Thread by @roadscholarz

(1/n) The launch of 'Dissent on Aadhaar: Big Data Meets Big Brother' is about to begin.

Thread.

Justice AP Shah launches the book!

Justice Shah: "It would be right to say the issue of data privacy is complex and split down the middle."

J Shah: The view by the govt is that we need a digital identity to fix up welfare and help the impoverished.

Another view has been that Aadhaar has neither helped the impoverished but even lead to exclusion.

J Shah: Further, issues of privacy and surveillance remain major challenges.

Bringing, Orwell into the noisy debate is almost unrresitble.

J Shah: This brilliant book cuts through the noise and presents the comprehensive picture of the challenges that Indian faces with digital identity.

J Shah: Like many of the authors, I am also convinced that the judicial approval for Aadhaar has widened the gap b/w have and have nots.

J Shah: Even as the majority judgement chose to ignore the reality of exclusion, we saw the dissenting judgement of J Chandrachud where a range of issues were dealt with.

J Shah: Like the minority judgement, this book provides a reasoned intelligent dissent on the majority judgement.

It reminds us to keep the marginalized in the centre of the debate and demand democratic action.

J Shah: The state through its various arms is telling us what to eat, whom to eat, whom to marry. Dissenting on these actions had led to overt violence in some instances.

J Shah: Would like to note Shyam Divans brilliant chapter in the book titled "Aadhaar's Biometric Tsunami".

Acc to Divan, the large-scale collection of data puts the balance of power significantly in favour of the govt. He demonstrates how Aadhaar creates a surveillance org.

J Shah: The chapter by Sunil Abraham brilliantly notes how Aadhaar makes the citizen transparent to the state but the state is entirely opaque to the citizens.

J Shah: Would like to end by saying that these are times where we have to anchor ourselves to simple truths.

This book comes as a timely reminder of such simple truths.

The panel consisting of @sharmasupriya, @AnandTeltumbde, Reetika Khera, and Jean Drèze begins.

Supriya: Thank you Reetika for putting this book together. You have brought the various silos of the Aadhaar debate together.

Reetika: Thanks the various institutional orgs, Stanford Humanities Centre, IITD, IIMA, and the media that have them a good hear.

Reetika: When we started out, the voices from different parts of the debate were not speaking to each other.

Thought it was worthwhile to bring various aspects of the legal, technological, welfare perspective on Aadhaar.

Reetika: What hope I have from the book -

(a) Be given a fair chance to be heard.

There has been such a lot of propoganda noise from the pro-Aadhaar side, it has drowned the critical voices.

(b) Welfare -

UIDAI made a mistake by sending reps to explain to me how UID will fix up the welfare.

But identified right at the start that Aadhaar's cure doesn't do much for welfare.

Reetika: This is an important point to highlight. "Aadhaar was a remedy looking for a curse".

The evidence on identity fraud - which Aadhaar can fix - was non-existant. As more evidence has come by, this fact has been concerned.

Reetika: In many ways, Aadhaar has made matters worse for welfare. Aadhaar has become an added hurdle for citizens to cross before they can receive their entitlements.

Reetika: The third thing is (c) Privacy and Surveillance.

Really do hope that people will go beyond the idea of privacy is an "elitist concern". Quite certain that privacy is crucial for a healthy democracy.

Hope the book will make people go beyond these lazy responses.

Reetika: What is the true nature of this project?

It will concentrate state power and corporate power. This kind of power cannot be good for citizens and democracy.

Reetika: Used to cheekily say that "Aadhaar is the #NREGA for the IT Sector".

We can see how these orgs like iSpirt and other fin tech orgs have been trying to work around all legal reqs.

Reetika: The UPA Aadhaar bill was sent back to the drawing board by the Parliamentary Committee. They still tried to do the "compulsorily voluntary" game.

This govt goes worse but rammed it through the Money Bill route.

Reetika: Convinced that Aadhaar is not really about welfare. Usha Ramanathan has said this for a while. Read Shankar Aiyyar's book, chapter titled "Push for Pull".

Reetika: Jairam Ramesh's response to Arun Jailtleys recent blog on Aadhaar, clearly shows that even Congress believes that Aadhaar works for welfare. Despite all the mounting evidence of the contrary.

Reetika: The propoganda had been all over the place. The media has been tightly controlled.

This is a deeply flaws project. Don't why people still think biometric auth is the best form of security.

@sharmasupriya : The fact that Aadhaar could continue to grow the way it did, throws light on the Indian democracy.

@sharmasupriya and Reetika discusses the brilliance of the World Bank figure which puts Aadhaar savings as $11 billion.

Reetika: Till today, the World Bank has till date not refused to accept the error or retracted the figure.

@sharmasupriya asks Jean that biometric auth may be creating issues, but Aadhaar seeding is good right?

Jean: I will take some time to answer this and show some videos. The biggest issue for me is the authoritarian nature of the project.

Jean: There is now a large body of evidence documenting the disruption by Aadhaar.

Contrary to "evidence based policy", Aadhaar is a case of "policy based evidence".

Jean: Various instances of blind persons denied Aadhaar enrolment, ration cards being cancelled, pensioners being deprived their rights, children being denied admissions.

Video testimonies of persons denied of entitlements being shown.

Jean: Issues with Aadhaar are not limited to biometric authentication. There are at least three issues:

(a) People often don't know one of the various Aadhaar reqs.
(b) With pensions, need linking of Aadhaar with across 3 databases.

(c) Because people don't have any stake, they don't link their accounts with Aadhaar.

Govt uses the "ultimatum" method - gives a final deadline to link and then deletes all others.

Jean: With Pensions, we knew even at the start of the Aadhaar project, that the issue of identity fraud has been very limited. Study by Saloni Chopra & Jessica Pudussery brought that fact out.

@sharmasupriya - Why do we not see the noise about people being deprived?

Jean: It is manifestation of the powerless-ness of the people.

Jean: By now we, by and large, know of the damage that Aadhaar is causing at the PDS.

But we don't know much of how Aadhaar is damaging the banking system - largely because of the opaque system and lack of any transparency.

Jean: 500 crores of MNREGA payments were rejected during the financial year 2017-18. That's a massive amount of money.

Jean: Let me get to the LALA rule - last Aadhaar linked account.

If we use Aadhaar payment bridge system to make payments, the money is directed to the latest Aadhaar linked account, without any consent of the users.

Jean: Students recently interviewed bank managers to learn how much they understand about the entire payment systems.

We found that they also know close to nothing.

@sharmasupriya: Thanks @AnandTeltumbde for joining us despite the troubled times from him and his family.

@sharmasupriya: How does Aadhaar play into this big data epoch?

There is a dictum in control theory - "you cannot control what you cannot measure".

@AnandTeltumbde - The innocuous demographic data that Aadhaar collects may not be the biggest surveillance challenege.

@AnandTeltumbde - When CIDR was being put together, E&Y were appointed for consultants to figure out what could be done from such a database.

@AnandTeltumbde - We cannot compare Google, Facebook and Aadhaar. The latter is a state tool for surveillance makes it an entirely different ball game.

@AnandTeltumbde - I've taught data breaches and security for a long time.

Let me tell you that no database is fool-proof.

@sharmasupriya - One good aspect of the SC judgement was the striking down of private use. But now there is an amendment which reintroduces that.

Reetika - The reintroduction was a bit surprising. We thought that Section 57 is what affected the middle/upper class and so we thought the govt would just let it pass.

But the fact that the govt didn't, shows how much of interest the corporates have.

@sharmasupriya - Jean, you point out in the book that the earlier Aadhaar law allowed restricted authentication data. But that has changed now.

How does that impact privacy?

Jean - NIDAI bill, which was shot down by the Parliamentary Standing Committee only allowed for a yes/no authentication.

The current Aadhaar allows for drawing demographic info at the time of authentication.

"Goodbye to Privacy".

Jean - When govt says "your data is safe", they basically mean "your core biometrics are safe". But with the rest of demographic data, Aadhaar creates the structure to effectively share that with govt snd private entities.

@sharmasupriya to @AnandTeltumbde: Do you think the data protection law can turn the situation around?

@AnandTeltumbde - Honestly, don't have much faith on the law!

@AnandTeltumbde - Seem to be convinced that law cannot do too much. Merging of biometrics with various databases will go unfettered. They should fundamentally not be doing such things.

Reetika - Just want to add that we need a data protection law. But even that is unlikely to reign in the Aadhaar terrors.

Reetika - Work by @random_walker shows that even with anonymized databases, Machine Learning tools can be used to reverse identity persons.

@sharmasupriya to @AnandTeltumbde - How do you link this discussion on Aadhaar to the way the government is arm-twisting you into the Elgar Parishad issue?

@AnandTeltumbde - As @Snowden has highlighted, when persons fear that they are under surveillance, there are serious psychological effects with people curving what they are free to speak.

@AnandTeltumbde - The govt is so amoral and so rogue that they have created a huge issue out of the Elgar Parishad issue - it is purely an election gimmick.

@AnandTeltumbde - Initially, thought it was a whole joke and didn't take it seriously.

Then the lawyers told me that I've been named in the FIR.

@AnandTeltumbde - Went to high court, but they rejected the appeal and the SC has refused to intervene.

This is quite serious and leaves citizens quite defenceless.

@sharmasupriya: What comes next now that we know that Aadhaar has caused a lot of damage.

Reetika - I am "umeed ki bimaari" so believe Aadhaar won't remain, at least like this. See J Chandrachud's dissenting opinion.

@AnandTeltumbde - Such kind of false projects should be dropped. As starters, the biometric data should be destroyed. We have no reason to have that.

Jean - We are in challenging times. Important to note that the debate changed dramatically when the middle class was forced to link Aadhaar with everything.

Now the middle class is off the hook. Hence the momentum behind anti-Aadhaar has deflated a bit.

Jean: The Section 57 is being reintroduced through an amendment now. So we don't know what's really happening.

The debate it still framed by COACH - Coalition of Aadhaar Champions. Their word is "Aadhaar or nothing".