Hello folks
The twitter is abuzz with the news, as is anything else that buzzes (and it seems a lot of things do just that) that the UID judgment is to be delivered tomorrow.
Three judgments. Two judges signing on with one or two of those writing.
What do they say? Who agrees with whom?
(You could safely stop reading here.)
Is the UID project constitutional?
Is the passage of the Aadhaar Act 2016 as a Money Bill unconstitutional?
What about biometrics? Untested technology. Remarkable failure rates. Band-aids of Virtual ID (which only geeks can work). Facial recognition, which, during the pendency of the judgment been made mandatory (by making it mandatory for the service provider to use this technique on pain of punishment). Failure of biometrics – experienced by people, admitted by the CEO of the UIDAI. What would the judges have made of the UBCC? (That deserves its own story.)
Isn’t coercion unconstitutional? If UID enrolment is voluntary, shouldn’t people be able to opt out of the system?
Exclusion. Children, women, men dying because they couldn’t get their rations. The elderly unable to get their pension. Children unable to get into schools. And this just for a start.
State coercion.
The discredited claims of `savings’.
The building up of databases by deliberately violating orders of the court.
What about the seeding of the number in multiple databases?
And the data breaches that followed?
Surveillance?
National security – including what it means to have everyone in the country on a single database. And one that leaks like many metaphors that may not be the best to set out.
What would they have made of the 360-degree view that has been planned and executed by state governments – in State Resident Data Hubs – designed and delivered by the UIDAI?
In the days that the judges were writing the judgments, they heard time after time, tales of surveillance, of perception management, of sentiment analysis through professionalised voyeurism. The judges objected to it, and the state had to climb down. What did they make of it in relation to the UID project? Especially given that the UIDAI was itself so engaged.
Privacy.
(The Attorney General attempted to give the judges the Srikrishna Committee report, but they did not accept it.
In the meantime, in a demonstration of what the Srikrishna Committee Report says, RS Sharma, ex-Mission Director of the UIDAI and presently TRAI Chief, put out his UID number and dared anyone to cause him harm. This was a deliberate attempt to push aside the right to privacy one more time and to shift the focus to `harm’, but that failed to impress. The judges must have been watching, I wonder what they thought of it.
Convergence, tracking, profiling.
What will they say about companies such as L1 Identity Systems and Accenture being companies providing the biometric technology, handling, holding, managing our data, even as they are close to the CIA and Homeland Security?
Will they remember Edward Snowden and what he told us about state surveillance?
What will the court say to the companies who approached them to ask that the court should not change anything in the law, or in the project, because their livelihood depended o nothing changing, and their being allowed to carry on as they had begun? What will the court make of the impunity of a company that flouts the court’s orders and uses the UID in ways not allowed by the court?
It was said, many times over, that the Constitution is about the limits of power of the state. That it is the state that should be transparent to the people, and not people who should be tracked by the state. That the treatment of people as criminal unless they establish otherwise in this case, again, and again, and again – is unconstitutional.
I wonder too if the court noticed that, even as they were working hard on writing the judgment, the UIDAI was issuing notifications, and regulations, demanding that banks open enrolment stations in 10% of their branches, or they could be penalised. And that they enrol a minimum number of people as specified by the UIDAI, or else be liable to punishment. I wonder if the court wondered where that power came from?
More than anything else, I wonder what the court thought about the government, and companies, violating their orders, many many times. Every time.
Till tomorrow, then
usha
— source telegra.ph | Usha Ramanathan | Sep 26, 2018