BOSTON (AP) – For two decades, the United States and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating databases for the Afghan people. The noble goal: To promote law and order and government accountability and modernize a war-torn land.
But in the Taliban’s seizure of power, most of these digital devices, including biometrics to verify identities, apparently fell into the hands of the Taliban. Built with few guarantees of data protection, you run the risk of becoming the high-tech buttons of a surveillance state. As the Taliban stand up, there are concerns that they will be used for social control and to punish perceived enemies.
Putting this data into operation constructively (empowering education, empowering women, fighting corruption) requires democratic stability, and these systems were not designed for the prospect of defeat.
“It’s a terrible irony,” said Frank Pasquale, a surveillance technology scholar at Brooklyn Law School. “It’s a real object lesson in ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.'”
Since the fall of Kabul on August 15, there have been indications that government data may have been used in Taliban efforts to identify and intimidate Afghans working with U.S. forces.
People get phone calls, text messages and nefarious and threatening messages, said Neesha Suarez, constituent services director for Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., An Iraq war veteran whose office is trying help stranded Afghans working with the United States find a way out.
A 27-year-old American contractor in Kabul told The Associated Press that he and his co-workers who developed a U.S.-funded database to manage army and police payrolls received phone calls. summoning them to the Ministry of Defense. He is in hiding, changing his location daily, he said, asking not to be identified for his safety.
In victory, Taliban leaders say they are not interested in retribution. Restoration of international aid and thawing of foreign-owned assets are a priority. There are few signs of the draconian restrictions, especially for women, they imposed when they ruled from 1996 to 2001. There is also no indication that Afghans working with Americans have been systematically persecuted.
Ali Karimi, a University of Pennsylvania scholar, is among Afghans unprepared to trust the Taliban. He worries that the databases will give rigid fundamentalist theocrats, known during their insurrection for relentlessly killing enemy collaborators, “the same ability as an average U.S. government agency when it comes to surveillance and interception.”
The Taliban realize that the world will watch how they handle the data.
All Afghans – and their international partners – have a joint obligation to ensure that sensitive government data is used only for “development purposes” and not as police or social control by the Taliban or to serve others. governments in the region, said Nader Nadery, a negotiator and head of the former government’s civil service commission.
At the moment the fate of one of the most sensitive databases, the one used to pay soldiers and police, is uncertain.
The Afghan Personnel and Wages System has data on more than 700,000 members of the security forces dating back 40 years, a senior government security official said. Their more than 40 data fields include dates of birth, phone numbers, names of parents and grandparents and could check fingerprints and scans of irises and faces stored in a different database with which it was integrated, they said. two Afghan contractors who worked there. condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Only authorized users can access this system, so if the Taliban cannot find it, they can be expected to try to hack it, said the former official, who asked not to be identified for fear of the safety of relatives in Kabul. He hoped that the ISI intelligence service of Pakistan, which was the patron of the Taliban, would provide technical assistance. U.S. analysts expect Chinese, Russian and Iranian intelligence to offer such services as well.
Originally designed to combat payroll fraud, this system was eventually to be linked to a powerful database in the Ministries of Defense and Interior, based on one the Pentagon created in 2004 to achieve “identity dominance.” by collecting fingerprints and scans of irises and faces in combat zones.
But Afghanistan’s automated biometric identification database grew out of a tool to examine army recruits and police to retain them to contain 8.5 million records, including government enemies and the civilian population. When Kabul fell, it was upgraded, along with a similar database in Iraq, under a $ 75 million contract signed in 2018.
U.S. officials say it was secured before the Taliban could access it.
Prior to the U.S. withdrawal, the entire database was wiped out with military-level data removal software, said William Graves, chief engineer of the Pentagon’s biometrics project management office. Similarly, 20 years of data collected from telecommunications and internet interceptions since 2001 by the Afghan intelligence agency were wiped out, the former Afghan security official said.
The remaining crucial databases include Afghanistan’s financial management information system, which contained extensive details on foreign contractors, and a Ministry of Economy database that compiled all international sources of financing. development and aid agencies, the former security official said.
Below are the data controlled by the National Statistics and Information Agency (with iris scans and fingerprints for about 9 million Afghans). In recent years a biometric scan has been required to obtain a passport or driver’s license and to take an entrance test for public office or university.
Western aid organizations led by the World Bank, one of the funders, praised the usefulness of the data to empower women, especially in the registration of land ownership and obtaining bank loans. The agency was working to create electronic national identifiers, known as e-Tazkira, in an unfinished project based on India’s biometrically enabled Aadhaar national identification model.
“This is the treasure chest,” said a Western election attendance official, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize future missions.
It is unclear whether voter registration databases (registries of more than 8 million Afghans) are in the hands of the Taliban, the official said. Full impressions were made during the 2019 presidential election, although the German technology provider retained the biometric records that were then used for voter verification against fraud. After the 2018 parliamentary elections, there were inexplicably missing 5,000 portable biometric handheld devices used for verification.
Another database inherited from the Taliban contains analysis of irises and faces and fingerprints of 420,000 government employees, another anti-fraud measure, which Nadery oversaw as a civil service commissioner. It should have finally merged with the e-Tazkira database, he said.
On August 3, a government website promoted digital hits of President Ashraf Ghani, who would soon flee into exile, saying biometric information from “all officials in every corner of the country” would allow them to link them “under one umbrella” with banks and mobile phone operators for the electronic payment. UN agencies have also collected biometric data from Afghans for food distribution and refugee tracking.
The central agglomeration of this personal data is exactly what worries the 37 digital civil liberties groups that signed an August 25 letter. calling for the urgent closure and erasure, where possible, of Afghanistan’s “digital identity tool”, among other measures. The letter said authoritarian regimes have exploited this data “to target vulnerable people” and that digitized and searchable databases amplify the risks. Disputes over the inclusion of ethnicity and religion in the e-Tazkira database (for fear that it might put digital views on minorities, as China has done in repressing its ethnic Uighurs) delayed its creation for nearly a year. decade.
John Woodward, a Boston University professor and former CIA officer who pioneered the Pentagon’s biometric collection, is concerned about hostile intelligence agencies so that the United States can access the data obtained.
“ISI (Pakistani intelligence) would be interested to know who worked for the Americans,” Woodward said, and China, Russia and Iran have their own agendas. Undoubtedly, their agents have the necessary techniques to enter password-protected databases.
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The story clarifies that the Afghan salary and personnel system did not include biometric data, but could consult this information in a different database with which it was integrated.