I’ve blogged several times about the dangerous collection of private information from Indian citizens, ostensibly to prevent the admittedly vast theft of government subsidies as well as to foil potential terrorists:

1. “Modi Visa-On-Arrival: Trojan Horse for Biometric ID?” November 26, 20142.

2. “Ambani, Manmohan: CIA Spying On India Helps Poor,” MBP, January 22, 20143.

3.  “South Asia increasingly under biometric surveillance,“ MBP, September 26, 20104.

4. “Government to introduce biometric ID in India,” MBP, Sept. 22, 2009.

As I noted, there are other ways in which to foil crime and terrorism:

The simplest one is to cut-back on government welfare.

It only tends toward corrupting and destroying private initiative, while perpetuating vote-bank politics.

Short of that, the use of  two-step authentication and one-use passwords can do everything that the collection of private, sensitive information is purported to do, without the privacy concerns.

An article in FirstPost.com in 2013 pooh-poohed such worries.

Another FirstPost article continued in the same vein.

The subject is the CIA-backed firm In-Q-Tel’s funding of MongoDB, the American firm contracted by the UIDA to implement Aadhar.

MongoDB is small potatoes, writes the author, and if we worry about it, what about the rest of the technology from US companies that we use without a thought?

So the idea that the CIA is covertly back dooring its way in to the UIDAI via MongoDB seems a bit premature and frankly, absurd.

And if we expect the CIA to have a tap on the personal information of Indian citizens then we might as well fear Samsung. If not for reasons that its devices simply hold more personal information of Indian users due to its market penetration, then for it’s investment in Cloudant – a cloud based mobile provider that is also partially funded by In-Q-Tel and soon to be part of the mainstream Samsung cloud network.

There are far more serious technologies foreign intelligence agencies have made that should give us cause for concern like – the TOR network, created by the US Navy and used by Bitcoin fans world over or miniature flying drones being developed by the US Air Force or the series of interconnected computer network made by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, United States Department of Defense – commonly known as “the internet”.

Well, yes.

Of course the entire Internet is the field of surveillance, first by Western intelligence, but also by other intelligence agencies, as well as by aggressive corporate marketers and criminal networks.

But it does not follow from that there should be any less concern over Aaadhar, MongoDB and the CIA.

On the contrary.

It should be of far greater concern than anything the Indian public has expressed so far.

Most of all,  the public should be concerned that the UIDA is so complacent that the public has been sold on its  scheme that it feels confident enough to publicly proclaim its ties to Western intelligence without fear of civic outrage.