India has rampant fraud and waste in its government aid programs. So, the government says, they have launched a massive effort to get detailed information on all of its 1.2 billion citizens to be able to track its aid programs and cut out the fraud and waste. It certainly makes sense to root out waste and fraud.
But note these details outlined in the Wall St. Journal article on this program, called Aadhaar, and now imagine this in a country with a repressive government. Also, is this type of tracking coming to America?
* Each citizen will get a unique, 12-digit ID number
* All 10 fingerprints of each citizen will be stored
* Iris scans of each person will be collected
* Digital photos will be taken of each person
* Names, addresses, genders and dates of birth will be collected
* “Passports, driver’s licenses, ration cards and government health-insurance cards could either have the numbers printed on them or embedded electronically.”
* “Signing up is technically voluntary, but any government agency or company will be allowed to require a unique ID as identity proof, an approach critics say amounts to a de facto mandate for people to enroll.” In addition, aid programs that provide subsidies for food, fuel, fertilizer and jobs will all be tied to the program.
* In one town where people were recently registered for the program, “residents provided an array of personal information, including their caste, religion and cellphone number.”
* “State agencies and companies who register people can gather whatever information they deem appropriate.”
* Current and former employees from Snapfish, Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems and Intel are among those consulting for the program
* The government hopes to collect the data on the first 600 million people in four years, and will spend billions on the program
Tech evangelists often pretend that the digital world is going to expand freedom. Imagine being a dissident in a repressive country with a program like India’s. Technology is making totalitarianism far, far easier to maintain, especially when coupled with restrictive gun laws. An unarmed populace that is tracked wherever they go is a population easy to subjugate.
Category: Government control, Privacy
Tags: biometric data, India, national ID