In India, we go one step ahead of all this forensic BS: we employ stockmarket billionaires as experts in designing and implementing national policy. Minor problem: the solutions are anti-national, but that is easily ignored by nationalists, including 1/n
it would appear, those sworn to defend the Constitution. We've come a long way from the days a colonised India established fingerprints as a way to track criminals: today, their failings are used to exclude welfare beneficiaries. Of course, it is possible 2/n
that a market billionaire might view an indigent as a criminal: living off the taxes paid by billionaires. It is another matter that India's industrial billionaires prosper off subsidies designed to grow the economy, in the hope that some of that 3/n
prosperity might trickle down to the poor. Instead, poverty has grown by leaps and bounds, triggering 'farmer suicides' on a scale that appears bewildering, in a nation that has food surpluses that are considered adequate to meet the worst crop failures. 4/n
It isn't as though being a billionaire erases the capability to be human, at least, not always. But to fancy that a cut-rate back office processing business provides the smarts to understand the complexities of chronic poverty is truly a leap of faith. 5/n
It is, however, ridiculous to fancy that all Indians share this faith. Still, a surprising number evidently do, if the savage attacks on naysayers for India's staggeringly incompetent identification scheme, here on Twitter, are any clue. This article 6/n
aadhaar-articles.blogspot.in/2011/08/1553-a… listed the occasions @NandanNilekani deliberately avoided answering questions about the scheme, during the period he officially steered it. Today, he chairs his former company, contracted to run services based on the identification 7/n
project, and both mentors and funds startups that piggyback on it. No conflict of interest there, naturally, at least, none that appears to worry politicians and bureaucrats who are part of the framework that keeps it going, coercing a billion+ Indians 8/n
to register, with daily threats to cut off access to bank services, telecom service, cooking fuel, pensions and savings, healthcare and even a host of private services, such as internet-based home deliveries. So much for voluntary, or even for comparisons 9/n
to social welfare schemes in other nations, some that have a broad reach, far more than envisaged for India, yet are fiercely protective of personal rights, and deeply suspicious of shady technologies, such as digital biometric records, that are 10/n
remarkably well suited to pervasive mass surveillance, due to optimisation techniques that analyse vast amounts of data in order to statistically narrow in on, for instance, persons of interest.
Curious, then, that among the earliest mentions of 11/n
Curious, then, that among the earliest mentions of 11/n
biometrics as identifiers, in popular literature, is in a Sherlock Holmes short story, where the crime scene has been tampered with by the perpetrator, in order to divert suspicion. In that story, The Norwood Builder, eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/…, wax is used 12/n
to fake a fingerprint impression on a wall, but Holmes has already inspected the scene, and scents a rat.
India's entire biometric identification scheme is a vast crime scene, but there is no single Sherlock Holmes to be found to expose it. 13/n
India's entire biometric identification scheme is a vast crime scene, but there is no single Sherlock Holmes to be found to expose it. 13/n
Rather, the diligent efforts of hundreds of concerned Indians, persevering over nearly 10 years, have brought the mansion of lies to the Supreme Court, where 5 jurists now stand between monstrous machinations and the continuance of a democratic 14/n
socialist republic, whose Constitution affirms the will of a people to build a free new nation from the ashes of a feudal post-medieval Empire. That freedom has always been recognised to be fragile, but the threats of 'fascism' and 'strong leaders' are 15/n
proving to be far less of a serious threat (although still very real) than that posed by the threats of false science and badly used technologies, that come together in the biometric-based identification scheme being misused to undermine 16/n
self-determination, the foundation of this free state.
unroll
