Aaadhaar is India’s massive biometric ID Card system. And it’s flawed.
It takes it’s name from Hindi for Foundation or Base.
Aadhaar is run by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) under the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 (“Aadhaar Act 2016”).
The Indian Government referred to it as being voluntary when it started in 2014 but quickly made it compulsory.
People would be denied access to basic services if they couldn’t produce an Aadhaar card.
Quantify, Qualify
The age old urge to measure life for tax & regulatory purposes means Aadhaar is entering surveillance’s pantheon of legends.
It joins the English 11th Century Domesday book, IBM’s Nazi Holocaust punch card system, the Food and Agricultural Organisation‘s Codex Alimentarius, and Britain’s Universal Credit.
Even passengers for Noah’s Ark were grouped in twos.
Gender may have been a unique identifier, but don’t quote me.
Genocide makes me Nervous
Hippopotami
Have you heard the one about the late Drug Lord Pablo Escobar’s Hippos?
The Garden of Eden
Back to Codex, the apple symbolises rather more than man’s biblical quest for perfect information.
Apparently the original Apple logo was a pen and ink drawing of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree.
For years it has been rumoured that Apple’s iconic logo, a stylized apple missing a bite on one side, was inspired by the circumstances surrounding the death of Alan Turing.
The groundbreaking mathematician and computer scientist committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple in 1954.
British Intelligence agencies were making him take oestrogen to suppress his homosexual tendencies. He couldn’t take it any more.
One is reminded of the state-backed torture of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
The Apple of Discord
Mālum Discordiae meaning the Apple of Discord plays with the spelling and pronunciation of malum which means apple with a long a and evil with a short one.
Paris was asked to judge a beauty contest between three goddesses because Zeus was too chicken.
Eris had turned up to a party she wasn’t invited to on account of her always starting trouble.
She brought with her the Apple of Discord.
It was Golden and would be given to the most beautiful woman at the party.
Zeus was asked to judge. He let Paris do it.
The next day, after bathing, the three goddesses each attempted to bribe Paris. Aphrodite, the Patron Goddess of Prostitutes, offered him the most beautiful woman in the world — Helena of Sparta.
He accepted and in return gave Aphrodite the Golden Apple, on which Eris is said to have inscribed: Kallistei meaning “to the most beautiful one”.
Paris was handed Helen which rather irritated her husband and sparked the Trojan War.
Apparently Zeus’ sister / wife Hera who had also been in the running for Most Beautiful Girl in the World was not best pleased with Paris either.
Golden Apple
Il pomo d’oro (The Golden Apple) by Antonio Cesti was originally composed to mark the wedding of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I and Margaret Theresa of Spain in 1666.
The Chinese Women
Gluck’s Chinese Women finishes with a ballet scene dedicated to Eris’s Apple of Discord.
Chinese Surveillance
Where China have their Social Credit system like Baidu, Ali Baba, and Tencent (BAT), the UK has Facebook / HMRC / Universal Credit, and India have Aadhaar.
Aadhaar Trailer
This film looks brilliant.
Vandana Shiva & Linsey McGoey
One shouldn’t talk about measuring life without mentioning Vandana Shiva and Linsey McGoey’s various projects with regard to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Whereas Vandana Shiva is very concerned about patenting food and other data issues, McGoey goes for the Gates Foundation as a whole and measuring its effect on Global Health and Education Policy.
Shiva’s latest is the Oneness Vs the 1%
And McGoey has just released the Unknowers:
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