God, Golem, UID: Singularity As An Object In The Mirror
By Binu Karunakaran
30 April, 2010, Countercurrents.org
"In societies of control the individual is doubled as code, as information, or as simulation such that the reference of the panoptic gaze is no longer the body but its [digital] double, and indeed this is no longer a matter of looking but rather one of data analysis." B. Simon
Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram was right when he said the gravest threat to Indian democracy comes from within. There's a slight change though - the threat does not stem from the Maoists who are waging a war to ususrp state power by the year 2060. It comes from a super-panopticon project that aims to create a 12 digit UID/Aadhar number for the 1.2 billion citizens of India.
The UID/Aadhar, in reality a tracking, profiling and surveillance project fast-tracked post 26/11 attacks on Mumbai is being sold to us as an ICT panacea - a one-click fix for all the ills of a modern welfare state.
For Nandan Nilekani, the czar of India's silicon valley, who paratrooped straight from a corporate boardroom to the helm of the UIDAI and the UPA's neoliberal mandarins the UID project is nothing but the translation of the world into a problem in coding. The society re-interpreted as a cybernetic system with informational flows as control loops. A society subject to social and political control where privacy and dissent will remain - to borrow a phrase from Rondald Rumsfled - known unknowns.
It is to hide this real and devious intent that the UIDAI sings a lullaby of welfare and shows us its silicon (forgive the pun) mammaries. Who wouldn't love a technology that will plug the leaks in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and optimise the PDS delivery of food grains to the country's poorest of poor. All by de-duplication of identities of the 'fraudulent' Indian citizens, a good 37.2 per cent of population according to the Planning Commission falls under the Below Poverty Line (BPL).
Democracy can now cut the long story of its upstaging short. Why wait till 2060 for the gun-toting Maoists if you can cut five decades of crap with the UID that will roll out in early 2011? A bloodless coup in the digital realm.
The birth of UID also mean that the singularity so far discussed in the realm of science fiction is already here. Not the technological singularity of domination by a super-human intelligence, but a panopticon singularity described by Charles Stross, that arises from a situation in which the human behaviour is deterministically governed by processes outside their control. With the advent of the UID, citizens will cease to be individuals and their relation with the state will be drastically altered forever. From individuals with power over our destinies we will turn into dividuals in perpetual cybernetic slave mode. Our'databased selves' acting as our body doubles conditioning our behaviour in realtime and transforming our physical selves into zombies.
The metaphors of Orwellian Big Brother and Bentham's prison architecture pales in comparison. If in the Foucaultian vision of prison the object of surveillance was the physical body, in the panoptics of UID, the object of control is the digital representation of the body. It is no longer necessary to create a real cyborg - all you need is a virtual cybernetic double that can hold your biometric and other ID info and authenticate the Real You in all virtual and physical transactions.
UID should be opposed because it's an assault on our privacies which form the basis of freespeech, autonomy and personal dignity. Privacy is a solemn zone and a powerful right by which we form opinions and express them fearlessly. We concede in private, what cannot be said in a public sphere - often political opinions and radical thoughts germinate within the four walls of a room. Journalists know the volatile power of information that is shared in private conversations with bureaucrats and politicians and of the solitary acts of whistle blowers - all which help democracy to flourish.
The UID seen in the context of its linkages with the National Population Register and the NATGRID that involves sharing of information by 11 agencies which run over 20 different databases, ranging from IT returns to bank accounts, and telephone records to internet search histories is sure to undermine democracy by infringing on our privacy in a way not visualised before. When the row over illegal phonetapping by NTRO surfaced recently the opposition was indignant. If a foxy Rs.7 crore sophisticated snooping instrument can unnerve them what about the consequences of the UID whose potential for datamining and human rights infringement cross every imaginable threshold?
In his essay Future Map US born theorist Brian Holmes quotes from scientist Norbert Wiener's seminal workGod & Golem, Inc.: “Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?” The question we need to ask Nandan Nilekani and the UPA government is the same.
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By Citizens Against UID
Government of India's Unique Identification number (UID) which is one of the greatest threat to Indian democracy. Please endorse the statement by clicking here
Showing posts with label Binu Karunakaran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Binu Karunakaran. Show all posts
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17 - India 's UID And The Fantasy Of Dataveillance by Binu Karunakaran - Counter Currents
Sunday, May 23, 2010
30 - India 's UID And The Fantasy Of Dataveillance
CLICK ON TITLE TO SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE - Posted by Ram Krishna Swamy
24th August 2009
India 's UID And The Fantasy Of Dataveillance
By Binu Karunakaran
24 August, 2009 -Countercurrents.org
http://www.countercurrents.org/karun240809.htm
The perils of establishing nationwide identity systems have always been a hot topic of debate in countries that attach great value to privacy and human rights of its citizens. Plans to launch national ID cards have met with stiff opposition in UK , which announced the final design of its card in end of July 2009. The United States Senate too is getting ready to debate the PASS ID bill, a renamed version of George Bush regime's REAL ID that will bring in a national ID through the backdoor.
Compare this with the scenario in India where the UPA government is pushing ahead with a national ID program through the Unique Identity Development Authority of India (UIDAI), a body created blatantly bypassing the authority of parliament. And there is not even a whimper of protest from civil society groups or politicians. The government presumably does not want to lose time on creating consensus or engage in a national debate on a project which has irrevocable implications on data security and privacy of individuals. The government knows that no questions on its limit of stupidity will be raised because the whole business has been outsourced to a CEO with brand equity called Nandan Nilekani. Now we hear that the illegitimate UIDAI will be made legitimate by an Act of Parliament - that loud thumping of desks drowned by the blabbering of many tongues.
According to one estimate Rs. 150,000 Crore (US$ 30.9 bn) of taxpayers' money will flow out into the gargantuan task of making our lives similar to that of aquarium fish and no less secure. Imagine that kind of money and political will power going into healthcare and sanitation or basic education and poverty alleviation.
Show me your UID?
If media reports can be believed there won't be any human-readable intelligence loaded into the UID . It will be a random generated number (no physical card) that citizens can quote in dealings with government authorities, banking/taxation transactions or while interacting with e-governance applications. That would mean that personal information will exist only in a database and need to be paired with the UID when the situation demands. A unique number that will subsume our multiple and divisive identities, the mark of the perpetually wired beast
Some reports indicate having a UID might not be mandatory at all. But chances are that even if the UID is made voluntary the large inconveniences of non-participation will make it effectively mandatory.
The draft report on Personal Identification Codification (PIC) released by the Expert Committee on Metadata sheds some light on the data elements that would be stored in the database of the national identity system. The report says the objective of the PIC is to identify each and every person uniquely at the national level to ensure interoperability of information related to individuals collected by various govt/non government organisations. This throws up several questions: Will the government be the only authority which can use or request the UID? What information in those databases will be linked explicitly to other databases? Who has the authority to create this linkages and who all can access this information? Would the people who use the UID for various transactions be informed of the algorithms used to analyse their data. Will the data collected stored forever? Article 20, clause 3 of the Indian constitution states that " No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself ." Will data records generated by the UID be used against the accused in a court of law? There is not much clarity on this as the confidentiality level of data elements (open to all, open only to security agencies/NGOs) are yet to be finalised.
But the security agencies will definitely have a say on this. They would be specifically interested in Data mining, a process that involves the use of mathematical analytical tools to detect patterns in large sets of data with the purpose of predicting certain kinds of behaviour, such as the propensity to engage in criminal activity or to purchase particular consumer goods. They would also be looking at data matching - the technique of comparing different databases so as to identify common features or trends in the data.
30 - India 's UID And The Fantasy Of Dataveillance
CLICK ON TITLE TO SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE - Posted by Ram Krishna Swamy
24th August 2009
India 's UID And The Fantasy Of Dataveillance
By Binu Karunakaran
24 August, 2009 -Countercurrents.org
http://www.countercurrents.org/karun240809.htm
The perils of establishing nationwide identity systems have always been a hot topic of debate in countries that attach great value to privacy and human rights of its citizens. Plans to launch national ID cards have met with stiff opposition in UK , which announced the final design of its card in end of July 2009. The United States Senate too is getting ready to debate the PASS ID bill, a renamed version of George Bush regime's REAL ID that will bring in a national ID through the backdoor.
Compare this with the scenario in India where the UPA government is pushing ahead with a national ID program through the Unique Identity Development Authority of India (UIDAI), a body created blatantly bypassing the authority of parliament. And there is not even a whimper of protest from civil society groups or politicians. The government presumably does not want to lose time on creating consensus or engage in a national debate on a project which has irrevocable implications on data security and privacy of individuals. The government knows that no questions on its limit of stupidity will be raised because the whole business has been outsourced to a CEO with brand equity called Nandan Nilekani. Now we hear that the illegitimate UIDAI will be made legitimate by an Act of Parliament - that loud thumping of desks drowned by the blabbering of many tongues.
According to one estimate Rs. 150,000 Crore (US$ 30.9 bn) of taxpayers' money will flow out into the gargantuan task of making our lives similar to that of aquarium fish and no less secure. Imagine that kind of money and political will power going into healthcare and sanitation or basic education and poverty alleviation.
Show me your UID?
If media reports can be believed there won't be any human-readable intelligence loaded into the UID . It will be a random generated number (no physical card) that citizens can quote in dealings with government authorities, banking/taxation transactions or while interacting with e-governance applications. That would mean that personal information will exist only in a database and need to be paired with the UID when the situation demands. A unique number that will subsume our multiple and divisive identities, the mark of the perpetually wired beast
Some reports indicate having a UID might not be mandatory at all. But chances are that even if the UID is made voluntary the large inconveniences of non-participation will make it effectively mandatory.
The draft report on Personal Identification Codification (PIC) released by the Expert Committee on Metadata sheds some light on the data elements that would be stored in the database of the national identity system. The report says the objective of the PIC is to identify each and every person uniquely at the national level to ensure interoperability of information related to individuals collected by various govt/non government organisations. This throws up several questions: Will the government be the only authority which can use or request the UID? What information in those databases will be linked explicitly to other databases? Who has the authority to create this linkages and who all can access this information? Would the people who use the UID for various transactions be informed of the algorithms used to analyse their data. Will the data collected stored forever? Article 20, clause 3 of the Indian constitution states that " No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself ." Will data records generated by the UID be used against the accused in a court of law? There is not much clarity on this as the confidentiality level of data elements (open to all, open only to security agencies/NGOs) are yet to be finalised.
But the security agencies will definitely have a say on this. They would be specifically interested in Data mining, a process that involves the use of mathematical analytical tools to detect patterns in large sets of data with the purpose of predicting certain kinds of behaviour, such as the propensity to engage in criminal activity or to purchase particular consumer goods. They would also be looking at data matching - the technique of comparing different databases so as to identify common features or trends in the data.
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