On Saturday 26 November 2011 11:24:56 Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) wrote:
On Saturday 26 Nov 2011, Binand Sethumadhavan wrote:
Now imagine the scenario in the country where Aadhar and Natgrid talk to each other. Do you think anyone (forget even people like Anna Hazare) can survive as an independent-thinking and opinion-forming free and proud individual in such an eventuality? The combination is exactly what George Orwell predicted in his novel, 1984 - go read the book too.
At the risk of repeating oneself:
In 1906, an Indian was put into jail for resisting a Government's efforts to issue biometric (fingerprint) identity cards to his nation. Incidentally, it was his first experience of jail (he had many more later).
Exactly 100 years later, Government of India first mooted a proposal to issue biometric identities to all its residents. What has changed so drastically in one century that we can go diametrically against this earlier pioneer's vision?
The name of the Indian was M K Gandhi, and the government that jailed him was South Africa.
I might add that SA did issue id cards, though not biometric. It was used to target people. SA was perhaps on par with Nazi Germany - another card issuer - in it's official human rights violations. More recently it was Serbia which used a national id card database in it's genocide pogrom. The case is on trial in the international courts.
One of the earliest documented persecutions happened in the year of the birth of the dude JC 2500 yrs ago in Judea. National census for tax collection was the avowed goal. But it was used to target certain sects of jews.
Those who fear their people are the ones who want to implement an id system.