper remains an optional program, is undeniable in the country. The government says Aadhaar has already saved it as much as $5 billion.

But that's not it.

There's a bit of Aadhaar in everyone's life

Aadhaar (Hindi for foundation) has long moved beyond helping the poor. The UPI (Unified Payment Interface), another project by the Indian government that uses Aadhaar, is helping the country's much unbanked population to avail financial services for the first time. Nilekani calls it a "WhatsApp moment" in the Indian financial sector.

In December last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched BHIM, a UPI-based payments app that aims to get millions of Indians to do online money transactions for the first time, irrespective of which bank they had their accounts with. With BHIM, transferring money is as simple as sending a text message. People can also scan QR codes and pay merchants for their purchases.

"This app is destined to replace all cash transactions," Modi said at the launch event. "BHIM app will revolutionize India and force people worldwide to take notice," he added.

The next phase, called Aadhaar Enabled Payments System will do away with smartphones. People will be able to make payments by swiping their finger on special terminals equipped with fingerprint sensors rather than swiping cards.

Last year, the government said people could store their driver license documents in an app called DigiLocker, should they want to be relieved from the burden of carrying paper documents. DigiLocker is a digital cloud service that any citizen in India can avail using their Aadhaar information.

The government also plans to hand out "health cards" to senior citizens, mapped to their Aadhaar number, which will store their medical records, which doctors will be able to access.

“Aadhaar is an instrument for good governance. Aadhaar is the mode to reach the poor without the middlemen,” Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT minister said in a press conference last year.

But despite all the ways Aadhaar is making meaningful impact in millions of lives, some people are very skeptical about it. And for them, the scale at which Aadhaar operates now is only making things worse.

A security nightmare

There have been multiple reports suggesting bogus and fake entries in Aadhaar database. Instances of animals such as dogs and cows having their own Aadhaar identification numbers have been widely reported. In one instance, even Hindu god Hanuman was found to have an Aadhaar card.

The problem, it appears, is Aadhaar database has never been verified or audited, according to multiple security experts, privacy advocates, lawyers, and politicians who spoke to Mashable India this month.

“There are two fundamental flaws in Aadhaar: it is poorly designed, and it is being poorly verified,” Member of Parliament and privacy advocate, Rajeev Chandrasekhar told Mashable India. “Aadhaar isn’t foolproof, and this has resulted in fake data get into the system. This in turn opens new gateways for money launderers,” he added.

Another issue with Aadhaar is, Chandrasekhar explains, there is no firm legislation to safeguard the privacy and rights of the billion people who have enrolled into the system. There’s little a person whose Aadhaar data has been compromised could do. “Citizens who have voluntarily given their data to Aadhaar authority, as of result of this, are at risk,” he added.

Rahul Narayan, a lawyer who is counselling several petitioners challenging the Aadhaar project, echoed similar sentiments. “There’s no concrete regulation in place,” he told Mashable India. “The scope for abuses in Aadhaar is very vast,” he added.

But regulation — or its lack thereof — is only one of the many challenges, experts say. Sunil Abraham, the executive director of Bangalore-based research organisation the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), says the security concerns around Aadhaar are alarming.

“Aadhaar is remote, covert, and non-consensual,” he told Mashable India, adding the existence of a central database of any kind, but especially in the context of the Aadhaar, and at the scale it is working is appalling.

Abraham said fingerprint and iris data of a person can be stolen with little effort — a “gummy bear” which sells for a few cents, can store one’s fingerprint, while a high resolution camera can capture one’s iris data.

Aadhaar doesn’t use basic principles of cryptography, and much of its security is not known.

Aadhaar is also irrevocable, which strands a person, whose data has been compromised, with no choice but to get on with life, Abraham said, adding that these vulnerabilities could have been averted had the government chosen smart cards instead of biometrics.

On top of this, he added, that Aadhaar doesn’t use basic principles of cryptography, and much of the security defences it uses are not known.

Had the government open sourced Aadhaar code to the public (a common practice in the tech community), security analysts could have evaluated the strengths of Aadhaar. But this too isn’t happening.

At CIS, Sunil and his colleagues have written over half-a-dozen open letters to the UIDAI (the authority that governs Aadhaar project) raising questions and pointing holes in the system. But much of their feedback has not returned any response, Abraham told Mashable India.

India Stack: A goldmine for everyone

As part of its push to make Aadhaar more useful, the UIDAI created what is called India Stack, an infrastructure through which government bodies as well as private entities could leverage Aadhaar's database of individual identities. This is what sparked the initial debate about privacy when India Stack tweeted the controversial photo.

Speaking to Mashable India, Piyush Peshwani, a founder of OnGrid, however dismissed the concerns, clarifying that the picture was for representation purposes only. He said OnGrid is building a trust platform, through which it aims to make it easier for recruiters to do background check on their potential employees after getting their consent.

India Stack and OnGrid have since taken down the picture from their Twitter accounts. "OnGrid, much like other 200 companies working with UIDAI, can only retrieve information of users after receiving their prior consent," he said.

The lack of information from the UIDAI and India Stack is becoming a real challenge for citizens, many feel. There also appears to be a conflict of interest between the privately held companies and those who helped design the framework of Aadhaar.

As Rohin Dharmakumar, a Bangalore-based journalist pointed out, Peshwani was part of the core team member of Aadhaar project. A lawyer, who requested to be not identified, told Mashable India that there is a chance that these people could be familiar with Aadhaar’s roadmap and use the information for business advantage, to say the least.

Most people Mashable India spoke to are questioning the way these third-party companies are handling Aadhaar data. There is no regulation in place to prevent these companies from storing people’s data or even creating a parallel database of their own — a view echoed by Abraham, Narayan, and Chandrasekhar.

Not mandatory only on paper

But for many, the biggest concern with Aadhaar remains just how aggressively it is being implemented into various systems. For instance, in the past one month alone, students in most Indians states who want to apply for NEET, a national level medical entrance test, were told by the education board CBSE that they will have to provide their Aadhaar number.

A few months ago, Aadhaar was also made mandatory for students who wanted to appear in JEE, an all India common engineering entrance examination conducted for admission to various engineering colleges in the country.

The apex Supreme Court of India recently asked the central government to register the phone number of all mobile subscribers in India (there are about one billion of those in India) to their respective Aadhaar cards. Telecom carriers are already enabling new connections to get activated by verifying users with Aadhaar database.

A prominent journalist who focuses on privacy and laws in India questioned the motive. “When they kickstarted UIDAI, people were told that this an optional biometrics system. But since then the government has been rather tight-lipped on why it is aggressively pushing Aadhaar into so many areas,” he told Mashable India, requesting not to be identified.

"It is especially difficult to explain why privacy is necessary for a society to advance when taken in the context of Aadhaar."

“It is especially difficult to explain why privacy is necessary for a society to advance when taken in the context of Aadhaar. The Aadhaar card is being offered to people in need, especially the poor, by making them believe that services and subsidies provided by the government will be held back from them unless they register,” Satpathy told Mashable India.

The central government said last week Aadhaar number would be mandatory for availing food grains through the Public Distribution System under the National Food Security Act. In October last year, the government made Aadhaar mandatory for those who wanted to avail cooking gas at subsidized prices.

“No matter how many laws are made about not making Aadhaar mandatory, ultimately it depends on the last mile person who is offering any service to inform citizens about their rights,” Satpathy added.

“These last-mile service providers are companies who would benefit from collecting and bartering big data for profit. They would be least interested to inform citizens about their rights and about the not mandatory status of Aadhaar.

“As Aadhaar percolates more and is used by more government and private services, the citizen will start assuming it's a part of their life. This card is already being misunderstood as if it is essential like a passport,” he added.

“My worry is that this data will be used by government for mass surveillance, ethnic cleansing and other insidious purposes,” Satpathy said. “Once you have information about every citizen, the powerful will not refrain from misusing it and for retention of power. The use of big data for psycho-profiling is not unknown to the world anymore.”

Mashable India reached out to UIDAI on Feb. 8 for comment on the privacy and security concerns made in this report. At the time of publication, the authority hadn't responded to our queries.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/mashable-india-february-14-2017-india-aadhaar-uidai-privacy-security-debate

India's Aadhaar mandate for smartphone makers may rile global firms

praskrishna — 2016-09-15T02:25:31Z

They are unlikely to oblige to request to make changes in their operating system and devices to ensure Aadhaar authentication is done securely on smartphones.

The article by Alnoor Peermohammed was published in the Business Standard on September 14, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

India is asking global smartphone makers such asApple and Google to adopt locally designed standards on their devices or operating systems that would allow use of biometric scanners for Aadhaarauthentication, a move that could face resistance from global firms.

Apple, the world’s largest smartphone maker runs its own iOS closed ecosystem and mandates apps built by developers to be certified by the company. Its closest rival Google, which owns the Android operating software that runs on nine out of ten smartphones in India, has directives for device makers to comply with. Firms such as Samsung, Lenovo and Micromax build smartphones on the Android OS that are sold in India.

Most global companies are unlikely to oblige India’s request that would require to make changes in their operating system and devices to ensure Aadhaarauthentication is done securely on smartphones, say analysts.

“There is no clarity so far. As of now, it is impossible that they (global smartphone makers) would oblige for a hardware safe zone baked on the sensors,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director at Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based researcher that works on emerging technologies. “Because the biometrics contain sensitive personal information, they (UIDAI) don’t want anybody — vmobile manufacturer, OS vendor, telco or ISP — to intercept it”.

India is hoping that global firms would accept the country’s plea considering that most of India’s population use a mobile phone as their only computing device and need them to authenticate on Aadhaar for using government and banking services.

“Right now we’re in consultation with all these device manufacturers as well as the operating system vendors,” said Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Director General of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in a phone interview. “Basically we’re trying to evolve our system wherein a manufacturer or the devices where those operating systems are being used will have a facility where Aadhaar authentication can be made possible in a secure manner.”

India has over 105 crore people or 98% of adult population with Aadhaar. Most government and private organisations use Aadhaar authentication to issue services or products such as opening a bank account, getting a ration card or buying a mobile connection.

Reliance plans to reduce paperwork and issue connections in less than an hour usingAadhaar and try to get its 100 million target market sooner.

Over a fifth of India’s one billion users own smartphones and as the country sees better mobile internet access, more people are expected to upgrade to smartphones and use apps to access their banks to transfer funds, do online shopping and access government services.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-alnoor-peermohammed-september-14-2016-indias-aadhaar-mandate-for-smartphone-makers-may-rile-global-firms

India Today Conclave Next 2017: Aadhaar was rushed, says MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar

praskrishna — 2017-11-26T06:41:07Z

Talking at the ongoing India Today Conclave Next 2017, MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar said that Aadhaar was rushed and foisted on the country by authorities that fail to first create a proper ecosystem. Chandrashekhar gave his comments at a keynote titled Privacy -- The Fundamental Right for the Digital Citizen.

The article by Priya Pathak was published by India Today on November 8, 2017.

Chandrashekhar, who has been vocal on the issues like data protection, privacy and net neutrality, said that the government should have created a proper ecosystem for Aadhaar by bringing norms and laws around data protection and privacy before asking people to sign up for the unique ID.

The MP talked about India's journey from being a largest unconnected world to becoming the largest connected world. But Chandrashekhar criticised the "flawed" Aadhaar and said that it was a classic example of how a government system would push for technology in governance without addressing key bits of the ecosystem around the citizen and the consumer.

"If that (Aadhaar) wasn't enough, the IT act and section 66A and its language and its vagueness and its potential for misuse was another example of the faults of a bureaucracy or a political system trying to legislate or create solutions in the digital world, " he said.

At the same time, he lauded the recent Supreme Court order that held all Indians had fundamental right to privacy. "The latest finding of Supreme Court of Privacy as fundamental right is a big deal and it will alter number of things going forward," he said. He added that there should be more debate and discussion on data privacy as there is an attempt to characterise data privacy as some of kind of elitist issue in India which it's not.

Privacy, especially for the digital world, currently is one of the most debated topics in India. The country in the past few years has seen a number of instances where a government or a private entity has knowingly or unknowingly compromised the data of its users. Recently a study published by Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based organisation, revealed that private data of more 130 million Aadhaar card holders were leaked from four government websites.

The Supreme Court in August this year declared privacy as a fundamental right. A nine-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar has declared that "right to privacy is an intrinsic part of Right to Life and Personal Liberty under Article 21 and entire Part III of the Constitution".

The move has been praised by many including Rajeev Chadrashekhar who has said that it is a big welcome step. "It is clear that Aadhaar and all other legislations existing and proposed will have to meet the test of privacy being a fundamental right," he recently said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-today-priya-pathak-november-8-2017-india-today-conclave-next-2017-aadhaar-was-rushed-says-mp-rajeev-chandrashekhar