Our senses, just not only feelings, have got so much numbed that virtually nothing surprises us, let alone shock and stir.
The author of the report below has just won a prestigious RedInk Award - for 2021, by the Mumbai Press Club, under the Human Rights (Print) category: <https://fb.watch/adv-owvubk/>. The issue on the table, right at this moment, is not the precise technical feasibility of the project - which is bound to rise over time, but, the grotesquely sinister intentions driving it. This has to be read together with the use of Pegasus - a military-grade spyware, against journalists, social activists, politicians and such others. And, not to miss, the National Security Advisor's pronouncement at the passing out parade of the 73rd batch of IPS probationers, just about seven weeks back, that the civil society is the new frontiers of war, which is, again, of a piece also with indiscriminate use of the UAPA and other draconian laws against a wide array of dissenters and individuals considered inconvenient by the regime. The blueprint of the roadmap ahead - as is emerging, is all too chilling. <<If the plans of Modi’s bureaucrats and advisors are realised, this system will automatically track when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys new property, when a member of a family is born, dies or gets married and moves to their spouse’s home. The interoperability of modern database systems means there is no technical limit to the extent of data that can be collected and indexed by this master database of databases. In a meeting on October 4, 2019, for instance, a special secretary of the NITI Aayog even proposed geo-tagging every single home and integrating it with Bhuvan, a web-based geo-spatial portal developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). ... Now, documents obtained through the Right To Information Act by Srinivas Kodali, data and internet governance researcher, and this correspondent suggest quite the opposite: Under the guise of creating a SECC that automatically updates itself in real time, the National Social Registry (or the Social Registry Information System or SECC Social registry as it is also known) will either be a single, searchable Aadhaar-seeded database or “multiple harmonised and integrated databases” that use Aadhaar numbers to integrate religion, caste, income, property, education, marital status, employment, disability and family-tree data of every single citizen. The National Social Registry, the documents make clear, will not be restricted to sucking up data on below-poverty-line families who rely on state support, but every single Indian citizen. Unlike the Indian population census — governed by the Indian Census Act of 1948 that legally mandates the confidentiality of those enumerated — the SECC has no such safeguards. Yet this registry is no pipe-dream.>> (Excerpted from: < https://www.reporters-collective.in/projects/surveillance-nation-how-every-indian-is-under-government-watch >.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/greenyouth/CACEsOZi8kmJgTLWZ0KmHeHy0m%2B0zbbPrL-EsN-%2BUtOMDB%2B47RQ%40mail.gmail.com.
