[Reader-list] Part II -Surveillance and the MNIC prject

[Aman Sethi]

  Dear All,

This is Part II of the paper "May i see your papers", on the Multipurpose National Identification Card Project... 
Aman
contd from Part I
A miracle drug, but will it work?	
The MNIC project shall map a vast ocean of information– both in terms of the depth of information extracted of every individual and the breadth of the population concerned. The sheer size of the database raises serious questions of the efficacy of the system. 
In evaluating its efficacy, it is important to clearly define the objectives that the system is to accomplish.  As mentioned before, the system is expected to help identify illegal immigrants, track ‘potential terrorists,’ solve problems of impersonation and provide a secure pathway for delivery of government services.  The ease with which the MNIC performs these functions should be taken as an indicator of the need for such a system.

Identity Verification
The arguments in favour of implementing MNIC project are based on the fundamental assumption that the card will be truly infallible and will provide a foolproof method of identification.  Once this basic assumption is questioned, the potential for misuse is frightening.  The script tends to unravel when the issuing of cards is underway.  Unlike USA and other developed countries, where most citizens have a social security number and so already have a fair amount of authentic information in government databases, the MNIC project aims to start the verification process from scratch.  As I pointed out in the section on Methodology, the government shall first carry out a census type survey to create a National Population Register, based on which the cards shall be issued.  But how will identity be verified or authenticated? What sort of proof will be required to obtain a card? 
Obviously the card will require documents like ration cards, voter identity cards, proof of residence documents etc.  Given that, in the eyes of the authorities, the present system of identification is insufficient, fallible and open to manipulation; a system based on these documents shall necessarily have the same shortcomings.  The problem could actually be accentuated by the introduction of such a card, as the card will now have a legitimacy that these documents did not have. But what makes the identity card so different from existing documentation and surveillance?  The difference lies in the popular conception of technology.  
As I mentioned before, the MNIC project has passed through the media filters unchallenged, drawing only praise for India’s growing IT prowess.  Technology is seen a neutral, unbiased and, most importantly, consistent entity.  By consistent, I refer to the greatest advantage of the machine – it can untiringly carry out repetitive tasks with minimal error percentages.  This ensures that the national identity card has a legitimacy that other forms of documentation never had, and thus makes the consequences of an error that much more devastating for the innocent card holder.  While a misspelling on a ration card was simply a sign of official incompetence, it could now imply that the cardholder is a dangerous subversive using a falsified identity card.  In this way the MNIC shall make ‘criminals’ out of ordinary, forgetful, busy people whose only crime would be to have left their card at home.
Another problem that the census authorities might face is the absence of any documentation whatsoever.  The landless poor, who constitute a large percentage of the population in the rural and urban areas, have no real means of identification, nor have they required it.  They have no property, no fixed residence, no birth or death records and in many cases, no ration cards either.  Thus, the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society run the risk of being labeled “aliens”, being stripped of the few rights and assets that they possess and of harassment by the police.
Recent experience at tsunami relief centres in Chennai  has shown that in the absence of proper documentation, community leaders and local policemen carry out most identification exercises.  Given the caste and class hierarchies that currently exist in rural and urban areas, it is not impossible to imagine dalits, tribals and other oppressed communities being denied the MNIC by local strongmen.
Assuming that the government does survey a billion plus population successfully and accurately, which is a big assumption, the emphasis on making the MNIC the gold standard for all identification purposes opens up a lucrative avenue of crime – identity theft.  
According to a report by the Federal Trade Commission, USA, identity theft was America’s top consumer complaint for the fifth year in a row.   Another disturbing example is the current scandal involving data aggregator ChoicePoint.  ChoicePoint is a USA- based company that collates disparate data about individual consumers to create detailed consumer profiles for marketing firms.  In February 2005, ChoicePoint disclosed to the press that it had been duped into passing on sensitive customer information like social security numbers, credit card details and postal addresses to a cartel of con artists posing as legitimate businesses.  By offering a dense data-bundle to the cartel, ChoicePoint presented them with – everything needed to operate existing bank accounts and create new accounts in the names of the victims.  According to news reports, 700 ID’s have been stolen and an estimated 500,000 persons are at risk. 
While ChoicePoint claims to be “actively engaged with local and federal law enforcement agencies” in an attempt to limit the damage, the scam proves that the concentration of large amounts sensitive data in central databanks makes them potential targets for hackers and ultimately puts citizens at risk.  The more essential the data, the higher the stakes.  By centralizing vast amounts of sensitive data, the MNIC might actually increase the incidence of identity theft instead of reducing it.  The fact that the MNIC shall be seen at the gold standard of identification shall imply that, once stolen, the possibilities of abuse are unlimited.


Illegal Immigration
Sujata Ramachandran   points out that as urban slums have been regularized over the years, many Bangladeshi immigrants have acquired documents like ration cards and ownership papers for low cost housing settlements.  The government now finds itself in a classic catch-22 situation – those who must be issued the card do not have the required documentation, while those who have the required documentation are the people the card is supposed to isolate in the first place. 
In his paper on national identity cards, Richard Sobel  examines the role of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)  of 1986 in curbing illegal immigration into the USA.  In a disincentive for migrants in search of work, the Act made it illegal to employ aliens and those without a work permit.  The act also called for greater enforcement at the borders and created new categories for seasonal agricultural workers.  According to Sobel, the IRCA failed to stem the flow of immigrants into the country as most immigrants entered via legal routes using tourist visa and then simply stayed on.  Unless the Indian government plans on issuing a MNIC card to every tourist, the same problem shall arise.  The IRCA didn’t succeed in reducing employment opportunities either.  Businesses simply realized that, due to their desperate situation, migrant labour was now even easier to exploit; thus, forcing illegal immigration further underground and victimizing legal Hispanic residents and job seekers.  The same trend has been noted in India.  
Sujata Ramachandran  suggests that the issue of immigration should be seen as part of a larger socio-economic and political context in South-Asia and not as a simple problem of law enforcement.  She argues that a comprehensive package of regional dialogue and immigration policy reform would be a far more effective step in the final resolution of immigration concerns.

Terrorism and the MNIC project
While the Indian government has not explicitly stated that the MNIC shall be used by law enforcement agencies to track potential security threats and to monitor private citizens, it is obvious that security agencies shall find it extremely useful.  While the government has been careful to speak only in terms of monitoring aliens, it is not hard to imagine it turning the technology onto its citizens.  Richard Sobel points out that at the point of its implementation in 1936, President Roosevelt and the American congress promised that every citizen’s social security number would be kept confidential.  Since 1936, there have been at least 40 amendments to the act, thereby ensuring that the social security number is one of the most visible features of all individual transactions in America today.  The number is required to operate bank accounts and credit cards, for job applications and filing taxes, for accessing Medicare and drawing pensions.  It is not inconceivable that the MNIC shall follow the same path.
As I mentioned before, supporters of the MNIC have argued that the system could have helped prevent the 9/11 tragedy if a record of their activities had been easily available.  What the supporters fail to mention is the fact that all the hijackers involved in the attack had entered the USA legally, had mostly valid travel documents and most were not on any government watch list, with the result that the MNIC or any similar system would not have helped foil their plans.  A report by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada makes the obvious point that “there is no database containing the names of each and every “bad guy.” For example, first time or unknown terrorists using legitimate identification documents will not be in law enforcement databanks. It is difficult to see, therefore, how a national identity system—however sophisticated—could compensate for such shortcomings.” 
The same report makes the point that terrorists are become more and more sophisticated in their methods and a costly system of surveillance is unlikely to yield any significant information and is equally unlikely to act as a deterrent.  The report adds that, given the importance placed on it by the state, the database itself might become a target for a terrorist attack. An obvious example is that of Spain.  It is mandatory for all Spanish citizens to carry an identity card, but that could not prevent the Madrid Bombings in March 2004 where at least 190 people were killed.  
The MNIC is, by definition, a ‘multi-purpose’ card.  Yet, it can be argued that is fails to adequately serve any of the ‘purposes’ that its proponents have in mind. Its impact on curbing immigration, improving identity verification, and combating terrorism shall be negligible and in the case of identity theft, might do more harm than good.  The project is waste of precious resources, (Rs 10,000 crore at the minimum) and allotted elsewhere, the money could probably be spent in strengthening existing structures.  What we need to ask ourselves is if we should be forced to sacrifice our privacy for something that is of no practical use.

The potential for abuse: Why such a system must be opposed
Under an NIDS system, the individual draws his/ her rights from the act of possession of an identity card.  Hence, a citizen can exercise his/ her fundamental rights contingent on her papers and documentation in correct order.  This opens the door for potential abuse at the hands of those charged with authenticating the required documents.

The myth of fingerprints
As I mentioned earlier in the paper, the MNIC has gone largely unchallenged in the public sphere largely due to its packaging as a ‘technological breakthrough’.  Technology, and especially a field as esoteric as ‘Biometrics,’ is seen as a specialised field that the common person is not competent enough to comment on, and so has no choice but to trust the experts.  But is that a wise decision? 
Biometrics is the science of identifying people based on their physiological and behavioral characteristics.  It is claimed that biometrics offers the prospect of fast, accurate identification of subjects using the unique bodily markers like eye vein patterns, fingerprints, handprints and facial recognition.  But, Robin Feldman  argues that biometric technology is far from proven. He says that while courts have accepted fingerprinting close to a century, technologies like facial recognition still have a lot to prove.  Facial recognition is found to work only with frontal-face views in well lit conditions.  Feldman writes, “In a recent demonstration of the problem, National Geographic magazine asked a former CIA operative to try to fool a facial imaging system using techniques such as glasses, facial hair and head positioning. When the system tried to match the operative’s current photo against various types of disguised images, the level of correlation ranged from roughly 60 percent to 80 percent. The results were even worse when the system tried to make the match using a photograph from 27 years before. In that case, the level of correlation between the old photo and the operative’s undisguised face was only 19 percent and the level of correlation between the old photo and various facial disguises ranged from 8 percent to 12 percent.”
Similarly, in study conducted by the Department of Justice, USA, in 1999, the department checked the background records of thousands of applicants for the Civil Services with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) watch-lists.  The results identified 5.5 per cent of the applicants as having criminal records, in spite them having no previous convictions.   According to a report in the Guardian, in the U.K. the error margin of the national police computer is between 20-30 per cent.    Of course, it might possible to build more accurate systems, but accuracy might come at a price that is unviable for the corporate-government partnership.  Even if the NIDS system has even an improbably low error rate of 0.1 per cent, that would mean that for a population of 1 billion, it would wrongly identify 1 million individuals as criminals.  Given the government’s enthusiasm for the identification and isolation of potential terrorists, coupled with restrictive anti-terror legislation, 1 million people could find their bank accounts seized, employment terminated, access to public spaces restricted, and could become victims of constant police harassment.  This also begs the obvious question – what’s the point of a system that throws up 1million incorrect answers? What can be concluded from such examples is that no technology is foolproof, and that an identification project shall be subject to a series of technological and human errors that accompany any technology – biometric or otherwise.
Any system that ensures the rights of individual on the basis of papers being in order places too much power in the hands of authenticating authorities.  An examination of the track record of supposedly secure databanks reveals a history of abuse.  In 1994, The Business Week revealed that the state of Ohio, USA had sold its driver’s license and car registration lists to a private company for US$ 375,000 .  In early 1995, more than 500 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents were caught prying into the tax records of American citizens .  The most horrifying instances of the misuse of census information were observed in the Greater Reich during the Holocaust.  In his award winning book “IBM and the Holocaust” , and in several accompanying articles, Edwin Black uncovers the secret behind the ruthless efficiency that accompanied the Jewish genocide.  How did the Nazis track down and eliminate almost 6 million Jews?
The Holocaust began with isolation and identification of Jews across Germany.  An elaborate system of identification was devised, and all German Jews were required to carry identification papers by December 31, 1938.  This was followed by two censes – the first, in 1938, was carried out in Germany to identify practicing Jews; while the second, in 1939 was carried out in Austria, The Saar, Sundentenland and the rest of the Greater Reich to identify “Racial Jews”.  The identity card regime was extended throughout the Reich and Jews were required to have their passports and ration cards marked.   According to Edwin Black, the Reich hired IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, to track entire populations of Jews across the German Empire using a revolutionary new punch card technology.  Much like the identification system devised by the Indian Home Ministry, each Jew was issued a unique 5-digit number that made it possible to track him or her across the continent, in spite of changes in name, address or appearance.  As Black notes, “The infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number... 
[The] punch card number would follow [the inmate] from labour assignment to labour assignment as Hollerith systems tracked him and his availability for work, and reported the data to the central inmate file eventually kept at Department DII. Department DII of the SS Economics Administration in Oranienburg oversaw all camp slave labour assignments, utilizing elaborate IBM systems... The Extermination by Labour campaign itself depended upon specially designed IBM systems that matched worker skills and locations with labour needs across Nazi-dominated Europe. Once the prisoner was too exhausted to work, he was murdered by gas or bullet. Exterminated prisoners were coded ‘six’ in the IBM system.”   
All this was possible with a machine less sophisticated than a modern programmable calculator.
Closer to home, communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 saw the planned genocide of the Muslim community by Hindu fanatics.  Articles written at the time of the riots speak of official complicity and, at times, active participation of the BJP State Government.  Months before the riots, ruling party cadre drew up systematic lists detailing the demographic composition of residential areas around the state.  Riot victims testified that rioters used Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation lists to supplement their information.  So when the riots did break out in that summer, rioters struck Muslim shops and homes, with the precision of guided missiles homing in on programmed targets. 
The examples of Gujarat in 2002 and the Holocaust in the 1940s prove that states should never be trusted with detailed, sensitive information about their citizenry – no matter how democratic or despotic they may seem.

Privacy
Given the ambitious aims of the NIDS project, it shall probably be mandatory to carry the card at all times.  Citizens without cards could have their rights temporarily withdrawn and their access to public spaces denied.  The fact that India plans to introduce two versions of the national identity card – a free basic version and a priced premium version could only serve to heighten class bias in public institutions.  Indian cities are fast becoming sites of contestation between the middle class and the working classes for the use and control of public spaces.  Given the class bias inherent in state policy, it is not hard to imagine certain spaces that cater exclusively to premium cardholders, or make the process of entry/access difficult for those with basic cards.
Proponents of the MNIC regime point out that most of the information that will be collected on the card is already in the public domain in some form or the other.  A collation of the information on ration cards, voter identification cards, insurance schemes and passports could arguably furnish most of the information that shall eventually find its way onto the MNIC.  However, this argument can be countered on two basic fronts – firstly by the principle of “fair information” that I shall elaborate later in the text, and on the grounds that all such information has been provided on a voluntary basis. Should a private citizen choose, she could refrain from signing up for any of the schemes mentioned above, and retain complete control over her privacy and information.  The fact that the government has made changes to the Indian constitution makes it mandatory for every citizen to subscribe to the MNIC Project.  Thus, a citizen no longer has control over her personal and private information and is forced to share it with government and private agencies.  She forced to subject herself to a search that is almost as physically intrusive as a bodily search.
Surprisingly, the India press has remained largely silent on the issue of privacy when it comes to the MNIC project.  The project has remained largely in the technology sections of most papers and most of the coverage is found in specialized trade journals like Convergence Plus.  Most of the reports dwell at length on how the project promises to be a technological treat and is a sign of India’s ever-growing IT prowess.  The assumption that the privacy of the individual shall be protected has been swallowed as easily as have the assumptions on security, identity and immigration.
The very act of collecting information for the MNIC constitutes a breach of the privacy of the individual.  However, even if privacy is not treated as a fundamentally inviolable right, the MNIC still does not convincingly prove how compromising our privacy shall maker us safer.
The MNIC makes it possible for law enforcement agencies (and possibly private organizations) to follow the digital trail left by any or all of us at any given point in time. Monitoring an individual’s data trail is equivalent to tapping telephone conversations– which is illegal, and taped conversations are not permissible as evidence in court in India without prior permission from a court of law.  The right to be free of unreasonable, unwarranted search is a benchmark of individual rights and should apply to one’s virtual identity as well.  The use of personal information without consent violates the concept of due process of law.
Richard Sobel  points out that a national identification system runs contrary to the principle of “fair information”, i.e. that information required for one purpose shouldn’t be used for another. For example, to protect people from discrimination at the workplace, medical information should not be accessible to potential employers. By putting all the information about an individual on a single card, the MNIC allows severely compromises his or her privacy and makes the individual vulnerable to discrimination and humiliation.

Another worrying fact is that the role of private companies in the project has not been defined.  The government has stated that it is interested in a public-private partnership whose modalities are yet to be worked out.  The role played by these companies shall play a crucial role in defining the extent to which our privacy shall be compromised.  

In Conclusion
Identity cards are not simply the “proof” of our identities; they represent an elaborate series of institutions and processes put in place by society and the State.  They represent the successful establishment of the state as the sole legitimate agent of control of society.  While state interventions in society are not always negative; moves to map, categorize and monitor citizenry violate our rights as members of a free society.  Post 9/11, the world has been gripped by an anxiety to gather as much ‘human intelligence’ as possible, and states have made a persuasive case for the sacrifice of our rights of freedom and privacy at the altar of national security.  The MNIC and similar projects, contribute to an argument that the terrorist, the subversive and the anti-national can be stereotyped as a social profile.  This reduces law enforcement into a simple task of comparing citizen profiles against a pre-determined template, identifying successful matches and arresting the “guilty”.  Clearly, this is a flawed means of approaching the problem.  The MNIC project is part of a larger movement that increasingly turns to technological “fixes” to contain the fallout of complex socio-political and economic problems.  While a solution of the problems of terrorism, crime and corruption would require a comprehensive reshuffle of existing hierarchies of power; surveillance and enforcement ensure that the status quo can continue. As I argue through the course of my paper, the MNIC shall fail on all counts – curbing of illegal immigration, effective and foolproof identification, and the combating of crime and terrorism.  Instead, it shall stifle individual freedom and blur the distinction between public and private spaces.

EOM
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