Parliament is set to pass legislation that gives central agencies access
to world's biggest biometric database in the interests of national
security, raising fears the privacy of a billion people could be
compromised.
It could also usher in surveillance far more intrusive
than the US 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 realise that it can also be
used for mass surveillance," said Tathagata Satpathy, a lawmaker from
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 US?"
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 organisation, 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
programme.
He pointed to the US 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 Rajya Sabha 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 Rajya Sabha cannot reject. It can return it to
the Lok Sabha, 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 recognise patterns of behaviour 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."
© Thomson Reuters 2016
Aadhaar App With Facial Recognition-Based Authentication Unveiled by UIDAI9 April 2025
Search
