Centre for Internet and Society

Identity of the Aadhaar Act: Supreme Court and the Money Bill Question

Vanya Rakesh and Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2016-05-09T11:52:44Z

A writ petition has been filed by former Union minister Jairam Ramesh on April 6 challenging the constitutionality and legality of the treatment of this Act as a money bill. The Supreme Court heard the matter on April 25 and invited the Union government to present its view. It is our view that the Supreme Court can not only review the Lok Sabha speaker’s decision, but should also ask the government to draft the Aadhaar Bill again, this time with greater parliamentary and public deliberation. Vanya Rakesh and Sumandro Chattapadhyay wrote this article on The Wire.

Published by and cross-posted from The Wire.

The Aadhaar Act 2016, passed in the Lok Sabha on March 16, 2016, faced opposition ever since it was tabled in parliament. In particular, the move to introduce it as a money bill has been vehemently challenged on grounds of this being an attempt to bypass the Rajya Sabha completely. A writ petition has been filed by former Union minister Jairam Ramesh on April 6 challenging the constitutionality and legality of the treatment of this Act as a money bill. The Supreme Court heard the matter on April 25 and invited the Union government to present its view.

It is our view that the Supreme Court can not only review the Lok Sabha speaker’s decision, but should also ask the government to draft the Aadhaar Bill again, this time with greater parliamentary and public deliberation.

The money bill question

M.R. Madhavan has argued that the Aadhaar Act contains matters other than “only” those incidental to expenditure from the consolidated fund, as it establishes a biometrics-based unique identification number for beneficiaries of government services and benefits, but also allows the number to be used for other purposes beyond service delivery. While Pratap Bhanu Mehta calls this a subversion of “the spirit of the constitution”, P.D.T. Achary, former secretary general of the Lok Sabha, expressed concern about the attempts to pass off financial bills like Aadhaar as money bills as a means to circumvent and erode the supervisory role of the Rajya Sabha. Arvind Datar has further emphasised that when the primary purpose of a bill is not governed by Article 110(1), then certifying it as a money bill is an unconstitutional act.

Article 110(1) of the Constitution identifies a bill as a money bill if it contains “only” provisions dealing with the following matters, or those incidental to them:

imposition and regulation of any tax,
financial obligations undertaken by Indian Government,
payment into or withdrawal from the Consolidated Fund of India (CFI) or Contingent Fund of India,
appropriation of money and expenditure charged on the CFI or receipt, and
custody, issue or audit of money into CFI or public account of India.

However, the link of the Act with the Consolidated Fund of India is rather tenuous, since it depends on the Union or state governments declaring a certain subsidy to be available upon verification of the Aadhaar number. The objectives and validity of the Act would not actually change if the Aadhaar number no longer was directly connected to the delivery of services. The use of the word “if” in section 7 explicitly leaves scope for a situation where the government does not declare an Aadhaar verification as necessary for accessing a subsidy. In such a scenario, the Act will still be valid but without any formal connection with any charges on the Consolidated Fund of India.

A case of procedural irregularity?

The constitution of India borrows the idea of providing the speaker with the authority to certify a bill as money bill from British law, but operationalises it differently. In the UK, though the speaker’s certificate on a money bill is conclusive for all purposes under section 3 of the Parliament Act 1911, the speaker is required to consult two senior members, usually one from either side of the house, appointed by the committee from amongst those senior MPs who chair general committees. In India, the speaker makes the decision on her own.

Although article 110 (3) of the Indian constitution states that the decision of the speaker of the Lok Sabha shall be final in case a question arises regarding whether a bill is a money bill or not, this does not restrict the Supreme Court from entertaining and hearing a petition contesting the speaker’s decision. As the Aadhaar Act was introduced in the Lok Sabha as a money bill even though it does not meet the necessary criteria for such a classification, this treatment of the bill may be considered as an instance of procedural irregularity.

There is ample jurisprudence on what happens when the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review comes up against Article 122 – which states that the validity of any proceeding in the parliament can (only) be called into question on the grounds of procedural irregularities. In the crucial judgment of Raja Ram Pal vs Hon’ble Speaker, Lok Sabha and Others (2007), the court evaluated the scope of judicial review and observed that although parliament is supreme, unlike Britain, proceedings which are found to suffer from substantive illegality or unconstitutionality, cannot be held protected from judicial scrutiny by article 122, as opposed to mere irregularity. Deciding upon the scope for judicial intervention in respect of exercise of power by the speaker, in Kihoto Hollohan vs Zachillhu and Ors. (1992), the Supreme Court held that though the speaker of the house holds a pivotal position in a parliamentary democracy, the decision of the speaker (while adjudicating on disputed disqualification) is subject to judicial review that may look into the correctness of the decision.

Several past decisions of the Supreme Court discuss how the tests of legality and constitutionality help decide whether parliamentary proceedings are immune from judicial review or not. In Ramdas Athawale vs Union of India (2010), the case of Keshav Singh vs Speaker, Legislative Assembly (1964) was referred to, in which the judges had unequivocally upheld the judiciary’s power to scrutinise the actions of the speaker and the houses. It was observed that if the parliamentary procedure is illegal and unconstitutional, it would be open to scrutiny in a court of law and could be a ground for interference by courts under Article 32, though the immunity from judicial interference under this article is confined to matters of irregularity of procedure. These observations were reiterated in Mohd. Saeed Siddiqui vs State of Uttar Pradesh (2014) and Yogendra Kumar Jaiswal vs State of Bihar (2016).

Thus, the decision of the Lok Sabha speaker to pass and certify a bill as a money bill is definitely not immune from judicial review. Additionally, the Supreme Court has the power to issue directions, orders or writs for enforcement of rights under Article 32 of the constitution, therefore, allowing the judiciary to decide upon the manner of introducing the Aadhaar Act in parliament.

National implications demand public deliberation

As the provisions of the Aadhaar Act have far reaching implications for the fundamental and constitutional rights of Indian citizens, the Supreme Court should look into the matter of its identification and treatment as a money bill and whether such decisions lead to the thwarting of legislative and procedural justice.

The Supreme Court may also take this opportunity to reflect on the very decision making process for classification of bills in general. As Smarika Kumar argues, experience with the Aadhaar Act reveals a structural concern regarding this classification process, which may have substantial implications in terms of undermining public and parliamentary deliberative processes. This “trend,” as Arvind Datar notes, of limiting legislative discussions and decisions of national importance within the space of the Lok Sabha must be swiftly curtailed.

Apart from deciding upon the legality of the nature of the bill, it is vital that the apex court ask the government to categorically respond to the concerns red-flagged by the Standing Committee on Finance, which had taken great exception to the continued collection of data and issuance of Aadhaar numbers in its report, and to the recommendations passed in the Rajya Sabha recently. Further, the repeated violation of the Supreme Court’s interim orders – that the Aadhaar number cannot be made mandatory for availing benefits and services – in contexts ranging from marriages to the guaranteed work programme should also be addressed and responses sought from the Union government.

Evidently, the substantial implications of the Aadhaar Act for national security and fundamental rights of citizens, primarily privacy and data security, make it imperative to conduct a duly balanced public deliberation process, both within and outside the houses of parliament, before enacting such a legislation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/identity-of-the-aadhaar-act-supreme-court-and-the-money-bill-question

How the government gains when private companies use Aadhaar

praskrishna — 2016-04-01T15:58:38Z

This blog post by M. Rajshekhar and Anumeha Yadav was published in Scroll.in on March 24, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Last week, Rajya Sabha made a last-ditch attempt to modify the contentious Aadhaar legislation introduced by the Modi government. Since the legislation was introduced as a Money Bill, the Upper House had no powers to amend it. It could only send back the bill with recommended amendments.

One of the clauses which Rajya Sabha wished to amend related to the use of the Aadhaar number, the 12-digit unique identification number assigned after the collection of an individual’s biometrics in the form of fingerprints and iris scans.

Clause 57 said that anyone, whether an individual or a public or private organisation, could use the Aadhaar number. Rajya Sabha voted to restrict the use of the number to the government. After all, the government had justified introducing Aadhaar legislation as a Money Bill by stating that it would be used for delivering government subsidies and benefits funded out of the Consolidated Fund of India. If the delivery of government welfare is the aim of Aadhaar, why should private companies be allowed to use it?

The Rajya Sabha recommended dropping clause 57 to limit the use of Aadhaar to government agencies. But the Lok Sabha rejected its recommendation, and cleared the Bill in its original form, paving the way for private companies to use Aadhaar.

Strikingly, however, well before the Bill was cleared, a private company started advertising its services as “India’s 1st Aadhaar based mobile app to verify your maid, driver, electrician, tutor, tenant and everyone else instantly”. In an article for Scroll.in, legal researcher Usha Ramanathan said, “A private company is advertising that it can use Aadhaar to collate information about citizens at a price. It says this openly, even as a case about the privacy of the information collected for the biometrics-linked government database is still pending in the Supreme Court.”

LinkedIn for plumbers

The company that owns the mobile app called TrustID believes it is not doing anything wrong.

Monika Chowdhry, who heads the marketing division of Swabhimaan Distribution Services, the company that created TrustID, defended the app, saying it offers the valuable service of verifying people's identities. “In our day to day life, we do a lot of transactions with people – like maids or plumbers. Till now, you would have to trust them on what they said about themselves and what others said about the quality of their work.” The company is solving that problem, she said. “We are saying ask the person for their Aadhaar number and name and we will immediately tell you if they are telling the truth or not,” Chowdhry said.

Chowdhry said that over time, the Aadhaar number of individuals will be used to create a private verified database of TrustIDs. “Our plan is to create a rating mechanism,” she said. Referring to the option for maid, plumbers and other service providers on the app, she added: “People like you and me, we have Linkedin and Naukri. What do these people have?”

How does the company use Aadhaar for verification and is there a reason to be concerned?

Aadhaar authentication

After you have logged into the TrustID app, you can choose from a dropdown menu of categories. You can send anyone's Aadhaar number, gender and name – or even biometrics – and the app claims it can verify their identity.

The app performs Aadhaar authentication – which means it matches an Aadhaar number with the information stored against that number in the servers of the Unique Identification Authority of India. At the time an individual enrols for an Aadhaar number, they disclose their name, gender, address and give biometric scans. This information is held in a database maintained by the UID authority.

One of the criticisms of Aadhaar has been that the database of millions of people could be misused in the absence of a privacy law in India. First, there is the question about whether the biometrics are secure. Second, there are risks that accompany the uncontrolled use of unique numbers.

In response, the proponents of Aadhaar have said that the data is encrypted and secure, and can be accessed only by the authority. Those wanting to authenticate – or match – the Aadhaar number cannot directly access the database. They can simply make requests to the authority which authenticates the number for them.

So far, it appeared that the authority was taking Aadhaar authentication requests solely from government agencies. For instance, to pay wages to workers of the rural employment guarantee programme.

But TrustID’s example showed that private companies too have been sending authentication requests to the authority. This is not entirely surprising for those who have followed the blueprint for Aadhaar as envisioned by Nandan Nilekani, its founder. In an interview in 2012, Nilekani spoke about creating a "thriving application system" using Aadhaar for both the public and private sector.

Chowdhary said Swabhimaan Distribution Services registered as an Aadhaar authentication agency in November 2015, and the app was launched in January 2016.

TrustID, or Swabhimaan, is not the only private company that has signed up as an authentication agency for Aadhaar. A quick Google search throws up the name of Alankit, which wants to “provide Aadhaar Enabled Services to its beneficiaries, clients and customers and can further verify the correctness of the Aadhaar numbers provided ” .

This shows the authority entered into agreements with private companies well before the Aadhaar law was passed in Parliament. The companies were running ahead of legislation in a space unbounded by law, and the UIDAI supported them in this.

It is unclear how many private companies were sending requests for Aadhaar authentication. Scroll's questions to Harish Agrawal, the deputy director general of Aadhaar's Authentication and Application Division, remained unanswered.

In an interview to Business Standard, ABP Pandey, the director general of the UIDAI, said, "Usually what happens is that first a law is passed and thereafter the institutions are built and operations start. Here it has happened the other way around. The operations – the enrolment – is almost complete. The organisation is also there and has been working under executive orders. Now everything has to be kind of retrofitted in to the acts and the regulations."

Why is this problematic?

For one, allowing private companies to use the Aadhaar number shows that the government’s stated aims of Aadhaar are misleading.

Both in the Supreme Court and in Parliament, the government has pushed for the use of Aadhaar as an instrument of welfare delivery. It justified passing Aadhaar legislation as a Money Bill by emphasising its importance to its welfare schemes. But as the case of Swabhimaan shows, Aadhaar's uses clearly go well beyond what the Bill's preamble describes as the “targeted delivery of subsidies, benefits and services, the expenditure for which is incurred from the Consolidated Fund of India.”

Two, biometrics and unique identification numbers are a qualitatively new form of private information. As such, they bring unknown risks. India does not have a privacy law, and a law defining the use of biometrics and unique numbers is yet to be created. Delhi-based lawyer Apar Gupta said, “Even the Aadhaar Bill is yet to be approved by the president. Its rules are yet to be drafted. There is not enough legal guidance on its use.”

Three, companies like Swabhimaan would be in a position to construct databases of their own. Take TrustID. When it starts retaining Aadhaar numbers, and adds ratings to them, it creates a database of its own, which amounts to creating profiles of people.

Here, as Ramanathan said, the analogy with the networking site LinkedIn doesn't work. “When I have an account on LinkedIn, I update my data,” she said. But the TrustID app generates profiles out of the ratings that others give. Even if a prospective employee shares his/her Aadhaar number, it does not amount to free consent since getting a job hinges on giving that number.

In the future, companies could use Aadhaar numbers in unknown ways, for instance, to combine multiple databases – banks, telecom companies, hospitals – to create detailed profiles of you and me that they can monetise. In effect, Aadhaar becomes a commercial instrument for private companies, and not just a mechanism for the delivery of government welfare.

Gains for the government

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, further explained the risks that arise when databases are combined. He cited the example of OCEAN, the system created by researchers at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology to raise privacy awareness. OCEAN used publicly available information held by the government (voter identity card, PAN card, driving licence) to access details about citizens in Delhi. This public data was combined with people's Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the aggregated results were visualised as a family tree which showed information extending to a person’s parents, siblings and spouse.

"If a company like TrustID tied up with OCEAN, it can create a very detailed profile of an individual," said Abraham. "To continue with the example of a job-seeker, if a employer uses TrustID to verify applicants' identity or profiles, the App may combine a database like OCEAN to track that you logged into Twitter at, say 2 am on most nights. It can profile you as someone who might not turn up at work on time in the morning."

Abraham pointed out that the government too stands to gain by allowing private companies to use Aadhaar for authentication. "Use of authentication by private companies will mean UIDAI can have information on authentications performed on you, or by you, over time in the private sphere as well, say during such a job search," he said. For instance, when TrustID runs a search for your prospective employers using your Aadhaar number, the government knows you have applied for a job at certain companies. "This is unnecessary involvement of the government, giving it access to information in an area that it should not have access to."

Over time, such Aadhaar authentication for private services in companies, hospitals, or hotels will "help the government gain granular data on citizens", he said.

Perhaps that explains why the government rushed the Aadhaar Bill through Parliament, allowing little time and room for public debate.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/scroll.in-march-24-2016-rajshekhar-anumeha-yadav-how-the-govt-gains-when-private-companies-use-aadhaar

How private companies are using Aadhaar to try to deliver better services (but there's a catch)

praskrishna — 2016-12-23T02:04:59Z

They are gathering more information on you.

The article by M. Rajshekhar was published in Scroll.in on December 22, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

In 2006, Ajay Trehan set up AuthBridge, a background verification company in Gurgaon. That was a time when business process outsourcing was booming. Global companies like Citibank were relocating back-office functions to India. Outfits like AuthBridge sprang up in response to help these companies find qualified staffers. They vetted applicants by running identity checks, verifying education and employment records, doing reference checks and more.

Ten years later, AuthBridge’s client profile has changed. With rising insecurity over crimes in India’s cities, like the December 2012 gangrape in Delhi, or the rape of a young woman in an Uber taxi in 2014, local companies – sizeably from e-commerce and businesses with delivery services – have also started vetting employees and partners to check if they have any criminal history. “Now, we have about 700-800 clients,” said Trehan. “Of them, just 20%-30% are foreign companies.”

AuthBridge’s verification process has changed too. Earlier, its employees used to physically verify the credentials of an applicant by travelling to her school or college, meeting her previous employer, vetting her identity papers with the government department that issued them, and so on.

Now they simply run a query on an electronic database.

Aadhaar enters the private sector

Aadhaar, as India’s Unique Identity Project is called, aims to give a 12-digit unique identity number to all residents by collecting their fingerprint and iris scans. As of September, its database, maintained by the Unique Identity Authority of India, held the names, addresses and biometric information of more than 105 crore people.

The project was created by the United Progressive Alliance government in 2009 to reduce leakages in the country’s welfare programmes.

But, quietly, a range of private sector companies have started using it. This includes verification firms like Authbridge, banks like HDFC, telecommunications companies like Reliance Jio, among others.

So far, most discussions on Aadhaar have focused on its utility for welfare delivery and the risk of government surveillance. But as private sector companies incorporate Aadhaar into their systems, fresh questions and concerns are emerging about what this means. A recent tweet by a journalist that went viral encapsulated these concerns.

To understand the rewards and risks of the use of Aadhaar by private companies, here is a detailed look at how they are using it.

Five ways of using Aadhaar

The first way in which companies are using Aadhaar is pure authentication. This is how Authbridge uses Aadhaar. It sends a name and Aadhaar number to the Unique Identity Authority’s server, which responds to say whether they have matched.

Apart from background verification companies, Aadhaar-based authentication can also be used by employers. “A factory hiring women or a security agency hiring guards and wanting to be sure these people are who they claim to be,” said Pramod Varma, the chief architect and technology advisor for the Aadhaar project.

It could also be used by regulated entities with strong Know Your Customer or KYC norms like banks or telecommunications companies. In the old days of branch-based banking, KYC was not a problem, said Varma, since “the bank manager knew all his customers”. But now, KYC is much harder since banks have moved to “core banking with millions of accounts in the server”. Instant Aadhaar-authentication, he said, is useful for verifying customers.

The second is authentication plus. Here, at the time of authentication, a company also downloads the customer’s data from the Aadhaar database. This is what companies like Reliance Jio are doing.

When a customer provides his Aadhaar number to the company, the company not only runs a query on the Aadhaar database to verify the name and number, it also downloads other information about the customer held on the server, like address, date of birth and gender.

This data can be used to electronically fill out the Know Your Customer forms, replacing what is right now a manual process, said Anupam Varghese, the head (products) of Eko India Financial Services, a financial services startup in the phone banking and remittances segment.

It is a disruptive proposition that companies find useful. In India, the cost of enrolling customers is so high, said Abhishek Sinha, the founder of Eko, that it prices a set of financial products beyond the reach of most Indians. “Authenticating a credit card customer and vetting her identity papers will cost anywhere between Rs 150-Rs 200,” he said. A company can recover that investment only if the customer racks up at least Rs 10,000 on the card, assuming a 2% margin on card transactions.

With its instant authentication and automatic form filling, Aadhaar-based electronic Know Your Customer, said Sinha, slashes those costs and makes it easier for companies to offer financial products which become viable even with a smaller volume of transactions. This allows the growth of financial products for less affluent customer segments.

Subsequently, these companies might pad up those databases by adding their own data. This is a third model of using Aadhaar: authentication plus private database.

For instance, TrustID, a mobile app which claims it can verify “your maid, driver, electrician, tutor, tenant and all service professionals” using Aadhaar, wants users to rate the services of the people they eventually employ. In effect, it is creating a private database.

Others, like Eko, are adding financial transaction histories to the Aadhaar data.

While these three uses are built around Aadhaar-based authentication, the remaining three uses – database sharing, data broking, deduplication – pivot around use of just the Aadhaar number. They are based on recent changes in how companies use customer data.

The customer data boom

Customer data has acquired centrality for several Indian companies, particularly startups in e-commerce and financial services.

In some sectors, Varma said, “the cost of switching [between rival companies] is very low,” which heightens the need for customisation. “The better you can serve, they more sticky you get for a customer.” In other sectors, said Varghese, competition chips away at margins. Which is another reason to try and come up with better services and products.

This is where data can help.

In a conversation in October, Nandan Nilekani, software entrepreneur and the first chairperson of the Unique Identity Authority of India, explained why. “Companies like Ola compete with global companies like Uber which have a tremendous advantage in that they have more data – more customers globally – and better algorithms,” he said. If Ola has 5 million customers, Uber has 100 million. Which means Uber’s algorithms – thanks to pattern recognition and machine learning – will be more accurate.

For all these reasons, said Varma, companies in a handful of business verticals are trying to create “a 360 degree view of their customer”.

What has enabled this is a couple of technological trends. The ability to store and process data, said Nilekani, has gone up enormously in the last 15 years. At the same time, data itself has proliferated as electronic devices like mobile phones create records of voice, photos, messages and the locations of customers.

“All this is realtime data. So, on scale, speed and frequency, we have seen a jump,” said Nilekani.

This rising appetite for data is resulting in a couple of novel outcomes.

Enter, the sharing of customer data

Indian companies have begun sharing databases.

A good example is an experimental partnership between Eko, the banking and remittances company, and Capital Float, a financial services startup which gives short term loans.

The two companies worked out an arrangement where Eko shared a part of its database about its distributors with Capital Float. This shared information contained aggregated and anonymised information on distributors and their working capital positions, said Varghese. Capital Float evaluated the database and came back with a list of distributors it could lend to. Eko, then, forwarded these offers to the distributors. After taking their consent, data about the distributors who were interested in the loans was shared with Capital Float.

On the surface, this is a counter-intuitive development: if customer data holds the key to competitive advantage, companies should closely safeguard their data.

But as it turns out, there are strong reasons to share data.

Both Eko and Capital Float, for instance, are small, specialised players in the financial services market which is dominated by banks. Data sharing is one way to compete with banks by offering complementary services to customers.

It is not clear how endemic data-sharing will get. According to Varma, it will be used selectively. “I cannot see organisations sharing databases at will,” he said. “They will be shared only if they can be used to offer an additional service to the client.”

But a programmer who works at iSpirt, a product software evangelising association based in Bangalore, and who did not want to be identified, said the trend will grow. In the financial sector, as new players like mobile wallet companies acquire more customers, banks that refuse to share data will miss out on emergent markets, he said. “Keeping everything behind closed doors – not participating in data exchanges – is now harmful,” he said.

Sunil Abraham, who heads the Centre For Internet and Society, foresees the rise of another kind of data-sharing – by companies that aggregate customer data from multiple sources and market that to clients. These could be data brokers like US-based Acziom, he said. These could also be more specialised firms like medical transcription companies, which simultaneously serve hospitals, insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

The question is: what does all this have to do with Aadhaar?

The utility of Aadhaar

Aadhaar makes it easier to compare and combine diverse databases.

This is what India’s microfinance companies are doing. As Scroll.in reported recently, Microfinance Institutions Network, an association of microlenders, has told its member companies to seed the Aadhaar numbers of their borrowers into their databases. By searching the databases for the Aadhaar number of a prospective borrower, it will be possible to identify if she has already taken too many loans.

This is a scenario Nilekani bristles at. “You do not need Aadhaar for that,” he said. “You can triangulate databases using email or phone number or name.”

But the iSpirt programmer said, “With Aadhaar, the level of certainty is higher than what you would get by using name, phone number or email.” Between databases, the spelling of names might vary. Phone numbers change, especially in a country like India where prepaid mobile connections outnumber postpaid connections. Only a small part of the country’s population uses email. With Aadhaar, said the programmer, it gets easier to correlate databases.

Aadhaar, added Varma, can also be used to clean up databases. Banks, he said, can use the Aadhaar number to create better customer profiles by identifying all accounts owned by a person. This is the fifth use – deduplication.

What it all means

The implications are obvious. A lot of companies already had databases about their customers. Now, as Nilekani said, technology is allowing the collection of ever greater amounts of information about us. The sharing of databases means companies will have ever more detailed customer profiles.

In a sense, we are entering a future where multiple databases – including several that we are not even aware of – will contain information about us. A hospital and an insurance company might share their records. Or intermediary companies, which service both of them, might create their own databases.

This information will materially affect our lives. As already happens online, companies will increasingly base their products on algorithms that parse data about our behaviour and then offer a customised price – which could be geared to serve or exploit us.

These algorithms, as Propublica reported, can be opaque.

In a sense, much of this is a familiar trajectory. The United States too, as the iSpirt programmer said, “saw a lot of irresponsible data sharing without enough control for civilians”.

That is where India is heading as well. As Scroll noted in its article about TrustID, when the company creates scores for the workers who use its app, they might not always be aware of that rating – or be in a position to challenge that rating.

There are large questions here. Who owns the data about you in a company’s database? Take your information in, say, Ola’s database – the address from where you get picked up or dropped, the phone number, the places you visit most often. Is the data owned by you, Ola or the driver? Should you have a say if a company wants to share this data? If you grant permission, how does one ensure it is used correctly?

Right now, as the next story in this series will show, this is a poorly regulated landscape.

This is the third part in a series on the expansion of Aadhaar and the concerns around it. The first two parts can be read here.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/scroll-m-rajshekhar-how-private-companies-are-using-aadhaar-to-deliver-better-services-but-theres-a-catch

How Aadhaar compromises privacy? And how to fix it?

sunil — 2017-04-01T07:00:06Z

Aadhaar is mass surveillance technology. Unlike targeted surveillance which is a good thing, and essential for national security and public order – mass surveillance undermines security. And while biometrics is appropriate for targeted surveillance by the state – it is wholly inappropriate for everyday transactions between the state and law abiding citizens.

The op-ed was published in the Hindu on March 31, 2017.

When assessing a technology, don't ask - “what use is it being put to today?”. Instead, ask “what use can it be put to tomorrow and by whom?”. The original noble intentions of the Aadhaar project will not constrain those in the future that want to take full advantage of its technological possibilities. However, rather than frame the surveillance potential of Aadhaar in a negative tone as three problem statements - I will propose three modifications to the project that will reduce but not eliminate its surveillance potential.

Shift from biometrics to smart cards: In January 2011, the Centre for Internet and Society had written to the parliamentary finance committee that was reviewing what was then called the “National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010”. We provided nine reasons for the government to stop using biometrics and instead use an open smart card standard. Biometrics allows for identification of citizens even when they don't want to be identified. Even unconscious and dead citizens can be identified using biometrics. Smart cards, on the other hand, require pins and thus citizens' conscious cooperation during the identification process. Once you flush your smart cards down the toilet nobody can use them to identify you. Consent is baked into the design of the technology. If the UIDAI adopts smart cards, we can destroy the centralized database of biometrics just like the UK government did in 2010 under Theresa May's tenure as Home Secretary. This would completely eliminate the risk of foreign governments, criminals and terrorists using the biometric database to remotely, covertly and non-consensually identify Indians.

Destroy the authentication transaction database: The Aadhaar Authentication Regulations 2016 specifies that transaction data will be archived for five years after the date of the transaction. Even though the UIDAI claims that this is a zero knowledge database from the perspective of “reasons for authentication”, any big data expert will tell you that it is trivial to guess what is going on using the unique identifiers for the registered devices and time stamps that are used for authentication. That is how they put Rajat Gupta and Raj Rajratnam in prison. There was nothing in the payload ie. voice recordings of the tapped telephone conversations – the conviction was based on meta-data. Smart cards based on open standards allow for decentralized authentication by multiple entities and therefore eliminate the need for a centralized transaction database.

Prohibit the use of Aadhaar number in other databases: We must, as a nation, get over our obsession with Know Your Customer [KYC] requirements. For example, for SIM cards there is no KYC requirement is most developed countries. Our insistence on KYC has only resulted in retardation of Internet adoption, a black market for ID documents and unnecessary wastage of resources by telecom companies. It has not prevented criminals and terrorists from using phones. Where we must absolutely have KYC for the purposes of security, elimination of ghosts and regulatory compliance – we must use a token issued by UIDAI instead of the Aadhaar number itself. This would make it harder for unauthorized parties to combine databases while at the same time, enabling law enforcement agencies to combine databases using the appropriate authorizations and infrastructure like NATGRID. The NATGRID, unlike Aadhaar, is not a centralized database. It is a standard and platform for the express assembly of sub-sets of up to 20 databases which is then accessed by up to 12 law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

To conclude, even as a surveillance project – Aadhaar is very poorly designed. The technology needs fixing today, the law can wait for tomorrow.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindu-op-ed-sunil-abraham-march-31-2017-how-aadhaar-compromises-privacy-and-how-to-fix-it

Hammered government offers Virtual ID firewall to protect your Aadhaar

Admin — 2018-01-16T23:34:12Z

Days after reports surfaced claiming security breaches, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Wednesday announced the implementation of a new security protocol that would remove the need to divulge Aadhaar numbers during authentication processes and limit third-party access to KYC details.

The article was published in New Indian Express on January 11, 2018.

Admitting that the “collection and storage of Aadhaar numbers by various entities has heightened privacy concerns”, the UIDAI circular said Authentication User Agencies (AUAs) providing Aadhaar services have to be ready to implement the protocol from March 1, 2018. From June 1 use of Virtual ID for authentication would be mandatory.

The linchpin of the new protocol will be the virtual ID (VID) — a “temporary, revocable 16-digit random number” that can be used instead of Aadhaar to verify or link services. VIDs will have a limited validity and can be generated only by the Aadhaar holder. “UIDAI will provide various options to generate, retrieve and replace VIDs… these will be made available via UIDAI’s resident portal, Aadhaar Enrolment Centre, mAadhaar mobile application, etc.,” it said. While only one VID per Aadhaar number will be valid at a time, users can revoke and generate new VIDs as many times as desired.

UIDAI will also limit KYC details accessible by AUAs by classifying them as Global AUAs, which are required to use Aadhaar e-KYC by law, and Local AUAs. Only the former will have full access to e-KYC details and can store Aadhaar numbers. Local AUAs will only have access to limited KYC details and be prohibited from storing Aadhaar numbers. UIDAI will also generate UID tokens which will be used to identify customers within agencies’ systems, but these will not be usable by other AUAs.

However, cybersecurity experts say that even if the new “patch” is effective, verification processes will have to be redone to prevent misuse of already-leaked Aadhaar numbers. “The concept is attractive, but the devil is in the details,” observed Pavan Duggal, cyberlaw expert, adding that the new system does not address those who have already gained unauthorised access to Aadhaar numbers. Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, was more categorical. “If it has to be effective, they will have to redo (Aadhaar-KYC) from scratch.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/indian-express-january-11-2018-

Govt to keep Aadhaar record for 7 years, activists worried

praskrishna — 2016-10-17T01:53:24Z

The government will keep for seven years a record of all the services and benefits availed using the Aadhaar number, say new rules, prompting fears that the database could be used for surveillance.

The article by Aloke Tikku was published in the Hindustan Times on October 17, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which issues the 12-digit biometric identity to all Indian residents, will be required to preserve its record of verification of an Aadhaar number for the duration.

“This is an unprecedented centralised data retention provision,” said Sunil Abraham, director of the Bengaluru-based think tank, Centre for Internet and Society.

UIDAI chief executive officer ABP Pandey said the concerns were exaggerated. The agency was keeping records in case a dispute arose over a transaction.

The information will be retained online for two years and another five years in the offline archives, say the rules notified in September.

Users will be able to check the records but only for two years.

This restriction won’t apply to security agencies. Pandey, however, said the records would not be available to them without a district judge’s permission.

But, HT found that the rules allow designated joint secretary-level officers at the Centre to order access to information on the grounds of national security.

“Once Aadhaar becomes mandatory for all services, it can be used by benign and malignant actors to conduct a 360-degree surveillance on any individual,” Abraham said.

This is how the system, which will need millions of fingerprint-reading machines, works.

Every time a person fingerprints and quotes the Aadhaar number, the agency concerned sends the data to UIDAI to crosscheck the particulars.

The UIDAI authenticates about five million Aadhaar numbers, which are quoted to avail LPG subsidy, cheap ration and even passport, a day against a capacity to verify 100 million requests daily.

“You can think of it as Natgrid Plus,” Abraham said, a reference to the National Intelligence Grid being built by the government.

A one-stop database for counter-terrorism agencies, Natgrid will collate information real time from databases of various agencies such as bank, rail and airline networks.

“…we do not record the purpose for which an authentication request was received but only the details of the agency that sent it,” UIDAI’s Pandey said.

But seven years is a long time. Only a select category of government files are kept for longer than five years.

Asked about two-year deadline for users, Pandey said it would have been a logistic nightmare to let people access the records once the information was offline.

The Supreme Court has a ruled that Aadhaar is not a must for availing welfare schemes and is to decide if collecting biometric data for the 12-digit number infringed an individual’s privacy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-aloke-tikku-october-17-2016-govt-to-keep-aadhaar-record-for-seven-years-activitsts-worried

Govt narrative on Aadhaar has not changed in the last six years: Sunil Abraham

praskrishna — 2016-03-16T16:37:19Z

The bill is basically the same as the UPA version, with some cosmetic changes, and some tokenism towards the right to privacy, says Abraham.

Shreeja Sen interviewed Sunil Abraham. The article was published in Livemint on March 8, 2016.

The government’s bid to push financial inclusiveness and access to government services has received a fresh boost, with finance minister Arun Jaitley introducing a proposed law to give legislative backing to Aadhaar, being implemented by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

This project, which uses a person’s biometric data like fingerprints and iris scans to authenticate identity of people receiving subsidies and other state benefits, will move India towards a cashless economy and help digital initiatives such as biometric attendance, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, digital certificates, pension payments and the proposed introduction of payments banks.

Sunil Abraham, 42

Abraham is executive director of Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based think tank focusing on accessibility, access to knowledge, telecom and Internet governance. He has written extensively on the UID scheme, and the intersection of privacy and security. He founded Mahiti—an enterprise that aims to reduce the cost and complexity of information and communications technology for the voluntary sector by using free software.

The Aadhaar project has faced its share of roadblocks with cases challenging it pending before the Supreme Court. A constitution bench of the court will decide whether the right to privacy is a fundamental right and if Aadhaar violates it.

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based policy research institute, is a critic of Aadhaar for several reasons. He explained his concerns in an interview. Edited excerpts:

Have any of the concerns regarding the Aadhaar project since its inception in 2009 been addressed?

Whatever we complained about six or seven years ago, whatever complaints were made by the civil society...all of those complaints remain in the exact same situation.

Nothing has changed.

What kind of concerns?

The first thing to remember is that privacy and security are just two sides of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other.

Our first concern with the project is centralization. Whenever you build an information system, and you create a central point of failure, then it will fail because the possibility of failure exists. The Internet has no central point of failure. That is why it is so difficult for you to bring the Internet down. Complaint number 2 is the opaque technology.

UIDAI keeps saying that “we have built a technology using a free software and open standard stack”. The first is a de-duplication software and the second one is the authentication software—those are the most important pieces of software.

This software is proprietary and nobody knows how they work and nobody can independently audit them.

The third complaint is the use of an irrevocable and non-consensual authentication factor. In the UID scheme, the biometrics serve two purposes: it can be used to identify a citizen and it can be used to authenticate a transaction. Authentication factors, commonly known as passwords, should always be revocable. That means if the password is compromised, you should be able to change the password or at least say that this password is no longer valid. The use of biometrics eliminates those two important requirements.

Further, in most other authentication, the process of authentication ensures that you are consenting. For example, PIN (personal identity number) authentications. But suppose I am authenticating you through your irises, then as long as your eyes are open, the machine will think you’re authenticating. There’s no way of saying I don’t want to authenticate. Or if you’re sleeping, somebody can hold your fingers over a biometric reader and open your iPhone. So that’s complaint number three.

The fourth complaint from the privacy perspective is: there is a very important database that they don’t talk about. I call it the transactions database. Suppose there is somebody who is using the UIDAI service to authenticate a transaction, then UIDAI should keep a record of that successful or unsuccessful transaction authentication. That means you have been registered into the database.

You go to a fair price shop to purchase subsidized grain and at that fair price shop or ration shop, you use your finger on the biometric reader, and then the UIDAI system says “yes you are indeed who you say you are”.

So, at that point, later the shop should not be able to say X never came here, or X came twice. So, in order for them to not say all those things, a record should be made on the UID database, that on this day, from this geographical location, this particular biometric reader sent us X’s biometric template and asked if the template matched against X’s UID number...the transaction database can be used for profiling. They never talk about it.

They never tell us what that database holds and how long they’re keeping all those records. None of that is clear.

Does Aadhaar bill help assuage your doubts about the project?

The government narrative has not changed in the last six years; the bill is basically the same as the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) version, with some cosmetic changes, and some tokenism towards the right to privacy. The proof that the technology is fallible is in the bill.

If the technology was infallible, as the UIDAI would like us to believe, then the bill would not criminalize the following: (1) impersonation at the time of enrolment; (2) unauthorized access to the Central Identities Data Repository.

Imagine that the bill admits that every Indian’s biometric can be stolen from one single centralized database. Now why don’t we have a similar offence for stealing all private keys from the Internet—we don’t because that is technical impossibility thanks to decentralization.

Therefore we don’t need a law to make (it) illegal. We’ve suggested changes to both the technology and the law. We’ve written seven open letters to the UIDAI, and we’ve never gotten any response. Very few of our concerns have been addressed. We’ve seen dogs getting UID, various other things getting UID, so there’s a lot of evidence that the system does not work. From Kerala we have stories of one person getting several UIDs, so we have no idea about technological feasibility of the project.

One of our distinguished fellows, Hans Varghese Mathews, has published an academic paper in the latest EPW (Economic and Political Weekly), by extrapolating UIDAI field trial data to national scale. He predicts that by the time the number crosses 1 billion, every time UIDAI tries to register someone new, they will match with about 850 people already in the database positively. So, the unique identification capability of the UIDAI will not scale above the billion. The consequence of the technology failing is not trivial. If someone replaces your biometrics in the central database, then the onus is on you to prove that you are a resident of India.

Previously, human beings determined the answer to this question, and they had to find proof that you were not a resident. Now, a fallible technology will be asked to answer this important question.

Isn’t the basic function of the Aadhaar project to ensure that benefits reach the person they are meant for, and it’s easier for people to get an identity proof for those who have no other ID, like migrant workers?

Two responses: is it good anti- corruption technology? Unfortunately not, because it is intended at retail fraud. The person under surveillance is very poor. But the person responsible for corruption is not poor. So, I believe you should be surveilling those responsible for corruption.

What I had said is UID should be first given to every single bureaucrat and every single politician in the country. From Delhi till the Panchayat office, till the ration shop in the village, that supply chain must be monitored and documented using cryptography, so that nobody can deny anything. We need non-repudiatable audit trail from New Delhi to the village because according to all analyses, that is where the theft is happening—in the supply chain. The villager who is taking false benefits, that is called retail fraud.

The bulk of the fraud is actually wholesale fraud. Please tackle wholesale fraud using non-repudiatable public audit trail from New Delhi to the village first, before you start surveilling the poor.

The second point is that people find it easy to get the UID. That is fine, but there is a problem; that it’s not uniquely identifying anybody. So, people will keep registering and the UID system will keep giving them more and more UIDs because there are no human checks and balances. Because you’ve gone with a pure technological solution, it’s very easy to fool (the system).

So, the ease of registration has not served the purpose.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-march-8-2016-shreeja-sen-govt-narrative-on-aadhaar-has-not-changed-in-last-six-years-sunil-abraham

Govt may have made 135 million Aadhaar numbers public: CIS report

praskrishna — 2017-05-03T15:43:37Z

CIS report says Aadhaar numbers leaked through government databases could be 100-135 million and bank accounts numbers leaked about 100 million.

The article by Komal Gupta was published in Livemint on May 2, 2017.

A central government ministry and a state government may have made public up to 135 million Aadhaar numbers, according to a research report issued by Bengaluru-based think tank Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) late on Monday.

The report titled Information Security Practices of Aadhaar (or lack thereof): A documentation of public availability of Aadhaar numbers with sensitive personal financial information studied four government databases.

The first two belong to the rural development ministry—the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP)’s dashboard and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’s (NREGA) portal.

The other two databases deal with Andhra Pradesh—the state’s own NREGA portal and the online dashboard of a government scheme called “Chandranna Bima”.

“Based on the numbers available on the websites looked at, the estimated number of Aadhaar numbers leaked through these four portals could be around 130-135 million and the number of bank account numbers leaked at around 100 million from the specific portals we looked at,” said Amber Sinha and Srinivas Kodali, the authors of the research report.

The report claims these government dashboards and databases revealed personally identifiable information (PII) due to a lack of proper controls exercised by the departments.

“While the availability of aggregate information on the Dashboard may play a role in making government functioning more transparent, the fact that granular details about individuals including sensitive PII such as Aadhaar number, caste, religion, address, photographs and financial information are only a few clicks away suggest how poorly conceived these initiatives are,” said the report.

The report said the NSAP portal lists 94,32,605 bank accounts and 14,98,919 post office accounts linked with Aadhaar.

“While the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) has been involved in proactively pushing for other databases to get seeded with Aadhaar numbers, they take little responsibility in ensuring the security and privacy of such data,” said the report.

UIDAI did not respond to an email from Mint seeking comments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-may-2-2017-komal-gupta-govt-may-have-made-135-million-aadhaar-numbers-public-cis-report

Glaring Errors in UIDAI's Rebuttal

pranesh — 2016-09-18T03:22:32Z

This response note by Pranesh Prakash questions Unique Identification Authority of India’s reply to Hans Verghese Mathews' article titled “Flaws in the UIDAI Process” (EPW, March 12, 2016), which found “serious mathematical errors” in the article.

The article was published in Economic & Political Weekly Vol. 51, Issue No. 36, September 3, 2016.

While I am not a statistician, I have followed the technical debate between Hans Verghese Mathews and the UIDAI closely, and see a number of glaring errors in the latter’s so-called rebuttal in EPW (March 12, 2016).

The UIDAI alleges Mathews to have ignored the evidence that the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) "flattens" with more factors. However, Mathews cannot be accused of ignorance if the flattening of the ROC is not relevant to his argument. To explain this in simple terms, the ROC curve is used to choose the appropriate "threshold distance" which determines false positives and false negatives, and belongs to a stage which precedes the estimation of the false positive identification rates (FPIR).

However, Mathews has used the FPIR estimates provided by the UIDAI (based on evidence from the enrolment of 84 million persons), and calculated how the FPIR changes when extrapolated for a population of 1.2 billion persons. In other words, he did not need to look at the ROC curve as that factor is not relevant to his argument, since he has used UIDAI data (which has presumably been estimated on the basis of all 12 factors : 10 fingerprints and 2 irises).

Further, UIDAI asks why Mathews has assumed a linear curve for his extrapolation. Mathews has done no such thing. In fact, in their paper "Role of Biometric Technology in Aadhaar Enrollment," the UIDAI states: "FPIR rate grows linearly with the database size" (nd, 19). Thus, this is an assumption formerly made by them (without providing rationale for it to be a linear curve as opposed to anything else). Mathews mathematically derives bounds for the FPIR in his paper, that is, the range within which the FPIR lies. One gets a linear curve only if they use the upper bound and not on the usage of anything else. So while Mathews does, as he explains, provide the results of the calculation based on the upper bound for the sake of simplicity, he nowhere asserts nor assumes a linear curve.

If, as the UIDAI claims, one cannot perform such an extrapolation and needs to depend on “empirical evidence” instead, the question arises as to how the UIDAI decided to scale up the programme to 1.3 billion people given the error rates. One could also ask if the machines being used to capture biometrics are good enough for the enlargement. Surely they would have performed some extrapolations to decide this.

In their paper they note that "although it [FPIR] is expected to grow as the database size increases, it is not expected to exceed manageable values even at full enrolment of 120 crores" (UIDAI nd, 13). They do not illustrate the extent to which the FPIR is expected to grow—neither in their initial paper, nor in their rebuttal to Mathews—whereas Mathews provides a method of estimating the increase of FPIR. Even if UIDAI is correct in its appraisal of FPIR and that it will not exceed "manageable values," they need to either exemplify their calculations or release the latest data. They have done neither, and that is quite unfortunate.

References

UIDAI (nd): “Role of Biometric Technology in Aadhaar Enrollment,” Unique Identification Authority of India, Government of India, New Delhi, viewed on 18 August 2016, https://uidai.gov.in/images/FrontPageUpdates/role_of_biometric_technology

Related Links

Flaws in the UIDAI Process http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/9/special-articles/flaws-uidai-process.html
Erring on Aadhaar http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/11/discussion/erring-aadhaar.html
Request for Specifics http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/36/documents/request-specifics-rebuttal-u...
Glaring Errors in UIDAI's Rebuttal http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/36/documents/glaring-errors-uidais-rebutt...
Overlooking the UIDAI Process http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/36/documents/response-hans-verghese-mathe...

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/glaring-errors-in-uidai-rebuttal-epw

Get an Aadhaar card if you don't have one

praskrishna — 2017-04-04T15:39:05Z

The Aadhaar number has been made compulsory for filing tax return. With both the government and private parties insisting on it for various activities despite the Supreme Court's assertion that is not mandatory, you need to get one at the earliest.

The article by Priya Nair and Sanjay Kumar Singh was published in the Business Standard on March 27, 2017. Udbhav Tiwari was quoted.

Until now the need for an Aadhaar card arose if someone wanted to avail of the LPG subsidy, or if senior citizens wanted to enjoy a concession on train tickets. This 12-digit number, which is a proof of identity, is largely used by the government to distribute cash benefits and other subsidies under its welfare schemes. Since submitting the Aadhaar card at the time of opening a bank account, investing in a mutual fund, etc is optional (you can submit another proof of identity), many people have still not bothered to get one. That ambivalent attitude will now have to change.

This year onwards all those filing income tax returns will have to furnish their Aadhaar number. There is a field in the income tax return form for Aadhaar number. Don’t forget to fill it this year. If you do not have an Aadhaar number, you will have to submit the enrolment number of your application for Aadhaar. "In case of failure to intimate the Aadhaar number, the PAN allotted to the person shall be deemed invalid and the other provisions of the Income Tax Act shall apply, as if the person has not applied for allotment of PAN," says Amarpal Chadha, tax partner, people advisory services, EY India.

Experts say that this step has been taken to deal with the problem of duplicate permanent account numbers (PAN) and to control black money. Says Kuldip Kumar, partner and leader-personal tax at PwC India: “Many people have more than one PAN, even though there is a penalty under the Income Tax Act for doing so. The government is linking PAN to Aadhaar to deal with this problem. This step will also help control black money. Whether you invest in stocks, shares, or do any other high-value transaction, over a period of time the tax department will be able to see all this information at the click of a button." Other experts also agree that this step will create an audit trail for various transactions. “Linking of Aadhaar and PAN will throw up any discrepancies in reported transactions and provide a ready database to the revenue authorities for necessary action,” says Vikas Vasal, partner, Grant Thornton India.

Interim problems
This measure is expected to create a slew of problems for people. Many individuals may still not have an Aadhaar card. They should apply for one post-haste. Everyone needs to check if their Aadhaar and PAN details match. If there are discrepancies between the two, get either your Aadhaar or PAN details updated so that you do not face problems at the time of filing returns. Details on how to update the Aadhaar and PAN are available on the web sites of UID and the IT department respectively (see box).

Non-Resident Indians (NRI) and foreign nationals may also need to obtain an Aadhaar number now. Many NRIs have an income (before claiming any deduction) that exceeds the basic exemption limit of Rs 2.5 lakh, and hence file a tax return in India. Foreign nationals who have spent time in India and earned an income also need to file a tax return. Indian residents who have been sent by their companies to work abroad will also have to scramble for the card. "March is about to end and tax returns will have to be filed by the end of July. Persons who have to file a tax return but are abroad will face a challenge getting the Aadhaar card made in time since you have to be physically present in India for this purpose,’’ says Kumar. The government may possibly grant some leeway to such people.

Even though the Supreme Court has said that Aadhaar is not mandatory, there are several instances where the authorities are insisting on it. Those applying for domicile proof and those who want to get their property registered are being asked to provide this number. Some telecom providers also insist on it before giving a connection. Schools are asking for it from students. You need it to appear for competitive exams like IIT JEE. Online providers of financial products insist on Aadhaar since it makes KYC easier. With the government moving strongly towards making Aadhaar compulsory, one can't escape complying with this regulation.

Risks of an Aadhaar-centric system
There are several risks associated with Aadhaar, whose basic purpose is authentication and authorisation. The first problem arises from the fact that it is easily accessible to miscreants. Aadhaar numbers of thousands of people have been uploaded on the Internet. "Since the Aadhaar number has to be given at so many places, it can be misused to pull information about people from the centralised database. In the case of credit and debit cards, we are told not to shares these numbers publicly as the number is the first thing required for carrying out a transaction. That is not the case with Aadhaar. UID's position is that you should treat your Aadhaar number carefully. But the fact is that the Aadhaar number is not used carefully either by consumers or businesses. It is a fairly public number. With Aadhaar too much power is being vested in a number that is quite public,’’ says Udbhav Tiwari, policy officer, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru.

Second, Aadhaar has a centralised database, and all centralised databases are vulnerable to hacking. Third, biometrics are not a very secure form of authentication. "Fingerprints are easy to forge. The UID says that the device (used to check the fingerprint) should not remember the biometrics but should only transfer it to UID which will verify the information. But miscreants could use a device that captures your biometrics," says Tiwari.

Other documents used for identification like PAN and passport are not easy to duplicate because of their security features. PAN, for instance, has a hologram. The power of the passport lies not in the passport number but in the document. Without the passport one cannot travel internationally. But in case of Aadhaar one can go on the Internet and print a new Aadhaar card. “If somebody has managed to capture my fingerprint and has my Aadhaar number, he can use it wherever Aadhaar is required,’’ says Tiwari.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-march-27-2017-priya-nair-and-sanjay-kumar-singh-get-an-aadhaar-card-if-you-dont-have-one

From 1 March, only registered devices to be used to authenticate Aadhaar

Admin — 2018-02-24T07:59:39Z

UIDAI directive to Aadhaar authentication agencies aims to avoid putting citizens’ biometric data at risk

The article by Komal Gupta was published in Livemint on February 8, 2018.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has directed all Aadhaar authentication agencies to use only registered biometric devices from 1 March to avoid putting residents’ data at risk.

The initial deadline to upgrade these devices was 1 June 2017, but it has been extended several times. The latest is the sixth extension.

The UIDAI wants the biometric devices registered with the Aadhaar system for encryption key management. The Aadhaar authentication server can individually identify and validate these devices and manage encryption keys on each registered device.

“It is reiterated that to ensure encryption of biometrics of residents at time of capture, it is absolutely essential to use only the registered devices. Any further use of non-registered devices will be putting residents’ privacy at risk,” a UIDAI circular dated 2 February said.

In January last year, UIDAI had instructed all the authentication user agencies (AUAs) and authentication service agencies (ASAs) to adhere to its new encryption standards and accordingly upgrade the devices to the new norms.

The AUA is an entity engaged in providing Aadhaar-enabled services. It may be a government, public or a private legal agency registered in India which uses Aadhaar authentication services provided by UIDAI.

The ASA is any entity that transmits authentication requests to the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR) on behalf of one or more AUAs.

Requests from AUAs to extend the timeline has been cited as the reason for delay by UIDAI. The last deadline was 31 January.

Still, UIDAI claims most of the entities have migrated to registered devices and “no further extension will be given in this regard.” Failure to meet the February-end deadline will lead to loss or disruption of services, the circular added.

A privacy expert called for better security in the Aadhaar system.

“The UIDAI should have gone in for smart cards, which are inherently more secure and would have proven a better basis for a national ID system. Given its choice of biometrics, UIDAI should have required hardware-level encryption — the yet-to-be-specified (Level 1) security standard— from 2010,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at think tank Centre for Internet and Society.

“Making the much-delayed Level 1 mandatory is what UIDAI should be focusing on; sadly, even basic registration and easily-defeated software-level encryption (Level 0) is yet to be made mandatory,” he said.

UIDAI has been under the scanner over the past few months over charges that random entities have been accessing personal information without the consent of individual Aadhaar number holders.

Last month, UIDAI put in place a two-layer security to reinforce privacy protections for Aadhaar holders—it introduced a virtual identification so that the actual number need not be shared to authenticate their identity. Simultaneously, it further regulated the storage of the Aadhaar numbers within various databases.
There are more than 1.2 billion Aadhaar holders in the country.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-komal-gupta-february-8-2018-from-march-1-only-registered-devices-to-be-used-to-authenticate-aadhaar

Free Net advocates flay Trai's public Wi-Fi paper

praskrishna — 2016-11-20T03:21:41Z

Stakeholders vouching for a cheap and open Internet have flagged concerns over privacy and regulatory hurdles.

The article by Anita Babu was published in the Business Standard on November 20, 2016. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

With the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India releasing its consultation paper on public Wi-Fi this week, stakeholders vouching for a cheap and open Internet have flagged concerns over privacy and regulatory hurdles.

The Internet Freedom Foundation has pointed out that the proposed regulations might lead to invasion of privacy and interfere with the freedom of hotspot providers to operate freely.

“While we welcome Trai’s vision that increasing the number of public Wi-Fi hotspots could be the way to bringing the majority of Indians online, the proposals turn out to be regressive and poorly thought out,” said Aravind Ravi Sulekha, co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation.

The regulator in its consultation paper issued earlier this week proposed hotspot providers would have to register with the government and users could access hotspots only after paying using a service tied to their Aadhaar number. It wants to utilise Aadhaar, electronic-Know Your Customer (e-KYC) and the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) to build a standard authentication mechanism for access to public Wi-Fi in India. While the aim of Trai is to increase the number of Wi-Fi hotspots in India, proponents of free Internet fear these proposed rules might have a contrary effect.

Hotspot providers will have to incur costs on account of hardware installations for one-time password verification in addition to the costs of sending out the passwords. This might discourage entrepreneurs.

“This system of verification makes it harder for entrepreneurs to set up hotspots and for people to access them. It is impossible for broadband to proliferate in any significant way if Trai insists on applying ineffective and cumbersome regulations on those who wish to set up their own hotspots,” Internet Freedom Foundation said in its comments to Trai’s consultation paper.

The proposals have excluded individuals who do not have an Aadhaar account from accessing public Wi-Fi. “This not only brings concerns of costs and exclusion but also privacy, given the constitutionality of the Aadhaar project, and its government-mandated use, is pending adjudication in the Supreme Court,” the foundation pointed out.

The proposals also come at the cost of anonymity. The foundation, cofounded by the crusaders of last year’s SaveTheInternet campaign, trashed the argument that imposing eKYC norms would help in countering terrorism and other crimes. “This prohibition on anonymous communication is a violation of Indians’ freedom of expression… making a call at a PCO, sending a telegram and posting a letter have always been possible without showing ID — even though criminals and terrorists occasionally abused these services… KYC measures are ineffective in preventing crime and terrorism, as tools like VPNs, TOR, and proxies can easily mask the identity of an Internet user,” it stated.

“The solution proposed by Trai is a classic example of centralism and over-regulation. It turns out that Trai is unclear about the problem to be solved,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society. He added that the new proposals had also failed to address the limitations on foreigners or tourists in India.

Current regulations prevent foreigners without a local mobile number from accessing public Wi-Fi connections. While Trai had identified the problem, it failed to come up with a plausible solution.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-november-20-2016-anita-babu-free-net-advocates-flay-trais-public-wifi-paper

Forget privacy, Aadhaar Bill gives too much power to the executive

praskrishna — 2016-03-17T14:44:12Z

The government promotes the Aadhaar programme because it believes the 12-digit unique identification number will let them track every penny spent from the exchequer. But money is not all that the Aadhaar number can track.

The article by Aloke Tikku was published in the Hindustan Times on March 17, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs.

It can help track people too with amazing efficiency. This is at the centre of the controversy around the programme, and the Aadhaar bill that requires every resident to get the number to access government subsidies and services.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley put up a spirited defence of the bill in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday when the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 came up for passage. And he was right.

As far as privacy is concerned, the NDA government’s version is much more stringent than the creaky draft proposed by the UPA in 2010.

Jaitley said there were only two circumstances in which personal data collected by UIDAI could be shared under this bill.

One, if the Aadhaar number holder consents to his details being shared. Second, if a government agency wants to access this data on grounds of national security.

But the debate around privacy concerns – that neither the NDA nor the UPA governments addressed – and the new bill is much more fundamental.

The Aadhaar bill gives the executive too much power to decide how to administer the law.

Every law requires the government to frame rules to specify the nitty-gritty of its implementation.

But the Aadhaar bill passed by Parliament gives the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) the power to prescribe regulations for nearly every provision, right down to what biometric or biological attributes need to be captured.

“The law leaves too much power in the hands of the executive,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-headquartered research advocacy group, Centre for Internet and Society.

For instance, the bill gives the Unique identification Authority of India (UIDAI) powers to determine if it should collect any biological attribute of people too. This means the government could at a later date mandate that DNA of all Aadhaar numbers too be collected.

The example echoed in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday as well.

“No power should be delegated to the UID Authority because then the UID Authority will decide tomorrow that DNA is required, and they will then have the powers to take DNA information as well,” Congress MP Jairam Ramesh said.

The minister tried to explain the reliance on regulations issued by UIDAI – the word ‘regulations’ does appear some 50 times through the legislation – as compared to less than 10 in, say, the right to information law or the 2010 version of the bill.

He said MPs could still review notifications issued by UIDAI when they are placed for parliamentary approval.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-march-17-2016-aloke-tikku-forget-privacy-aadhaar-bill-gives-too-much-power-to-the-executive

Flaws in the UIDAI Process

hans — 2016-03-06T10:40:59Z

The accuracy of biometric identification depends on the chance of a false positive: the probability that the identifiers of two persons will match. Individuals whose identifiers match might be termed duplicands. When very many people are to be identified success can be measured by the (low) proportion of duplicands. The Government of India is engaged upon biometrically identifying the entire population of India. An experiment performed at an early stage of the programme has allowed us to estimate the chance of a false positive: and from that to estimate the proportion of duplicands. For the current population of 1.2 billion the expected proportion of duplicands is 1/121, a ratio which is far too high.

The article was published in Economic & Political Weekly, Journal » Vol. 51, Issue No. 9, 27 Feb, 2016.

A legal challenge is being mounted in the Supreme Court, currently, to the programme of biometric identification that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is engaged upon: an identification preliminary and a requisite to providing citizens with “Aadhaar numbers” that can serve them as “unique identiﬁers” in their transactions with the state. What follows will recount an assessment of their chances of success. We shall be using data that was available to the UIDAI and shall employ only elementary ways of calculation. It should be recorded immediately that an earlier technical paper by the author (Mathews 2013) has been of some use to the plaintiffs, and reference will be made to that in due course.

The Aadhaar numbers themselves may or may not derive, in some way, from the biometrics in question; the question is not material here. For our purposes a biometric is a numerical representation of some organic feature: like the iris or the retina, for instance, or the inside of a ﬁnger, or the hand taken whole even. We shall consider them in some more detail later. The UIDAI is using ﬁngerprints and iris images to generate a combination of biometrics for each individual. This paper bears on the accuracy of the composite biometric identiﬁer. How well those composites will distinguish between individuals can be assessed, actually, using the results of an experiment conducted by the UIDAI itself in the very early stages of its operation; and our contention is that, from those results themselves, the UIDAI should have been able to estimate how many individuals would have their biometric identiﬁers matching those of some other person, under the best of circumstances even, when any good part of population has been identiﬁed.

Read the full article here.

The author thanks Nico Temme of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in The Netherlands for the bounds he derived on the chance of a false positive. He is particularly grateful to the anonymous referee of this journal who, through two rounds of comment, has very much improved the presentation of the results. A technical supplement to this paper is placed on the EPW website along with this paper.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/epw-27-february-2016-hans-varghese-mathews-flaws-in-uidai-process

Fixing Aadhaar: Security developers' task is to trim chances of data breach

sunil — 2018-01-10T16:47:59Z

The task before a security developer is not only to reduce the probability of identity breach but to eliminate certain occurrences.

The article was published in Business Standard on January 10, 2017

I feel no joy when my prophecies about digital identity systems come true. This is because from a Popperian perspective these are low-risk prophecies. I had said that that all centralised identity databases will be breached in the future. That may or may not happen within my lifetime so I can go to my grave without worries about being proven wrong. Therefore, the task before a security developer is not only to reduce the probability but more importantly to eliminate the possibility of certain occurrences.

The blame for fragility in digital identity systems today can be partially laid on a World Bank document titled “Ten Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development” which has contributed to the harmonisation of approaches across jurisdictions. Principle three says, “Establishing a robust — unique, secure, and accurate — identity”. The keyword here is “a”. Like The Lord of the Rings, the World Bank wants “one digital ID to rule them all”. For Indians, this approach must be epistemologically repugnant as ours is a land which has recognised the multiplicity of truth since ancient times.

In “Identities Research Project: Final Report” funded by Omidyar Network and published by Caribou Digital — the number one finding is “people have always had, and managed, multiple personal identities”. And the fourth finding is “people select and combine identity elements for transactions during the course of everyday life”. As researchers they have employed indirect language, for layman the key takeaway is a single national ID for all persons and all purposes is an ahistorical and unworkable solution.

Revoke all Aadhaar numbers that have been compromised, breached, leaked, illegally published or inadvertently disclosed and regenerate new global identifiers. Photo: Reuters

monoculture can be prevented. The traditional approach is followed in the US - you could have multiple documents that are accepted as valid ID. Or you could have multiple identity providers providing ID artifacts using an interoperable framework as they do in the UK. Another approach is tokenisation. The first time tokenisation was suggested in the Aadhaar context was in an academic paper published in August 2016 by Shweta Agrawal, Subhashis Banerjee and Subodh Sharma from IIT Delhi titled “Privacy and Security of Aadhaar: A Computer Science Perspective”.

Though I had spoken about tokenisation as a fix for Aadhaar earlier, I wrote about it for the first time on the 31st of March, 2017, in The Hindu. The steps would be required are as follows. First, revoke all Aadhaar numbers that have been compromised, breached, leaked, illegally published or inadvertently disclosed and regenerate new global identifiers aka Aadhaar Numbers. Second, reduce the number of KYC transactions by eliminating all use cases that don’t result in corresponding transparency or security benefits. For example, most developed economies don’t have KYC for mobile phone connections. Three, the UIDAI should issue only tokens to those government entities and private sector service providers that absolutely must have KYC. When the NATGRID wants to combine subsets of 20 different databases for up to 12 different intelligence/law enforcement agencies they will have to approach the UIDAI with the token or Aadhaar number of the suspect. The UIDAI will then be able to release corresponding tokens and/or the Aadhaar number to the NATGRID. Implementing tokenisation introduces both technical and institutional checks and balances in our surveillance systems.

On 25th of July 2017, UIDAI published the first document providing implementation details for tokenisation wherein KUAs and AUAs were asked to generate the tokens. But this approach assumed that KYC user agencies could be trusted. This is because the digital identity solution for the nation as conceived by Aadhaar architects is based on the problem statement of digital identity within a firm. Within a firm all internal entities can be trusted. But in a nation state you cannot make this assumption. Airtel, a KUA, diverted 190 crores of LPG subsidy to more than 30 lakh payment bank accounts that were opened without informed consent. Axis Bank Limited, Suvidha Infoserve (a business correspondent) and eMudhra (an e-sign provider or AUA) have been accused of using replay attacks to perform unauthorised transactions. In November last year, the UIDAI indicated to the media that they were working on the next version of tokenisation — this time called dummy numbers or virtual numbers. This work needs to be accelerated to mitigate some of the risks in the current system.

The paper in its fourth key recommendation says “cryptographically embed Aadhaar ID into Authentication User Agency (AUAs) and KYC User Agency (aka KUAs) — specific IDs making correlation impossible”. The paper considers several designs for such local identifier where — 1) no linking is possible, 2) only unidirectional linking is possible, and 3) bidirectional linking is possible referring to a similar scheme in the LSE identity report.Though I had spoken about tokenisation as a fix for Aadhaar earlier, I wrote about it for the first time on the 31st of March, 2017, in The Hindu. The steps would be required are as follows. First, revoke all Aadhaar numbers that have been compromised, breached, leaked, illegally published or inadvertently disclosed and regenerate new global identifiers aka Aadhaar Numbers. Second, reduce the number of KYC transactions by eliminating all use cases that don’t result in corresponding transparency or security benefits. For example, most developed economies don’t have KYC for mobile phone connections. Three, the UIDAI should issue only tokens to those government entities and private sector service providers that absolutely must have KYC. When the NATGRID wants to combine subsets of 20 different databases for up to 12 different intelligence/law enforcement agencies they will have to approach the UIDAI with the token or Aadhaar number of the suspect. The UIDAI will then be able to release corresponding tokens and/or the Aadhaar number to the NATGRID. Implementing tokenisation introduces both technical and institutional checks and balances in our surveillance systems.On 25th of July 2017, UIDAI published the first document providing implementation details for tokenisation wherein KUAs and AUAs were asked to generate the tokens. But this approach assumed that KYC user agencies could be trusted. This is because the digital identity solution for the nation as conceived by Aadhaar architects is based on the problem statement of digital identity within a firm. Within a firm all internal entities can be trusted. But in a nation state you cannot make this assumption. Airtel, a KUA, diverted 190 crores of LPG subsidy to more than 30 lakh payment bank accounts that were opened without informed consent. Axis Bank Limited, Suvidha Infoserve (a business correspondent) and eMudhra (an e-sign provider or AUA) have been accused of using replay attacks to perform unauthorised transactions. In November last year, the UIDAI indicated to the media that they were working on the next version of tokenisation — this time called dummy numbers or virtual numbers. This work needs to be accelerated to mitigate some of the risks in the current system.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/business-standard-sunil-abraham-january-10-fixing-aadhaar