By Sanjeev Miglani and Manoj Kumar
(via Reuters Media Express)
/ Source: Wikimedia
Commons
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's parliament is set to pass
legislation that gives federal agencies access to the world's biggest biometric
database in the interests of national security, raising fears the privacy of a
billion people could be compromised.
The move comes as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
cracks down on student protests and pushes a Hindu nationalist agenda in state
elections, steps that some say erode India's traditions of tolerance and free
speech.
It could also usher in surveillance far more intrusive than
the U.S. telephone and Internet spying revealed by former National Security
Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, some privacy advocates said.
The Aadhaar database scheme, started seven years ago, was
set up to streamline payment of benefits and cut down on massive wastage and
fraud, and already nearly a billion people have registered their finger prints
and iris signatures.
Now the BJP, which inherited the scheme, wants to pass new
provisions including those on national security, using a loophole to bypass the
opposition in parliament.
"It has been showcased as a tool exclusively meant for
disbursement of subsidies and we do not realize that it can also be used for
mass surveillance," said Tathagata Satpathy, a lawmaker from the eastern
state of Odisha.
"Can the government ... assure us that this Aadhaar
card and the data that will be collected under it – biometric, biological, iris
scan, finger print, everything put together – will not be misused as has been
done by the NSA in the U.S.?"
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has defended the legislation
in parliament, saying Aadhaar saved the government an estimated 150 billion
rupees ($2.2 billion) in the 2014-15 financial year alone.
A finance ministry spokesman added that the government had
taken steps to ensure citizens' privacy would be respected and the authority to
access data was exercised only in rare cases.
According to another government official, the new law is in
fact more limited in scope than the decades-old Indian Telegraph Act, which
permits national security agencies and tax authorities to intercept telephone
conversations of individuals in the interest of public safety.
"POLICE STATE"
Those assurances have not satisfied political opponents and
people from religious minorities, including India's sizeable Muslim community,
who say the database could be used as a tool to silence them.
"We are midwifing a police state," said Asaduddin
Owaisi, an opposition MP.
Raman Jit Singh Chima, global policy director at Access, an
international digital rights organization, said the proposed Indian law lacked
the transparency and oversight safeguards found in Europe or the United States,
which last year reformed its bulk telephone surveillance program.
He pointed to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, which must approve many surveillance requests made by intelligence
agencies, and European data protection authorities as oversight mechanisms not
present in the Indian proposal.
The Indian government brought the Aadhaar legislation to the
upper house of parliament on Wednesday in a bid to secure passage before
lawmakers go into recess.
To get around its lack of a majority there, the BJP is
presenting it as a financial bill, which the upper chamber cannot reject. It
can return it to the lower house, where the ruling party has a majority.
In its assessment of the measure, New Delhi-based PRS
Legislative Research said law enforcement agencies could use someone's Aadhaar
number as a link across various datasets such as telephone and air travel
records.
That would allow them to recognize patterns of behavior and
detect potential illegal activities.
But it could also lead to harassment of individuals who are
identified incorrectly as potential security threats, PRS said.
Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based
Centre for Internet and Society, said Aadhaar created a central repository of
biometrics for almost every citizen of the world's most populous democracy that
could be compromised.
"Maintaining a central database is akin to getting the
keys of every house in Delhi and storing them at a central police
station," he said.
"It is very easy to capture iris data of any individual
with the use of next generation cameras. Imagine a situation where the police
is secretly capturing the iris data of protesters and then identifying them
through their biometric records."
($1 = 67.0500 Indian
rupees)
(Additional reporting
by Dustin Volz in WASHINGTON; Editing by Mike Collett-White)
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Thomson Reuters 2016 , Click For Restrictions