On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 5:56 PM, jtd <[email protected]> wrote: > On Friday 07 May 2010 08:11:52 Raj Mathur wrote: > > > 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. > > Are we changing from why? to why not?. >
This was also my immediate reaction on reading Raju(Mathur)'s preliminary report. > > One of the minor reasons for asking WHY is that biometrics, except > for a tightly controlled set of usage scenarios, is unuseable. > Briefly, the technical compromises selected for machine readable fingerprinting (as elucidated by jtd) suit relatively tiny databases. They are unsuited for an exercise of this nature. Quite aside from the sheer cost o providing mass iris scanning devices at every verification point, a similar set of compromises is almost certain to accompany iris scanning for the same purpose. On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 9:24 AM, prabir <[email protected]> wrote: > On 7 May 2010 08:11, Raj Mathur <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > 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. > .... > Techno-economic analysis of UID scheme taking into account the costs > as opposed to benefits. As importantly, what is the real cost of using current methods of verification? Note that even UIDAI proposes using 'introducers', which is in short, what we do today when we meet someone new. Technology cannot fix the hole in this logic. Finally, it is pertinent to note that the Supreme Court has already declared its intention of bolstering Arts 20 and 21 of the Constitution wrt privacy rights, in the case of forced drug testing. Hopefully the lower courts will resist the temptation to judge a charged refusenik adversely, and further strengthen this ruling in practice (in the USA, many courts/juries tend to look askance at an accused who refuses to take the polygraph test, although in fact polygraph testing is acknowledgedly subjective and dependent on the skill - and therefore the sincerity - of the test technician). Imho, it is better to have the judiciary uphold the intentions of the Constitution framers in this respect than to approach Parliament with a new Bill. This is fraught with the danger of cementing breaches of our right to privacy, just as the IT Act has cemented Draconian intrusions into the right to private digital data. Similar action is needed in the case of the UIN, where the UIDAI is already soliciting (as reported in various press reports and on the FAQs page of the UIDAI website) participation of various agencies, such as passport, driving license, PAN and ration card issuers (and probably all the numerous new KYC-type backdoor IDs), where refusal to furnish the UIN will irrevocably tarnish one's ability to deal with these agencies. As alluded to already in this thread, and in previous discussions on this list, the census process has openly threatened refuseniks with a fine of Rs 1,000, although I am not aware whether any such fine has actually been levied as yet. -- Vickram http://communicall.wordpress.com
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