The New Indian Express points out that the Indian biometric ID is essentially being collated and bared for snooping by foreign governments and private corporations, with no accountability to Indian citizens.
The material collected can be used to track, monitor, and control citizens.
It can subject them to unlawful governmental surveillance, as well as to criminal attacks.
The material can also be used to silence dissidents, frame patsies and scape-goats, and terrorize the population at large:
In 2012, the IB warned the state about loopholes in Aadhaar, but the government continued with the enrolment process, sidestepping security concerns.
The NSA top secret documents leaked last week point to the covert operation. “Identity Intelligence is exploiting pieces of information that are unique to an individual to track, exploit and identify targets… ,” the papers stated.
Three types of data is being mined by the NSA which includes “biometric, biographic and contextual.” Biometric data shows an individual’s physical or behavioural traits like face, iris, fingerprints, voice etc. Biographic data gives details of life history, including address, school, and profession while contextual data is about individual’s travel history and financial bank details.
Although, the US government had earlier scrapped Aadhaar-like project for its residents, it surprisingly mounted covert ops to infiltrate biometric database in other countries. The decision of the US to not allow biometric profiling of residents was followed by China, Australia and UK and similar proposals were shot down by the respective governments.
The intelligence agencies raised the contentious provision in the contract agreement that allows foreign vendors to keep the biometric data for next 7 years making it easy prey for NSA. “The contract agreement signed by UIDAI with foreign vendors is absurd. Private companies can easily share it with US spy agency. We have seen how they arm twist private players to gain foothold in their server,” a top intelligence official said, adding the UIDAI also had arrangements with certain private software firms for technology assistance. “