A terrorist regime armed with biometric scanners

Citizens in countries that have created biometric databases must ask: What happens when the data falls into the wrong hands?

For more than a fortnight, a popular Afghan TV journalist did not step out of the safety of his house after the Taliban walked into a defenceless Kabul. Fearing that his past will bring grief to him, he furiously erased all his social media posts on the Taliban. And then he did what everyone who had worked closely with the Afghan government has done — run to the airport.

At the airport, he sought anonymity in the chaotic crowd that was converging there to escape the Taliban, till August 31, when the Americans made their final evacuation. By now, he had jettisoned his clean-shaven look by growing a beard and wearing a soiled and wrinkled salwar kameez. He failed to find a seat for himself and his family in any of the aircraft that evacuated thousands of foreigners and Afghans out of the country.

Now, he fears the worst.

Unlike in the past, when persecuted Afghans could escape by changing their identities by falsifying their documents or their appearances, now their exposure to the regime is just waiting to happen — it’s a biometric scan away. This is a widespread fear across Kabul, and elsewhere.

Though the Taliban has announced amnesty to all Afghans, including those who served in the army, reports of Taliban militants armed with biometric scanners linked to a government database knocking on the doors of many residents have begun to swirl around. No one really gives credence to the belief that the Taliban are technology-challenged and so cannot access the database containing the biometric data of millions of ordinary Afghans. What is being slowly realised is that if they need help, the Taliban can get it from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Also read: Afghanistan: War on terror was corrupt from the start

Many fear-stricken Afghans are also aware that weeks before Kabul fell, Taliban soldiers kidnapped some 200 people traveling through the town of Kunduz. The bus was stopped and the biometric scans of the occupants were taken. And then, young soldiers of the Afghan National Defence Force (ANDF), returning home on vacation in civilian clothes, were pulled out and shot in cold blood.

Everything that ordinary Afghans wanted to do to escape the hawk-eye of the Taliban failed in Kunduz. Today, Afghanistan presents a ‘doomsday scenario’ for a society that succumbed to the compelling reasoning of those technology evangelists who claimed that corruption could only be fought by bringing in biometric scans.

Undoubtedly, in Afghanistan, corruption was endemic. Army recruitment presented the worst-case scenario. It is common knowledge that the Afghan defence forces were known as the ‘ghost army’ — so many soldiers existed only on paper. This is one of the reasons that the Afghan army could not stand up to the Taliban juggernaut. This dubious phenomenon of ghost soldiers allowed the notorious warlords and the local commanders to squirrel away their salaries in their own accounts, apart from huge and organised corruption across the army network and ground operations. In 2019, the US army claimed to have discovered 42,000 ‘ghost servicemen.’

The discovery of such fraud may have helped in upholding the usefulness and efficacy of a central biometric database. However, did it occur to its votaries in Afghanistan, and in other countries like India — what happens when this data falls into the wrong hands?

In New Delhi, Attorney-General KK Venugopal fielded these questions in the Supreme Court in March 2018. When the issue of the safety of Aadhaar data was raised, he proudly told the apex court that the theft of data was impossible “as it is secured behind walls that are 13 feet high and five feet thick.” The good lawyer thought that data theft was similar to burglary. He did not know it could be hacked from a distance. Since 2009, biometric scans of 1.2 billion citizens have been collected.

Ironically, in Afghanistan these days, the fear of data betraying the identities of citizens is playing out in different ways, and with different people. Newspaper reports suggest that 14 BBC journalists and 200 judges are in hiding. There must be many more engineers, businessmen, professionals, doctors, nurses, journalists, interpreters, translators, etc., and people with a wide range of skills, who must be in a similar situation. They must be worried that a Talibani with a hand-held biometric scanner would come knocking.

Technology websites claimed that the ‘secure’ Afghan databases would have iris, finger and face scans of millions of nationals. Many of these people would be those who helped the US and the Karzai and Ghani governments. By accessing the database, the Taliban authorities would have a clear idea of who fought against them in which theatre of war. The central biometric database is thus the starting point to exacting vengeance for many a Talibani!

There are 40-odd data fields that are included against each name. According to MIT Technology Review, “It also contains details on the individual’s military specialty and career trajectory, as well as sensitive relational data such as the names of their father, uncles and grandfathers, as well as the names of the two tribal elders per recruit who served as guarantors for their enlistment. This turns what was a simple digital catalogue into something far more dangerous.”

In other words, this access to data imperils not just one man but his entire ecosystem, his social network, his professional and personal life, his colleagues, friends, relatives and clan. In these peculiar and sinister circumstances, imagine the fate of the thousands of soldiers of the Afghan army who sought to melt away into the crowds by stepping out of their uniforms!

Now, the Taliban would not just know their location and their family networks, their military and professional capabilities Perhaps they won’t have to worry too much about their usual problems — who will fix their grounded Black Hawk helicopters or operate many of the other war machines abandoned by the fleeing US and Afghan army. Within no time, the Taliban may be able to upgrade their military strength.

That is the reason why many Afghans who were cognizant of being badly compromised by giving their biometric scans to the US-backed Afghan government in the belief that they would remain secure, were the ones desperate to fly out of the country. The US evacuated about 1.3 lakh Afghans and US nationals; other countries also lifted about 50,000 people. Millions who remained are crossing into Pakistan, Iran or other countries.

The grave threat that the creation of such a biometric database presents to ordinary Afghans should worry democratic institutions in other countries. They should rethink this unquestioning submission to the seduction of technology to fight petty corruption by asking, “What happens when the data falls into the wrong hands?”

(The writer is Editor of the Delhi-based magazine, Hardnews)