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

nytimes.com

161–170 of 172 posts

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

#161
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right way to fix corruption is to make the state transparent - RTI was a right step in this direction. Opening up the citizen to the state feels like progress, but isn't really.

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?

I see it more as saying that more bugs can be found with OSS

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

#162
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't be all cash...so that helps. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/india-bans-large...

It is still all cash. Govt. removed 1000 INR note, only to introduce a 2000 INR note. This was done as a surprise move under foolish assumption that people hoarding black money, would lose all and we'll get a fresh start. Naturally people being smarter then government, found ways to transfer it all taking 5-10% in laundering charges.

Can you elaborate on how laundering it was possible? Genuinely interested.

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

#163
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Aadhaar stop corruption? You think the corrupt are just going to check in with their fingerprints and "Oh man you caught me?" This seems like a system that will just hit those with lesser means. I'm not sure I see that as equality or something that would stop corruption.

A computer cant be bribed. Move transactions online, cut out the middleman and corruption goes down. To do this, you need a strong national identity scheme. Aashaar is a good start but would need to be augmented with derived authentication mechanisms (preferably pki) to reduce reliance on the biometrics

I really don't think this is all that well thought out of a system. I have my doubts that the corruption that really plagues a nation occurs at a sort of point of sale like system that is being developed here.

You can still bribe a judge ... politician, government official just fine off the grid.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still all cash. Govt. removed 1000 INR note, only to introduce a 2000 INR note. This was done as a surprise move under foolish assumption that people hoarding black money, would lose all and we'll get a fresh start. Naturally people being smarter then government, found ways to transfer it all taking 5-10% in laundering charges.

Can you elaborate on how laundering it was possible? Genuinely interested.

1. One the day demonetization was announced at 8PM, all jewelers were open till till 12 and sold gold with post dated delivery.

2. Till next few days, most retailers were doing backdated bills for large ticket items.

3. In India lot of people didn't had bank a/c. To allow them to convert old currency, people were allowed to convert cash upto 4k INR, by just showing any ID. Bank managers used stash of IDs they had collected over years, to convert huge amount of cash to new notes.

Apart from this, local mafia used millions of poor to get the cash converted. These are common and publicly known methods.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enforcing law and order should take away corruption from the country, not a high risk scheme like this. I'm not really comfortable with linking anything because this govt literally gets away with murder. These things only enable them to pin point us easily when we resist. I voted for them despite my friends' advice. Seriously regret it now. There are numerous countries in the world who have a very low rate of corrupt…

>"There are numerous countries in the world who have a very low rate of corruption without forcing the citizens to enroll in a scheme like this." Just curious, can you name them and provide sources.

Note the countries with the least corruption: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2016

Compare with the data in this article: https://scroll.in/article/851282/are-countries-with-a-poor-d...

The graphs show the data excellently.

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

#167
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, even the very poor in India have voter IDs and the schemes in question already require a ration card. You started off by asking about how to reduce corruption (and I answered that as long as there are subsidies there is going to be leakage) but you keep bringing it back to some airy theoretical concept about 'identity in the state' when Aadhaar is a practical force in the country right now. I haven't linked my A…

> I answered that as long as there are subsidies there is going to be leakage It used to be the case before but is no longer the case. Aadhaar, even by this very article's admission, states that "Officials estimate that taxpayers have saved at least $9.4 billion from Aadhaar by weeding out “ghosts” and other improper beneficiaries of government services." $9.4 billion is a huge amount of money saved by the exchequer.…

That is untrue - aadhar introduces the problem of false rejections.

First - Most of the savings which the govt has attributed to aadhar they later walked back and admited it was due to gas price reductions and not because of aadhar.

Second - auth failures result in people not getting their ration- these are then counted as savings by the govt. if they were correctly accounted as a liability not only would the savings vaporize, additional costs would appear.

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

#168
post #71
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prepaid SIM card (in the US), I bought it on eBay This is highly unusual now. For instance most countries in Europe will now need to see your passport to enable a SIM card. So India isn't an outlier. The stated reason, I believe, is terrorism. Whether this is Orwellian I leave for you to decide.

Yes, that's highly Orwellian and terrorism is an absurd justification. Anybody capable of pulling off a terrorist plot requiring a phone is likely to be able to find a way to get one without such a regulation making a problem for them. What it does enable is surveilling a person's location and some of their communication without having to do something requiring resources and the possibility of alerting the person tha…

Sorry, by "highly unusual" I meant more an outlier among countries (in which I've bought sim cards).

I guess I now assume it's all so tracked as not to matter much one way or the other -- it's not like the NSA can't connect your ebay account to your name. Asking for ID just saves them a few CPU cycles, reducing everyone's carbon footprint :)

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

#169
post #168
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's highly Orwellian and terrorism is an absurd justification. Anybody capable of pulling off a terrorist plot requiring a phone is likely to be able to find a way to get one without such a regulation making a problem for them. What it does enable is surveilling a person's location and some of their communication without having to do something requiring resources and the possibility of alerting the person tha…

Sorry, by "highly unusual" I meant more an outlier among countries (in which I've bought sim cards). I guess I now assume it's all so tracked as not to matter much one way or the other -- it's not like the NSA can't connect your ebay account to your name. Asking for ID just saves them a few CPU cycles, reducing everyone's carbon footprint :)

I think they'd have to work a bit harder than that.

Even assuming they have continuous access to ebay, telco and mvno systems, they probably don't have continuous access to the computers of the individual reseller who's selling preloaded SIM cards. This is almost certainly one guy working out of his house.

No doubt, the NSA could hack that guy, but they'd have to do so deliberately. The connection necessary for mass surveillance is broken at this point.

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

#170
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need an OTP to get online Aadhar PDF. So you can't get paper Aadhaar just by knowing the Aadhar number.

What exactly is paper Aadhaar, just a PDF with the number on it, which you print & bring to the phone shop? Can you forge one with MS Word or is it somehow more secure than that?

Is voter id card something different?
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