[GreenYouth] Re: The Unique ID Card Scheme: The Grave Threats It Poses!
Dear Mr Sukla, Why is it a pigheaded scheme? It was BJP who had it in the election agenda to provide every citizen on the country with Multi Purpose National Identity (MNIC) cards. Later on congress picked up this idea and now Mr. Nandan Nilekani is in charge of it. Read the news in Hindustan times (http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=NLetterid=7dc43fc0-a1cc-4c5a-bb6c-5e6db0eee6abHeadline=Bye%2c+bye+multiple+IDs%2c+hello+unique+number) It will make life easier because people dont have to use multiple cards. Everything will be coded in one card. Let us not be critical of all good developments. Let the country go smart with new technologies. Bye Geethesh On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Sukla Sensukla@gmail.com wrote: This pigheaded scheme, which hopefully is unimplementable in the Indian context, is evidently a huge invasion against privacy, and liberty, of individual citizens, life since being always under the hawkish watch of the Big Brother/Sister, as the article reproduced below has argued. And there is also the danger of identity theft. Real terrorists would always find out ways and means to dodge. But the country would turn into a large prison house. But what is even more disturbing is that, in the specific Indian context, a large section of the population being in abject poverty, without any permanent roof over the heads and appalling lack of education and awareness, they would be perpetually criminalised - for not being able to produce such ID cards at command - and thereby remain utterly vulnerable to petty state officials extracting money, and also sexual services, and just out to satisfy their sadistic urges. The remedy proposed is going to be far worse than the disease itself. This needs be opposed tooth and nail. Sukla http://www.strike-the-root.com/columns/Rain/rain1.html What's Really Wrong with National ID Cards by Jack Rain The national ID card threat is in front of us. I have not yet seen a strong enough assault on this extremely dangerous idea, so I will face the challenge myself. The national ID card concept is not just bad on some theoretical level as an invasion of privacy. It has the potential to become an incredible source of power, more restraining than the strongest of handcuffs and leg chains. But first a word about its intended purpose, to help fight terrorism. Bunk. Some of the terrorists used fake ID's. So what? As generals always fight the last war, politicians battle the last terrorist attack. Politicians banned guns on planes. They put cement barriers in front of buildings to prevent car bombings. (Both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center had these cement barriers in front of them.) But the events of 9-11 certainly showed that the terrorists figured out angles to defeat these protections. So don't even try to tell me that the terrorists won't find their way around national ID cards. But I will tell you what a national ID card will do, it will track you and me. The national ID card system will be designed to track people and their movements every time you are required to show it. Otherwise, it will not serve any purpose for the government. When we are required to show the card it will be logged into a national ID super computer. This is the key to understanding its danger. It will track us. We won't have the time, the money or the underground contacts that will enable us to defeat the system. Only terrorists and crooks will be able to do that. With a national ID card, when we fly, where we fly, what hotel we stay at, it will all be tracked. Where we bank, what doctors we see, will be tracked. In back channel ways, what meetings we attend, where we shop and what we visit on the Internet will be tracked. Yes, you may agree that this will happen, but you will argue that it happens now. Credit card companies collect and sell data about us. Hotels sell our data and some web sites track where we are going. But the key to all this is that it is not a national ID card system. There is no national supercomputer where all this data is collected in one place. And we still have the option of easily circumventing any private data collection system. If I want to check into a hotel, I can pay cash and tell them I am Christopher Columbus Jr. Most hotels will take the money (Interestingly enough, most of the better hotels ask fewer questions than your average Red Roof Inn). If I want to surf the net anonymously, I can do that by taking a few precautions. I can travel now under any name without a national ID card (Trust me on this--you can travel under any name. Just ask any illegal Mexican you see and he will tell you how to get a very good quality Government issued ID in any name you want within two hours). But a national ID card will be different, it will have our names and some type of biological imprint--i.e., fingerprint, eye scan, hand scan, etc.--and it will
[GreenYouth] Re: The Unique ID Card Scheme: The Grave Threats It Poses!
On 6/30/09, geetheshp Nair geetheshpn...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Mr Sukla, Why is it a pigheaded scheme? It was BJP who had it in the election agenda to provide every citizen on the country with Multi Purpose National Identity (MNIC) cards. Later on congress picked up this idea and now Mr. Nandan Nilekani is in charge of it. Read the news in Hindustan times (http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=NLetterid=7dc43fc0-a1cc-4c5a-bb6c-5e6db0eee6abHeadline=Bye%2c+bye+multiple+IDs%2c+hello+unique+number) It will make life easier because people dont have to use multiple cards. Everything will be coded in one card. Let us not be critical of all good developments. Let the country go smart with new technologies. Bye Geethesh On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Sukla Sensukla@gmail.com wrote: This pigheaded scheme, which hopefully is unimplementable in the Indian context, is evidently a huge invasion against privacy, and liberty, of individual citizens, life since being always under the hawkish watch of the Big Brother/Sister, as the article reproduced below has argued. And there is also the danger of identity theft. Real terrorists would always find out ways and means to dodge. But the country would turn into a large prison house. But what is even more disturbing is that, in the specific Indian context, a large section of the population being in abject poverty, without any permanent roof over the heads and appalling lack of education and awareness, they would be perpetually criminalised - for not being able to produce such ID cards at command - and thereby remain utterly vulnerable to petty state officials extracting money, and also sexual services, and just out to satisfy their sadistic urges. The remedy proposed is going to be far worse than the disease itself. This needs be opposed tooth and nail. Sukla http://www.strike-the-root.com/columns/Rain/rain1.html What's Really Wrong with National ID Cards by Jack Rain The national ID card threat is in front of us. I have not yet seen a strong enough assault on this extremely dangerous idea, so I will face the challenge myself. The national ID card concept is not just bad on some theoretical level as an invasion of privacy. It has the potential to become an incredible source of power, more restraining than the strongest of handcuffs and leg chains. But first a word about its intended purpose, to help fight terrorism. Bunk. Some of the terrorists used fake ID's. So what? As generals always fight the last war, politicians battle the last terrorist attack. Politicians banned guns on planes. They put cement barriers in front of buildings to prevent car bombings. (Both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center had these cement barriers in front of them.) But the events of 9-11 certainly showed that the terrorists figured out angles to defeat these protections. So don't even try to tell me that the terrorists won't find their way around national ID cards. But I will tell you what a national ID card will do, it will track you and me. The national ID card system will be designed to track people and their movements every time you are required to show it. Otherwise, it will not serve any purpose for the government. When we are required to show the card it will be logged into a national ID super computer. This is the key to understanding its danger. It will track us. We won't have the time, the money or the underground contacts that will enable us to defeat the system. Only terrorists and crooks will be able to do that. With a national ID card, when we fly, where we fly, what hotel we stay at, it will all be tracked. Where we bank, what doctors we see, will be tracked. In back channel ways, what meetings we attend, where we shop and what we visit on the Internet will be tracked. Yes, you may agree that this will happen, but you will argue that it happens now. Credit card companies collect and sell data about us. Hotels sell our data and some web sites track where we are going. But the key to all this is that it is not a national ID card system. There is no national supercomputer where all this data is collected in one place. And we still have the option of easily circumventing any private data collection system. If I want to check into a hotel, I can pay cash and tell them I am Christopher Columbus Jr. Most hotels will take the money (Interestingly enough, most of the better hotels ask fewer questions than your average Red Roof Inn). If I want to surf the net anonymously, I can do that by taking a few precautions. I can travel now under any name without a national ID card (Trust me on this--you can travel under any name. Just ask any illegal Mexican you see and he will tell you how to get a very good quality Government issued ID in any name you want within two hours). But a national ID card will be different, it will have our names and
