angrytuna writes "The Unique Identification Authority is a new state department in India charged with assigning every living Indian an exclusive number and biometric ID card. The program is designed to alleviate problems with the 20 current types of proof of identity currently available. These problems range from difficulties for the very poor in obtaining state handouts, corruption, illegal immigration, and terrorism issues. Issuing the cards may be difficult, however, as less than 7% of the population is registered for income tax, and voter lists are thought to be inaccurate, partly due to corruption. The government has said the first cards will be issued in 18 months."
I am an Indian and what he's saying is true. Its not about being impatient and rude, its about making it or getting left behind.
It may sound like a troll, but things actually ARE like that. If you want some thing to be done, there's two ways to do it India:
1. Pay someone (generally a middle-man/agent) and get your work done (be it anything, from getting a new phone connection/water connection/submitting some form for your passport etc).
2. Stand with the crowd, elbowing, pushing and shoving for hours before you're told to come back with more documents.
True story. I've done this everywhere including filling up any University form, to getting my passport, to getting into a train/bus to just plain old admissions into any college/school.
Grandparent is not trolling, but stating an absolute truth.
America has over 50 types of commonly used ID, and that's not even counting the several types of ID cards and drivers licenses that some states have, nor does it count military IDs, civilian-government-employee IDs, university-issued IDs, passports, and more.
Yes, but many (most?) have more than one of them. Most military personnel, for example, have their military ID, state drivers' license, and motor pool personnel have military drivers' licenses. Plus you have tour Social Security card (the one I lost last month when my wallet was stolen said "not to be used for identification purposes" but the new ones don't say that). many folks have passports, etc. in addition to their state licenses.
Personally, I'm against a national ID card, or for requiring ID for most
My driver's license has my photograph. Is that not a biometric?
When my wallet was stolen all I should simply had to go to the DMV and sign something, which would have verified my signature, and my photo would have verified that it was me. When I was pulled over, all I had to do was tell the cop my SS number and he could see that I was me and was licensed (I was warned to fix my tail light).
The DMV required an alternate form of ID (I'd already replaced my YMCA card; the Y was where the wallet was stolen) and
No, you picture is not a considered true 'biometric' because it requires a human to decide 'sure I guess this looks like you'. Now if they actually assigned metrics to your facial structure that might work....unless you had an identical twin, but I digress.
Also, this statement:
The process was ludicrous, even though it only took a few minutes.
Made me think you need to watch this video [youtube.com].
My daughter bought me a book for Christmas last year, 100 things you're not supposed to know, and one of them was that DNA is unreliable, and gave reasons and citations.
More than half of the stuff in the book I already did know, I guess I'll be getting a call from Homeland Security...
Except that if Illinois is like many states, the fact that your photograph is on your license doesn't do the DMV any good when you have lost your license. Most states don't have your photograph on file. They send you a renewal form. You sign it and send it back along with the fee for renewal. They send you a form that you take to the appropriate location where your picture is taken and a license is printed with your picture on it. This picture never enters the state's database.
Not that I look forward to being in a huge database, but I am curious how long it will take given that things are so chaotic in India.
Some years ago when the government decided to issue voter cards for everyone eligible to vote, everyone in my family who qualified went to get photographed etc and some months later the cards turned up... with everyone's data mixed up. So my father was not only a woman but the daughter of my sister who happened to be the wife of my mother and so on. And pretty much every family in the neighborhood had their's screwed up as well.
So one billion people and at least two trials.. I would give the program at least 10 years - and that is being optimistic, I think.
Heh, here in Illinois our voter cards are made of paper and don't even have a photo on them. The election judges seldom ask for them. We're so patriotic that even being dead doesn't keep us from voting!
Kind of makes you realize how George Ryan [wikipedia.org] and Rod Blagojevich [wikipedia.org] got elected Governor (Ryan is in prison now, Blago was impeached and removed from office and goes to trial next year).
Perhaps you are trolling but I will respond nevertheless.
India is an amazing country: full of contradictions, and somehow the wheels still turn just fine.
I have been to banks in India where I had to spend the whole day to encash a cheque; the usual routine was to go to the bank, get in the queue and hand the cheque to the cashier, take a token, go home, have lunch, and come back in time to get the money. I have also been to banks that one would consider pretty efficient with every encashing taking roughly two or three minutes despite it being pretty crowded.
The government is horribly inefficient, but some private companies are as efficient as I have seen here in Germany. The point being that chances are that the companies involved in the outsourcing business are not government-owned.
I have heard people complain about the quality of outsourced jobs - and frankly I have no experience about either side of the story - but that is another story altogether and has nothing to do with the fact that the Indian government can't handle issuing voter-id cards properly.
Lets just hope that these guys learn from the Germans and have a GOOD BACKUP of the private key for the CA. Although, I wonder how much the manufacturer of the cards would be willing to pay the operators to "loose" the backup tape.
Given the corruption they have now, what makes them think corruption won't continue?
Stealing someones biometric data will mean an increasing arms race for technology to identify someone. It will eventually fail as corrupt agencies and criminals have the same methods to read biometry data and create the id cards. As a way to slow this down - do not give the biometric data to the person, explained thus:
Instead, people should be issued replaceable, hard to fake credentials (ID cards) - that do NOT have biometric readings on them, rather just a long random number. These would be easy to read - and the random number identifies the holder.
Creation and issuing of credentials would be done only based on government-run biometric scans. The identifying agency keeps the biometric data secret at the time of issue or re-issue, and links the biometric data to the replaceable credentials/random number.
This way if an ID is stolen or in dispute, the person comes in, gets scanned again and a new credential/card/random number is issued and the old one is cancelled.
This allows one upside: no big, central DB of biometric data - each local area keeps their own. By removing a central identity DB, corrupt officials will have smaller targets to break.
Part of the corruption with ID in India right now is unpersons, people with no ID and who have been 'lost' in the records. Asshats (who probably payed someone to lose the records in the first place) will then go in and claim that person's property as public land, since that person can't prove it belongs to them anymore. A better ID sceme and a central database will hopefully alleviate the problem, even if there are still other exploits in the system to be used.
There are many bad ideas about a biometric id card, but the one good thing about it should be the ability to FIX the problems they mentioned with no accurate census.
Each person gets one card, they give fingerprints and show some kind of name proof. If the fingerprint is in the system, you don't get another ID.
The "predicted cost of £3 billion" (from TFA) works out to a cost of £2.50 per card per person. Anyone else think this seems a little optimistic, given I think highly secure identity cards cost a little more than that to manufacture, never mind the infrastructure costs involved?
(P.S. trying to get pound symbols to show up on Slashdot from an American keyboard sucks)
I think your guess is approximately correct. While the article is actually quoted with "a predicted cost of at least 3 billion", assuming India's government proposals being as understated as anything western I think we can guess 3-5 times that amount.
Without the mention of which biometric is being used, or how the biometric will be read an estimate of cost is useless. The usual overhead of running a special department, enforcement of rules, dealing with counterfeits & more should also be considere
From the article: The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
I guess it would be more accurate to say, "The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 until he signed the Real ID Act into law in 2005." [wikipedia.org]
very badly. Considering there are different cards for almost everything in which you need an identification check, this was long required.
I have card A for casting my vote, B for getting my LPG supply for cooking, C for getting subsidized food. If I lose any one of them, I have to go through the entire process again which involves around four to five working days and bribing corrupt government officials who are not ready to work.
For getting a thing as simple as cellphone connection, I have to submit at least 3 identification documents - my voter card, my driving license and a college confirmation letter (in case you are a student). This has been done to check the use of mobile phones by terrorists, but since there is no standardized identification, it hurts the common man who just needs to get his work done.
We are all looking forward to this. Lets just hope it gets through.
That's why three-factor security is the only real way to make this work. They have two factors already (something you have (card) and something you are (fingerprint)). Now if they could just close the deal with a PIN code (something you know), that would be the hat trick of security. They could even provide you with a 'duress' PIN that you could give someone if you were at gunpoint. It would automatically lock everything down. And the best part? When the systems that maintains all this fails, you don't have
If the cards were piled on top of each other they would be 150 times as high as Mount Everest -- 1,200 kilometres.
India's legions of local bureaucrats currently issue at least 20 proofs of identity, including birth certificates, driving licences and ration cards. None is accepted universally and moving from one state to the next can easily render a citizen officially invisible -- a disastrous predicament for the millions of poor who rely on state handouts to survive.
Leaving aside the technicalities of the project for a moment, these are strange priorities. India is not the only country to have lots of starving people and homeless, but instead of feeding them or building homes, they are to piss billions of Dollars giving them ID cards for the New World Order to track them.
I think they aim for this move to benefit the poor as well. When they have an ID number it's going to be easier for them to use their rights, such as voting or obtaining state handouts.
Its an attempt to improve delivery of social services (e.g. food supplies to the poor), subsidies and also to address security concerns. Or did you think those things happen only in the US?
"For many years he worked for an international consulting firm where his main job was to convince LDCs (less developed countries) around the world to accept multibillion-dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ended up at Halliburton, Bechtel, B
Theres only so much you can do for poverty. Programs are already in place for them.
Its no different in the rest of the world. Government makes priorities and budgets. Id hate to see an entire nation held back because there will always be poor people. Cannibalizing the good parts of government to just hand out meals is never a sustainable policy.
That said, there can be social goods from good accounting like this. More people paying taxes, better census, jobs created, better tracking of migrations, identification of criminals, etc etc.
Without proper identification, it becomes to difficult to serve state services (such as unemployment, relaxed microloans, susidized food to lots of 'starving and homeless' people you mentioned in your message, and so on). In my opinion, this should have been implemented several decades ago. US/Canada have Social Security/Social Insurance number and it makes it easier for government to provide state services using that number. India doesn't have anything of that sort (yet).
No, both them and N. Korea, Pakistan plans to nuke their neighbors and live peacefully after it. You know, radiation, rain, winds, water supplies. They are all fine, such side effects will stop in that artificial map line we call "border":)
Billionth Indian (Score:3, Funny)
I hope they don't have to stand in a queue!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Billionth Indian (Score:4, Informative)
Indians do not stand in queues. They stand in masses and push and shove to get to the front.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
dude
troll much?
If I were an Indian I'd be pissed that you can sterotypically say that all Indians are inpatient and rude, and get marked +5 Informative.....
You should have a -10 D0uchebag Mod
Re:Billionth Indian (Score:5, Informative)
1. Pay someone (generally a middle-man/agent) and get your work done (be it anything, from getting a new phone connection/water connection/submitting some form for your passport etc).
2. Stand with the crowd, elbowing, pushing and shoving for hours before you're told to come back with more documents.
True story. I've done this everywhere including filling up any University form, to getting my passport, to getting into a train/bus to just plain old admissions into any college/school.
Grandparent is not trolling, but stating an absolute truth.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It does not suck. It just has social norms different from those in other parts of the world.
Comment on Germany Interesting (Score:2)
"German police can detain people who are not carrying their ID card for up to 24 hours."
Papers, please!
Sigh, if it hasn't happened already, SOMEBODY in the US government is going to try to convince us that we need to be more like India!
However, maybe this current clusterfuck will tie up so many Indian programmers, the US won't be able to export any more jobs.
Re: (Score:2)
Papers, please!
Uh, I only have a pipe, man.
Zen you'll Haff to come vit me!
(From "A Child's Garden of Grass")
America has over 50 types (Score:2, Insightful)
America has over 50 types of commonly used ID, and that's not even counting the several types of ID cards and drivers licenses that some states have, nor does it count military IDs, civilian-government-employee IDs, university-issued IDs, passports, and more.
Re:America has over 50 types (Score:5, Insightful)
and you're not required to have any of them to live in the u.s.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
and you're not required to have any of them to live in the u.s. Yet.
There, fixed that for ya
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but many (most?) have more than one of them. Most military personnel, for example, have their military ID, state drivers' license, and motor pool personnel have military drivers' licenses. Plus you have tour Social Security card (the one I lost last month when my wallet was stolen said "not to be used for identification purposes" but the new ones don't say that). many folks have passports, etc. in addition to their state licenses.
Personally, I'm against a national ID card, or for requiring ID for most
I have a biometric ID and so do you (Score:2)
My driver's license has my photograph. Is that not a biometric?
When my wallet was stolen all I should simply had to go to the DMV and sign something, which would have verified my signature, and my photo would have verified that it was me. When I was pulled over, all I had to do was tell the cop my SS number and he could see that I was me and was licensed (I was warned to fix my tail light).
The DMV required an alternate form of ID (I'd already replaced my YMCA card; the Y was where the wallet was stolen) and
Re: (Score:2)
Also, this statement:
Made me think you need to watch this video [youtube.com].
Re: (Score:2)
My daughter bought me a book for Christmas last year, 100 things you're not supposed to know, and one of them was that DNA is unreliable, and gave reasons and citations.
More than half of the stuff in the book I already did know, I guess I'll be getting a call from Homeland Security...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Beep! (Score:5, Funny)
Unique Identification Authority
Huh. Did they have a contest to come up with the most Orwellian sounding name? Are they a section of the Department Of Bureaus? :)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Unique Identification Authority
Huh. Did they have a contest to come up with the most Orwellian sounding name? Are they a section of the Department Of Bureaus? :)
I think they're part of the Department of Redundancy Department.
Re:Beep! (Score:5, Funny)
Did they have a contest to come up with the most Orwellian sounding name?
Well, they had to find a name that wasn't taken.
Parent
But when will it be done? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that I look forward to being in a huge database, but I am curious how long it will take given that things are so chaotic in India.
Some years ago when the government decided to issue voter cards for everyone eligible to vote, everyone in my family who qualified went to get photographed etc and some months later the cards turned up... with everyone's data mixed up. So my father was not only a woman but the daughter of my sister who happened to be the wife of my mother and so on. And pretty much every family in the neighborhood had their's screwed up as well.
So one billion people and at least two trials.. I would give the program at least 10 years - and that is being optimistic, I think.
Re: (Score:2)
Heh, here in Illinois our voter cards are made of paper and don't even have a photo on them. The election judges seldom ask for them. We're so patriotic that even being dead doesn't keep us from voting!
Kind of makes you realize how George Ryan [wikipedia.org] and Rod Blagojevich [wikipedia.org] got elected Governor (Ryan is in prison now, Blago was impeached and removed from office and goes to trial next year).
Re:But when will it be done? (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps you are trolling but I will respond nevertheless.
India is an amazing country: full of contradictions, and somehow the wheels still turn just fine.
I have been to banks in India where I had to spend the whole day to encash a cheque; the usual routine was to go to the bank, get in the queue and hand the cheque to the cashier, take a token, go home, have lunch, and come back in time to get the money. I have also been to banks that one would consider pretty efficient with every encashing taking roughly two or three minutes despite it being pretty crowded.
The government is horribly inefficient, but some private companies are as efficient as I have seen here in Germany. The point being that chances are that the companies involved in the outsourcing business are not government-owned.
I have heard people complain about the quality of outsourced jobs - and frankly I have no experience about either side of the story - but that is another story altogether and has nothing to do with the fact that the Indian government can't handle issuing voter-id cards properly.
Parent
Got backups? (Score:2)
Lets just hope that these guys learn from the Germans and have a GOOD BACKUP of the private key for the CA. Although, I wonder how much the manufacturer of the cards would be willing to pay the operators to "loose" the backup tape.
re-identification and stolen identities (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the corruption they have now, what makes them think corruption won't continue?
Stealing someones biometric data will mean an increasing arms race for technology to identify someone. It will eventually fail as corrupt agencies and criminals have the same methods to read biometry data and create the id cards. As a way to slow this down - do not give the biometric data to the person, explained thus:
Instead, people should be issued replaceable, hard to fake credentials (ID cards) - that do NOT have biometric readings on them, rather just a long random number. These would be easy to read - and the random number identifies the holder.
Creation and issuing of credentials would be done only based on government-run biometric scans. The identifying agency keeps the biometric data secret at the time of issue or re-issue, and links the biometric data to the replaceable credentials/random number.
This way if an ID is stolen or in dispute, the person comes in, gets scanned again and a new credential/card/random number is issued and the old one is cancelled.
This allows one upside: no big, central DB of biometric data - each local area keeps their own. By removing a central identity DB, corrupt officials will have smaller targets to break.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of the corruption with ID in India right now is unpersons, people with no ID and who have been 'lost' in the records. Asshats (who probably payed someone to lose the records in the first place) will then go in and claim that person's property as public land, since that person can't prove it belongs to them anymore. A better ID sceme and a central database will hopefully alleviate the problem, even if there are still other exploits in the system to be used.
Your Rights in Meatspace (Score:2)
Yeah, I agree that we need a new Slashdot category.
They have problems with bad census? (Score:2)
Unfounded optimism (Score:2)
The "predicted cost of £3 billion" (from TFA) works out to a cost of £2.50 per card per person. Anyone else think this seems a little optimistic, given I think highly secure identity cards cost a little more than that to manufacture, never mind the infrastructure costs involved?
(P.S. trying to get pound symbols to show up on Slashdot from an American keyboard sucks)
Re: (Score:2)
Without the mention of which biometric is being used, or how the biometric will be read an estimate of cost is useless. The usual overhead of running a special department, enforcement of rules, dealing with counterfeits & more should also be considere
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How on earth is India going to afford it with 20 times the population and 51 times less per capita GDP? Something's not right here.
The Keeping Tabs Around The World section (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess it would be more accurate to say, "The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 until he signed the Real ID Act into law in 2005." [wikipedia.org]
We needed this ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mandatory New World Order post (Score:3, Insightful)
Watch your Overlords as they beta test your future in 3rd world or smaller countries.
China, New Zealand, Finland, Thailand: Internet Censorship under different pretexts.
India: Biometric IDs.
Feel free to add to the list.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
also for all those people who are 1 in a million there are a thousand identical biometric cards.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Depends where they hit you.
That's where anatomically. It wouldn't matter where in the geographical sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Illegal Immigration? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, there is a big world out there outside the US.
Parent
A New Everest! (Score:2, Informative)
If the cards were piled on top of each other they would be 150 times as high as Mount Everest -- 1,200 kilometres.
India's legions of local bureaucrats currently issue at least 20 proofs of identity, including birth certificates, driving licences and ration cards. None is accepted universally and moving from one state to the next can easily render a citizen officially invisible -- a disastrous predicament for the millions of poor who rely on state handouts to survive.
Re:Illegal Immigration? (Score:5, Informative)
They have problems with people trying to get INTO India? I thought everyone wanted to get out!
Illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Nepal
Terrorists from Pakistan
Refugees from Sri Lanka (and to a tiny extent, Burma)
You need to get out of your little well once in a while.
Parent
Re:Sick priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Leaving aside the technicalities of the project for a moment, these are strange priorities. India is not the only country to have lots of starving people and homeless, but instead of feeding them or building homes, they are to piss billions of Dollars giving them ID cards for the New World Order to track them.
I think they aim for this move to benefit the poor as well. When they have an ID number it's going to be easier for them to use their rights, such as voting or obtaining state handouts.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Its an attempt to improve delivery of social services (e.g. food supplies to the poor), subsidies and also to address security concerns. Or did you think those things happen only in the US?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Trick is making countries buy technologies which they can`t afford (including nukes) and ask them to give up a resource when the loan pay day comes.
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hitman-Perkins-John/dp/B001GG67CC/ [amazon.com]
"For many years he worked for an international consulting firm where his main job was to convince LDCs (less developed countries) around the world to accept multibillion-dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ended up at Halliburton, Bechtel, B
Re:Sick priorities (Score:4, Informative)
Theres only so much you can do for poverty. Programs are already in place for them.
Its no different in the rest of the world. Government makes priorities and budgets. Id hate to see an entire nation held back because there will always be poor people. Cannibalizing the good parts of government to just hand out meals is never a sustainable policy.
That said, there can be social goods from good accounting like this. More people paying taxes, better census, jobs created, better tracking of migrations, identification of criminals, etc etc.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Who will outsource it back to India in a flash. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, both them and N. Korea, Pakistan plans to nuke their neighbors and live peacefully after it. You know, radiation, rain, winds, water supplies. They are all fine, such side effects will stop in that artificial map line we call "border" :)
Re: (Score:2)
Quote the only President never to have gotten a single vote in any national election; yeah, that's insightful.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
1976 presidential elections say otherwise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_1976
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
2^30 = 1,073,741,824
Every single person...
And what about married persons?