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ShareThings are not always what they seem or are made out to be. Take the Unique Identification (UID) project set up by the Indian government under former Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani. In his interviews to TV and the press, Nilekani has reiterated that the main function of the project is to be "an enabler which will allow more effective public delivery" for schemes for the poor.
It plans to have all of India's billion people covered by a unique number, which will have fingerprints, besides a photograph and details of the person, his/her sex, age, and address. All this is to be achieved by people voluntarily agreeing to be fingerprinted and their details being filed in a central depository. No coercion is mentioned and the unspecified "investment of money in this project will actually make all those other monies" for development projects "be spent more efficiently".
By funding and placing the project under an innocuous new ministry its real intent is concealed. In other countries such as the UK, similar proposed schemes come under the home ministry as it "offers the potential to combat the threat of terrorism, identity fraud and illegal working." The Indian scheme had a similar purpose when first put forward by the NDA government in 2001 but this has studiously not been mentioned by Nilekani. He has also neatly sidestepped the infringement of civil liberties and a person's privacy that the scheme would entail.
Far from helping, say, people getting work under The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) or people under the poverty line getting food at subsidised rates, it will introduce another bureaucratic layer that will be used to harass them. It would also be used to get information on anyone using banks, passports, driving licenses, demat share accounts or any other place where the individual has to deal with institutions. Once the scheme is installed, all such institutions will ask for the unique identification number, forcing a person to register, placing all such details as bank account numbers, passport details and demat share account numbers in a central depository.
Apart from the power such information gives the government, it can be misused by hackers. In October 2006, Jerry Fishenden the national technology officer of Microsoft in the UK wrote in The Scotsman that the proposal to put biometrics such as fingerprints on a national database would perpetuate the very problems it was built to solve, as no computer system is ever 100 per cent secure, "putting a comprehensive set of personal data in one place produces a honeypot effect -- a highly attractive and richly rewarding target for criminals" and the UK government"should not be building systems that allow hackers to mine information so easily".
The most comprehensive critique of a national ID scheme was done by the London School of Economics (LSE) of the UK draft Identity Cards Bill. It largely agrees with the conclusions of the UK home affairs committee set up to study the bill. Its analysis has been seen as sufficiently perceptive to contribute to policy deliberations in related areas in the US, Australia and Canada.
Among the many observations and recommendations LSE makes, some are worth mentioning as they would equally apply here:
In some cases, the use of unique identifiers for citizens has become the key enabler of identity theft. Reports from the US indicates that in 2004 there were 9.3 million victims of identity theft, costing over $50 billion.
Genuine biometric information could be inserted into otherwise fraudulent identity documents. Therefore the risk with this type of identifier lies in the issuing process.
Although law and order is a key motivation for the establishment of ID cards in numerous countries, evidence establishes that their usefulness to police has been marginal.
The National Identity Register poses a far larger risk to the safety and security of UK citizens than any of the problems that it purports to solve.
The technology envisioned for this scheme is, to a large extent, untested and unreliable.
No scheme on this scale has been undertaken anywhere in the world. The use of biometrics gives rise to particular concern because this technology has never been used at such a scale.
The UK scheme proposes to centralise ID records of 60 million people. India, a far less developed nation is attempting this at 20 times the scale. It is a bonanza for the IT industry but could be a disaster for the rest of us. We must not "sleepwalk into a surveillance society".
Gandhiji first used satyagraha in South Africa when the Smuts regime made it compulsory for Indians to have their fingerprints on their certificates of registration. The irony is those who claim his legacy have now put forward a far more intrusive, and ultimately coercive, proposal.
