Data & Afghanistan
Could more have been done to protect Afghans' digital identities?
It’s still morning in Howland Island, does that count? Welcome to a rare evening edition of Slow Build.
Programming note: Slow Build will be on summer vacation in the wilds of Wyoming the week of August 23rd. We’ll be back at it here the week of August 30th. Thanks for your continued support.
Watching what has been going down in Afghanistan this week has been hugely rattling in so many ways, but one of those is surprising in a country so often framed as stuck in the ancient past: what happens now to the data held on Afghans? By Afghans? The Taliban started laying out a strategy in the spring for the quick takeover of the country in the wake of the withdrawal of U.S. troops. If their success was inevitable, the question still remains: could more have been done to protect the people of Afghanistan on the digital front?
Rina Chandran writes for Reuters this:
“Thousands of Afghans struggling to ensure the physical safety of their families after the Taliban took control of the country have an additional worry: that biometric databases and their own digital history can be used to track and target them…
After years of a push to digitise databases in the country, and introduce digital identity cards and biometrics for voting, activists warn these technologies can be used to target and attack vulnerable groups.”
People are rushing to delete their digital fingerprints, writes Chris Stokel-Walker for Wired:
“The Taliban last ruled Afghanistan in 2001. In the 20 years since, more and more of our lives have been lived online. Now, with the Taliban back in power, each digital breadcrumb could be a reason to be punished or killed. There are several different ways the Taliban could find out information about you: information stored locally on your device; your contacts (messages with whom you’ve exchanged may be on their devices); the cloud services you use; and the data moving between those places, subject to interception. Those are the ones you can control. But there are the photos and videos that people have been caught up in, wittingly and unwittingly, that they can’t control. Posed photographs showing educational projects on NGO websites and candid shots of life outside Taliban rule are all potentially evidence of transgressions. Worried about retribution, many Afghans are scrambling to erase all evidence of their past lives.”
The group Human Rights First, headquartered in D.C. and New York, is providing a guide aimed at helping Afghans protect themselves, in English, Pashto, and Dari. “Overall, it is very difficult to avoid recognition based on biometric data,” they say.
Still, some tips:
Facial recognition: “You want to obscure or alter as many major facial structural features as possible, most importantly the mouth, nose, eyes, jawline, and cheekbones below your eyes… You can test this on a smartphone's Face ID, which uses fairly primitive technology. But if you can’t fool your smartphone, you probably won’t be able to fool the higher tech facial recognition technology.”
Fingerprint scans: “In an emergency the best thing you can do is try to stop the scanner giving a good read. If you are elderly you have deeper fingerprint ridges, and pressing down hard, or leaning your finger to one side or the other might smudge the print enough to fool the tech. If your hands are very dry or dirty this can also cause a failure to read.”
Iris scans: “Shake or move your head. This can prevent the test from running. Shaking or moving your head in rapid small movements can prevent the sensitive test from successfully running. This only has a chance of success against low tech equipment.”
In Friday’s Slow Build, we’ll have a Q&A with the data artist Jer Thorp, whose new book “Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future” tackles questions about the rights and responsibilities that come with our data being out in the world. Be sure to dig in.