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 The move comes as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cracks
down on student protests and pushes a Hindu nationalist agenda in
state elections, steps that some say erode India's traditions of
tolerance and free speech.
It could also usher in surveillance far more intrusive than the U.S.
telephone and Internet spying revealed by former National Security
Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, some privacy
advocates said.
The Aadhaar database scheme, started seven years ago, was set up to
streamline payment of benefits and cut down on massive wastage and
fraud, and already nearly a billion people have registered their
finger prints and iris signatures.
Now the BJP, which inherited the scheme, wants to pass new
provisions including those on national security, using a loophole to
bypass the opposition in parliament.
"It has been showcased as a tool exclusively meant for disbursement
of subsidies and we do not realize that it can also be used for mass
surveillance," said Tathagata Satpathy, a lawmaker from the eastern
state of Odisha.
"Can the government ... assure us that this Aadhaar card and the
data that will be collected under it – biometric, biological, iris
scan, finger print, everything put together – will not be misused as
has been done by the NSA in the U.S.?"
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has defended the legislation in
parliament, saying Aadhaar saved the government an estimated 150
billion rupees ($2.2 billion) in the 2014-15 financial year alone.
A finance ministry spokesman added that the government had taken
steps to ensure citizens' privacy would be respected and the
authority to access data was exercised only in rare cases.
According to another government official, the new law is in fact
more limited in scope than the decades-old Indian Telegraph Act,
which permits national security agencies and tax authorities to
intercept telephone conversations of individuals in the interest of
public safety.
"POLICE STATE"
Those assurances have not satisfied political opponents and people
from religious minorities, including India's sizeable Muslim
community, who say the database could be used as a tool to silence
them.
"We are midwifing a police state," said Asaduddin Owaisi, an
opposition MP.
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Raman Jit Singh Chima, global policy director at Access, an
international digital rights organization, said the proposed Indian
law lacked the transparency and oversight safeguards found in Europe
or the United States, which last year reformed its bulk telephone
surveillance program.
He pointed to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
which must approve many surveillance requests made by intelligence
agencies, and European data protection authorities as oversight
mechanisms not present in the Indian proposal.
The Indian government brought the Aadhaar legislation to the upper
house of parliament on Wednesday in a bid to secure passage before
lawmakers go into recess.
To get around its lack of a majority there, the BJP is presenting it
as a financial bill, which the upper chamber cannot reject. It can
return it to the lower house, where the ruling party has a majority.
In its assessment of the measure, New Delhi-based PRS Legislative
Research said law enforcement agencies could use someone's Aadhaar
number as a link across various datasets such as telephone and air
travel records.
That would allow them to recognize patterns of behavior and detect
potential illegal activities.
But it could also lead to harassment of individuals who are
identified incorrectly as potential security threats, PRS said.
Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based Centre for
Internet and Society, said Aadhaar created a central repository of
biometrics for almost every citizen of the world's most populous
democracy that could be compromised.
"Maintaining a central database is akin to getting the keys of every
house in Delhi and storing them at a central police station," he
said.
"It is very easy to capture iris data of any individual with the use
of next generation cameras. Imagine a situation where the police is
secretly capturing the iris data of protesters and then identifying
them through their biometric records."
($1 = 67.0500 Indian rupees)
(Additional reporting by Dustin Volz in WASHINGTON; Editing by Mike
Collett-White)
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