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BOSTON (AP) — The United States and its allies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over two decades building databases for Afghan people. The nobly stated goal: to promote law and order and government accountability, and to modernize a war-ravaged country.

But in of the TalibanLightning to power, many of these digital devices – including biometrics to verify identities – have apparently crashed of the Taliban hands. Built with few data protection measures, it risks becoming hi-tech jackbots of a surveillance situation. aspect of the Taliban Whether management’s feet, there are concerns that it will be used for social control and punishing perceived enemies.

Constructively putting such data into practice, such as increasing education, empowering women, fighting corruption, requires democratic stability and these systems are not designed for defeat.

“It’s a terrible irony,” said Frank Pasquale, a surveillance technologist at Brooklyn Law School. “A real object lesson in ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’.”

Since the fall of Kabul on 15 August, indications have emerged that government data may have been used at this time. of the Taliban Efforts to identify and intimidate Afghans working with US forces.

Neesha Suarez, founding director of services for Iraq War veteran Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, whose office is trying to help stranded Afghans working with the US find a way out, said people received ominous and threatening phone calls, texts and WhatsApp messages. .

A 27-year-old US contractor in Kabul told The Associated Press that he and his colleagues, who are developing a US-funded database used to manage army and police payrolls, have received calls calling them to the Department of Defense. He hides, moves every day, he said, and asked not to be identified for his safety.

in victory, of the Taliban‘s leaders say they’re not interested in revenge. Restoring international aid and not freezing foreign assets is a priority. There are few signs of the brutal restrictions they imposed on women in particular when they ruled from 1996 to 2001. There is also no indication that Afghans working with the Americans are being systematically persecuted.

Ali Karimi, an academic from the University of Pennsylvania, is among the Afghans. of the Taliban. He worries that the databases will give “the same capacity as the average U.S. government agency when it comes to surveillance and intervention” to the staunch fundamentalist theocrats, who are known for brutally killing enemy collaborators during their rebellion.

NS of the Taliban they realize that the world will monitor how they use data.

All Afghans – and their international partners – have a duty to ensure that sensitive government data is used only for “development purposes” and not for police or social control. of the Taliban or to serve other governments in the region, said Nader Nadery, a peace negotiator in the former government and chairman of the civil service commission.

The fate of one of the most sensitive databases paying soldiers and police is currently uncertain.

A senior security official from the fallen government said the Afghan Personnel and Pay System has data on more than 700,000 members of the security force dating back 40 years. Speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of revenge, the two Afghan contractors working on it said more than 40 data fields included birth dates, phone numbers, names of fathers and grandfathers, fingerprints and iris and facial scans.

Only authorized users can access this system, so of the Taliban If they can’t find one, they can be expected to try to hack it, said the former official, who asked not to be identified because he feared for the safety of his relatives in Kabul. He was waiting for Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, for a long time of the Taliban‘ boss, provide technical assistance. US analysts expect Chinese, Russian and Iranian intelligence to offer such services as well.

Originally designed to combat payroll fraud, the system eventually needed to interface with a powerful database in the Departments of Defense and Home Affairs, according to a model created by the Pentagon in 2004 to achieve “identity dominance” by collecting fingerprints, iris, and facial scans on battlefields. .

But the local Afghanistan Automated Biometric Identification Database has grown from a tool to loyalty to army and police soldiers to contain 8.5 million records, including government enemies and the civilian population. When Kabul fell, it was being upgraded, along with a similar database in Iraq, under a $75 million contract signed in 2018.

US officials say it has been secured. of the Taliban he could reach it.

William Graves, chief engineer in the Pentagon’s biometrics project management office, said the entire database was wiped with military-grade data erasure software prior to the US withdrawal. Similarly, the former Afghan security official said 20 years of data collected by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency from telecommunications and internet outages since 2001 has been erased.

Among the key remaining databases, the former security official said, are the Afghanistan Financial Management Information System, which contains comprehensive details on foreign contractors, and a Ministry of Economy database that compiles all international development and aid agency funding sources.

Then there’s the data, along with iris scans and fingerprints, for the nearly 9 million Afghans controlled by the National Agency for Statistics and Information. In recent years, biometric scanning has become mandatory to obtain a passport or driver’s license and take the civil service or university entrance exam.

Western charities led by one of the financiers, the World Bank, praised the usefulness of the data in empowering women, particularly in recording land ownership and obtaining bank loans. The agency was working to create electronic national identities known as e-Tazkira in an unfinished project that was somewhat modeled on India’s biometrically activated Aadhaar national identity.

“This is the treasure chest,” said a Western election aid official, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize future missions.

It’s unclear whether voter registration databases—registers of more than 8 million Afghans—are available. of the Taliban hands, said the official. Full printouts were made during the 2019 presidential election, but the biometric records used for anti-fraud voter verification at the time were kept by the German tech provider. After the 2018 parliamentary elections, 5,000 portable biometric handheld computers used for verification inexplicably disappeared.

Yet another database of the Taliban inherit includes iris and facial scans and fingerprints of 420,000 government employees, another anti-fraud measure that Nadery oversaw as public service commissioner. He said it will eventually be merged with the e-Tazkira database.

On August 3, a government website praised the digital achievements of soon-to-be-expelled President Ashraf Ghani, saying it would allow biometric information on “all civil servants from every corner of the country” to be linked “under one umbrella.” ” with banks and mobile operators for electronic payment. UN agencies also collected biometric data on Afghans for food distribution and refugee tracking.

The centralized collection of such personal data is what worries 37 digital civil liberties groups, who signed an August 25 letter calling for, among other measures, the immediate shutdown of Afghanistan’s “digital identity tool” and its deletion whenever possible. The letter said authoritarian regimes use such data “to target vulnerable people,” and digitized, searchable databases increase the risks. Disputes over the inclusion of ethnicity and religion in the e-Tazkira database – fearing that China could put digital bullseys on minorities, as it did when suppressing ethnic Uyghurs – delayed its creation for more than a decade.

Boston University professor and former CIA officer John Woodward, who spearheaded the Pentagon’s biometric collection, is concerned that intelligence agencies hostile to the United States have access to treasure troves of data.

“ISI (Pakistani intelligence) will want to know who is working for the Americans,” Woodward said, and China, Russia and Iran have their own agendas. Its agents certainly have the technical skills to enter password-protected databases.

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