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This is the true story of abandoned Afghan biometric databases.


According to Jacobsen’s book, AABIS aimed to cover 80% of the Afghan population by 2012, or about 25 million people. While there is no public information on how many records this database currently contains, and neither the contractor that manages the database nor officials from the US Department of Defense responded to requests for comment, an unconfirmed figure from the US-based LinkedIn profile of the program manager puts it at 8.1 million.

AABIS was widely used by the previous Afghan government in various ways. In most projects, applications for government jobs and roles required a biometric check from the MoI system to ensure applicants had no criminal or terrorist background. Biometric checks were also required for passport, national ID and driver’s license applications, as well as for registration for the country’s university entrance exam.

Another database, slightly smaller than AABIS, was linked to the country’s electronic national identity card, “e-tazkira”. When the government fell, about 6.2 million application processes continued, according to the government. National Statistics and Information Agency, but it is unclear how many applicants submitted biometric data.

Biometrics has also been used by other government departments – or at least made public. Independent Electoral Commission used biometric scanners to prevent voter fraud in the 2019 parliamentary elections, with questionable results. Ministry of Industry and Trade in 2020 announced said they will collect biometrics from those who register new businesses.

Despite the large number of systems, they were never fully interconnected. A August 2019 audit He found that despite the $38 million spent by the US to date, APPS failed to achieve many of its goals: biometrics was still not directly integrated into personnel files, but rather simply linked to the biometric unique number. Nor did the system directly connect to other Afghan government computer systems, such as the Ministry of Finance, which sends the salaries. APPS also still relied on manual data entry processes relative to auditing, which allowed room for human error or manipulation.

a global problem

Afghanistan is not the only country to adopt biometrics. Many countries are concerned about so-called “ghost beneficiaries”, false identities used to illegally collect salaries or other funds. Preventing such frauds is a common rationale for biometric systems, says Amba Kak, director of global policy and programs at the AI ​​Now institute and legal expert on biometric systems.

“It’s really easy to paint this [APPS] exceptionally,” says Kak, co-editor of a book on global biometric policies. “There seems to be a lot of continuity with global experiences” around biometrics.

“Biometric identification as the only effective tool for legal identification… flawed and somewhat dangerous.”

Amber Kak, AI Now

It is widely accepted that having legal identification documents is a right, but “combining biometric identification as the only effective way for legal identification” is “flawed and somewhat dangerous,” he says.

Kak questions whether biometrics, rather than policy fixes, is the right solution to fraud, adding that it’s often “not evidence-based.”

But Afghanistan’s rollout of such technologies, driven largely by US military objectives and international funding, has been aggressive. Even if APPS and other databases have not yet reached their intended level of functionality, they contain terabytes of data on Afghan citizens that the Taliban could mine.

“Identity sovereignty” – but by whom?

Increased alarm on leftover biometric devices and databases and Tons of other data on ordinary life in AfghanistanIn the two weeks between the Taliban’s entry into Kabul and the official withdrawal of American forces, it did not stop the collection of sensitive data on people.

This time the data is mostly collected by well-meaning volunteers. insecure Google forms and spreadsheets, emphasizing that either the lessons in data security have not yet been learned or must be relearned by every relevant group.

Singh says more attention needs to be paid to what happens to data during conflicts or government collapse. “We don’t take it seriously,” he says, “but we should especially take it in these war-torn areas where knowledge can be used to create so much havoc.”

Biometrics law researcher Kak believes that the best way to protect sensitive data is actually “this kind of [data] infrastructures…were not built in the first place.”

For writer and journalist Jacobsen, it’s ironic that the Department of Defense’s obsession with using data to create identity could help the Taliban achieve their own version of identity sovereignty. “That would be the fear of what the Taliban did,” he says.

As a result, some experts say that not so much interoperability of Afghan government databases could actually be a saving grace if the Taliban tries to use the data. “I suspect APPS is still not working that well, which is probably a good thing in light of recent events,” Dan Grazier, a veteran of the Government Oversight Project monitoring group, said via email.

But for those who depend on the APPS database and now find themselves or their family members hunted by the Taliban, it’s less irony and more betrayal.

“The Afghan military has relied on its international partners, including the US and led by the US, to build such a system,” says one familiar with the system. “And now this database, [new] It’s the weapon of the state.”



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