We just finished watching The Last Enemy -- a thriller mini-series produced by the BBC in 2008. It really scared me. No, not the series, but the images of a database state it showed. There's a sticker saying 'No ID No Entry' on every door and every gate everywhere, and a place to swipe your ID card beside it. There are cameras everywhere. Everywhere you go and everything you do is recorded and mapped to your ID. That was really really scary.
Watching the series I finally got it what's so wrong about unified ID cards. Since the Indian government started the Aadhaar project, I had read articles against it and knew some of the objections being put forward by advocates of privacy. But I hadn't really got it. This time I did. See -- as long as a government is good everything is hunky-dory. But when a government goes bad? Then people should be able to overthrow it. People should be stronger than the government -- always. Just like machines should not overpower humans, governments should never become all-powerful over its people. I am not a supporter of terrorism. But I don't want government terrorism either.
Watching the series I finally got it what's so wrong about unified ID cards. Since the Indian government started the Aadhaar project, I had read articles against it and knew some of the objections being put forward by advocates of privacy. But I hadn't really got it. This time I did. See -- as long as a government is good everything is hunky-dory. But when a government goes bad? Then people should be able to overthrow it. People should be stronger than the government -- always. Just like machines should not overpower humans, governments should never become all-powerful over its people. I am not a supporter of terrorism. But I don't want government terrorism either.
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