The Indian government isn't collecting biometrics for fun. Every government, particularly democracies and those with social spending, need to know (a) who is in their country, and, (b) said individuals can reliably prove their identity. Instead of filing forms and pictures in a centralised database the Indian government has opted to generate unique IDs hashed from biometrics.
"What gives a government the right to demand from someone fingerprints and iris scans, but not demand the GPS tracking or mandatory DNA samples of every citizen."
Slippery slope fallacy. By this logic any potential for data collection is totalitarian. Note that to gain U.S. residency (or, for that matter, work at a U.S. financial institution) I had to give my fingerprints to the FBI.
"With the iris scan, all they need to do is have a high resolution camera"
Facial recognition technology would be easier, cheaper, and as technologically inaccessible as planting high resolution cameras looking at peoples' irises everywhere.
What is the relationship between the level of reliability and the ability to provide democratic government and social support? Obviously democracy does not demand 100% reliable identification, if only because many countries with governments based on democratic principles do not require 100% reliable proof of identify in order to vote, participate in government, etc.
(Nor am I suggesting that you think it's 100% - this is a rhetorical point only.)
Historically, the case of Clarence Henry Willcock in the UK is relevant. The National Registration Act 1939 re-introduced compulsory identification cards. The practice extended after the war ended. In 1950, Willcock refused to present his card, saying "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing". While the courts upheld the decision and fine, public opinion was against that level of identity checking, and the policy was scrapped in 1952. In part too because of the cost.
So we have the case of a democratic system, with social care programs, which seemingly decreased their ability to identify people reliably.
Denmark is another example of a country, widely accepted as having both a democratic system and high social services, which doesn't have a highly reliable identity system.
So it does not seem that what you are saying is essentially true, and it is possible for a democratic government to have high social support systems without having a reliable method to prove their identity - at least, no more reliable than we had 100 years ago.
Reliably proving your identity becomes very important in India due to the vastness of the population and the number of subsidies earmarked for the under-privileged. Subsidies aside, reliably identifying someone guarantees their right to suffrage. Umpteen columns of newsprint are devoted each election year to voter fraud - people go to their designated election office to cast their vote but are turned away because they have "already voted". Having a reliable way to identify an individual will reduce the occurrence of these activities, if not totally eliminate them.
I have railed about the corruption in India in earlier posts and comments. That the government has green-lighted a project that leverages India's strength in IT to actually help its citizens is a departure from the norm, and is worth lauding. It remains to be seen if this will actually be implemented once the current government's term runs out.
I was speaking to the broad generalization of JumpCrisscross who said that "Every government" needs to do this, for the sake of good democracy and social services. I disputed that broad generalization. Nothing I wrote should be construed to apply specifically for or against India.
As to voter fraud, of that I know only about the US. There is a handful of voter fraud in the US, and almost no in-person voter fraud at all[1]. What fraud there is is mostly via the absentee ballot. We had a long history of election fraud and vote rigging in the US, but little of that was due to the inability to reliably prove one's identity.
([1] When you vote, you sign your name to a registry, which is publicly reviewable. This biometric identifier is sufficient to detect, after the fact, if there is significant in-person fraud. This has not been demonstrated, despite a strong desire by some to show that it exists.)
Denmark has a national personal identification number [1] and a reliable land registry system. The UK has had the latter in modern history. A democracy with social welfare programmes could theoretically exist without a reliable identification system, but one would expect that to lower systemic efficiency and barriers to fraudn and corruption.
The nut of my argument is that the Indian system is not substantially more instrusive than photograph + address based systems used in the developed world. Hence, the emotional backlash against the Indian project should not be held independently from identification programmes around the world.
That link says "SIDEN KAN IKKE FINDES" - "the page cannot be found."
Yes, Denmark has a personal number. What are the biometrics tying that number to the person? It's a signature.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_document#Denmark . "Denmark is one of few EU countries that currently do not issue national identity cards...", "National Health Insurance Card ... has no photo of the holder", "Danish drivers' licenses and passports are the only identity cards issued by the government containing both the personal identification number and a photo" but foreigners resident in the country who don't have driving skills (but notably are entitled to the social care system) can't get either one.
Then look for images of a Sundhedskort and you'll see there's only space for a signature on the back. No chip, no photo, nothing else.
Again my question to you is, what additional level of assurance do we need in order to have and maintain a democratic form of government with a strong social care system? I assert that signatures - which are a form of biometrics - and perhaps an identification number are more than sufficient for most countries.
(I again say that I know little about the situation in India. It may be that my views are only applicable to certain countries.)
Take voting as the main point. If you need to present stronger proof of the right to vote in order to vote, then what form would that be? An identity card? Then what happens if you've lost the card, or it was stolen or confiscated - have you lost the right to vote in a given election? What if you are unable to provide the needed documents to establish that stronger evidence, as is the problem of Viviette Applewhite, Wilola Lee, Grover Freeland, and others in Pennsylvania? Or should we use fingerprint and/or retina biometrics as in the linked article on India?
How much fraud and distrust in the voting system will the extra evidence remove, and what is the financial cost? Isn't existing fraud rather small, and less than to common-place problems during voting, like http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/2004... where votes were lost due to missing information about machine limitations? "Counting Votes 2012: A State by State Look at Voting Technology Preparedness" reports that "More than 300 voting machine problems were reported to election protection hotlines during the 2010 mid-term elections, and more than 1800 were reported during the 2008 general election."
I quite frankly don't see our democratic principles on shaky ground, in need of stronger assurances of citizen identification in order to stabilize it. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
The Indian government isn't collecting biometrics for fun. Every government, particularly democracies and those with social spending, need to know (a) who is in their country, and, (b) said individuals can reliably prove their identity. Instead of filing forms and pictures in a centralised database the Indian government has opted to generate unique IDs hashed from biometrics.
"What gives a government the right to demand from someone fingerprints and iris scans, but not demand the GPS tracking or mandatory DNA samples of every citizen."
Slippery slope fallacy. By this logic any potential for data collection is totalitarian. Note that to gain U.S. residency (or, for that matter, work at a U.S. financial institution) I had to give my fingerprints to the FBI.
"With the iris scan, all they need to do is have a high resolution camera"
Facial recognition technology would be easier, cheaper, and as technologically inaccessible as planting high resolution cameras looking at peoples' irises everywhere.