Hi, Nagarjuna, Prabir Purkayastha, Venky and I were invited to participate in the UIDAI meeting with the Civil Society yesterday, May 6. The meeting had about 30 people from civil society organisations with Nandan Nilekani, R S Sharma, Srikant, Raju and a couple of other people representing the UIDAI.
Venky couldn't make it for the meet, but Nagarjuna, Prabir and I tried to keep the flag flying in the interests of the FOSS community. There are some excellent pieces of information that came out of the discussions. Firstly with regard to laws relating to privacy and misuse and abuse of the NUID database. Both NN and RSS agreed in principle that any such legislation would be drafted and opened to the public for comments before being submitted to Parliament for ratification. I believe that this is a big step forward, and now it is up to us to ensure, when the draft is released, that we provide appropriate and relevant feedback. It wouldn't harm to open a Wiki page (no, I'm not volunteering -- there are enough qualified lawyers on this list!) and start noting down concerns that we would like to see addressed in the legislation. Secondly, Srikant and NN both asserted repeatedly that the complete NUID database and application would run on a FOSS stack. This again is good news. What is not so good is the seeming reluctance on UIDAI's part to open up the source of the application itself for public review and audit, but let's take one mountain at a time. Finally, there is talk about having a technical meeting with the UIDAI architects sometime in the future. If that materialises, I request everyone here on behalf of Prabir, Nagarjuna and myself to raise any technological concerns they may have which we can represent to the UIDAI. Again, a Wiki page to record and discuss the concerns may not be a bad idea. I'm glad to note that the geeks aren't the only ones concerned with privacy -- a number of people from non-technical backgrounds also raised privacy and database abuse issues. Request Nagarjuna and Prabir to share their takes on the meeting. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
