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‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

nytimes.com

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Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#111

Post by selimthegrim »

8note wrote: post #32
Zak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a mixed bag. Not Orwellian: * Requiring identification to get welfare benefits. The article mentions fraud is a big issue. * Use of biometrics. It sounds creepy at first, but without a robust system of record keeping to base the ID card on, this is a good way to ensure each one is unique. Orwellian: * Requiring a government ID to enter a middle school art contest. * Requiring a government ID to buy a pre…

are those really orwellian though? they could make an orwellian system on top of it where they destroy government IDs to unperson you, but in and of itself, those aren't very orwellian.

Given what’s going on with the population register in Assam and certain groups right now, this is not a groundless fear at all.

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#112

Post by buvanshak »

haltingproblem wrote: post #5

Lets step back and pose a meta question - how does a state go about providing services to its citizen if the state cannot identify citizens as its own and as unique entities. Both being necessary conditions. A well functioning state needs to be a strong (sorry libertarians) and benign (cf. Somalia and North Korea) to take care of its citizens. You can take birth, live and die in a weak state without the State ever kn…

>how does a state go about providing services to its citizen if the state cannot identify citizens as its own and as unique entities.

A man comes to you and ask you for money. He says that he is hungry. In this case, you have two options.

1. You can give him the money. But you risk being scammed, because you cannot actually check that the man is actually hungry. If you give them money, there is no way to make sure that they did not buy liquor instead of food. This is what Aadhar is supposed to solve.

2. You can offer to buy him food (not a parcel or takeaway). In this case, there is no risk of being scammed.

I think governments should try to do 2, instead of strapping on things like Aadhar in the name of doing 1, as it has a lot of chance of misuse and is vastly less reliable than 2..

As a solid implementation, instead of providing rations for rice and fuel, to prepare food, what if governments can open hotels, where one can have a solid, healthy meal for real cheap, For any one and every one who bothers to show up?

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#113

Post by hesarenu »

captn3m0 wrote: post #83
iguy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus much of the database has leaked. Honest question: how much does this matter? For instance, I believe in Denmark your ID number is simply not a secret at all, no more than your name. While in the US, your SSN & address basically seems to let any crook empty your bank account.

Aadhaar number enables identity fraud. Since paper-aadhaar is still very much accepted as a proof, just having the number is enough (in many cases) to take over someone's identity and get a new SIM issued, which you can then use for emptying the bank account. There are also phishing scams happening with Aadhaar since it uses OTP as the authentication factor. We have OTPs as 2FA for bank transactions, and it works bec…

Where do you get some with verification?

What do you mean by unencrypted SMS. How do you sms is unencrypted?

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#114

Post by hesarenu »

captn3m0 wrote: post #45
Zak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a mixed bag. Not Orwellian: * Requiring identification to get welfare benefits. The article mentions fraud is a big issue. * Use of biometrics. It sounds creepy at first, but without a robust system of record keeping to base the ID card on, this is a good way to ensure each one is unique. Orwellian: * Requiring a government ID to enter a middle school art contest. * Requiring a government ID to buy a pre…

>The article mentions fraud is a big issue. When tackling fraud, you must look at 1)exclusions and 2)cost. In the case of aadhaar, we've seen the project baloon in cost and vision over the span of two different governments. There have been savings number reported by the government that have since been redacted by the World Bank (but the government keeps claiming them). At some point, you must take stock and consider…

India spends a lot of money on roads which should have last year's but fails every monsoon. Aadhar expenditure might be a small blip compared to those.

Govt were anyway required for most things in India. This is just another card. The main issue would be accepting it without finger verification.

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#115

Post by hesarenu »

captn3m0 wrote: post #53
Zak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parts that sounded reasonable sound less so given this context.

It is guaranteed to get worse if the Supreme Court doesn't step in. For eg - Aadhaar enabled payments are on their way, and there is a push from the government to get Aadhaar authenticated ATMs out (fingerprint based). Think of what happens when your Aadhaar is disabled? We've already had people die on hospital entrances because they couldn't find the patient's Aadhaar[0], now we're moving closer to a guaranteed civi…

Why are you blaming Aadhar instead of hospital. What kind of hospital turncoat aways critical patients. Btw the hospital in my area were not accepting card payments before demonization. They wanted only cash.

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#116

Post by newyankee »

haltingproblem wrote: post #5

Lets step back and pose a meta question - how does a state go about providing services to its citizen if the state cannot identify citizens as its own and as unique entities. Both being necessary conditions. A well functioning state needs to be a strong (sorry libertarians) and benign (cf. Somalia and North Korea) to take care of its citizens. You can take birth, live and die in a weak state without the State ever kn…

That is a great summary, while i am a big privacy advocate myself, having observed India's ills from so close Aadhar's benefits outweights its costs.

I just hope that we have better security systems, lot of third party auditing and limits to the areas where Aadhar would be needed.

Unfortunately in a country like India to reduce corruption, improve PDS we need a better system and a well designed, maintained Aadhar system is one of the solutions. India being a democracy so many voices against it are raised unlike China, many points are valid though. However what gets me is the large scale fear mongering especially from people who have no idea about third world problems and priorities. These are the people who would give answers like 'why would X not find a job if he is so poor' ?

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#117

Post by newyankee »

navinsylvester wrote: post #110

Why Aadhaar[1] is evil: #1 Aadhaar has been foisted on us under false pretenses. #2 It is useless. #3 It is destroying the lives of the poor. #4 It is coercive. #5 It is technically unreliable. #6 It is insecure. #7 It puts sensitive data into unreliable hands. #8 It is creating the infrastructure for 24×7 surveillance. #9 It is allowing privileged insiders to profit from personal data. #10 It frees the government fr…

I do not know about other points and there may be rings of truth to all the issues

but #2 and #3 are definitely false.

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#118

Post by fooker »

microcolonel wrote: post #105
fooker wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is like saying that the right way to fix bugs is by conducting meetings to grill the programmer. Sure, it can work but it does not scale. If clerks spend all day manually answering RTI queries who will do the work?

Where in the world do clerks spend all day answering FOI/RTI queries? I feel people greatly overestimate the typical volume of requests, having personally known at least three FOI officers in two jurisdictions. When you're seeing elevated request volume, it's likely that there's something substantial worth requesting, which is exactly the point of this form of legislation.

Keeping my analogy, developers do not spend the whole day at meetings, but meeting to fix bugs are not generally worth it. Also, when there is a high volume of meetings, there is likely something wrong.

I know for a fact that in the Indian Railways, people spend weeks digging up information required to answer RTI queries.

Instead of going by feelings ask government employees (preferably someone with a high level view of things) about it.

I am not saying RTI is useless. However, without a computerized infrastructure for most, if not all, protocols and processes in the government, it is just a game of cat and mouse.

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#119

Post by hesarenu »

shripadk wrote: post #98
captn3m0 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with biometric leaks is that it could come from anywhere, like this leak from the PDS system (ironically) in Gujarat[0]. Using biometrics for authentication is like forcing everyone to use the same password everywhere. Aadhaar isn't the only biometric database in the country. [0]: https://www.medianama.com/2018/02/223-gujarat-bleeds-biometr...

Damn that's scary to think that the government was so callous with biometric data. Like you mentioned in one of your other comments to someone else in the thread, it's wise to couple biometric scans with a passkey or even yubikey as Aadhaar number by itself is no longer a good first factor (especially with compromise of biometric data). I don't see how it's possible for the government to rollback collected biometric…

I have seen some company use bio metric for login. Visa applications require them as well. Any other mechanisms might still get broken.

Re: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

#120

Post by Dravidian »

firasd wrote: post #2

As a tech professional, it's extra disturbing the way the government pushes these harebrained schemes by marketing them as 'Digital India', 'India Stack', etc. thus getting visiting dignitaries from other countries to lap it up. We really need to be careful that we don't whitewash autocratic bureaucracy by branding it digital innovation. Note the spin from Aadhaar proponents in this NYT article--that it's the equival…

Their point of Aadhaar being secure is only based on the data being encrypted with RSA public-key cryptography. They are totally obvilious to other threat vectors.

Their specifications state that the vendor should ensure end-to-end encryption. Say vendor X uses a kyc API which follows the UIDAI guidelines to the point, there's nothing preventing the vendor from storing the biometrics on the device before sending it to the kyc.

Not to mention that the biometric can be bypassed with OTP SMS & anyone is cybersecurity knowns SMS aren't fool-proof.

India is culmination of different civilizations and hence the diversity. No matter how corrupt the previous governments were, they weren't a direct threat to the democracy like the current government is under the pretext of religion.

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