Nubian Rights Forum & 2 others v Attorney General & 6 others; Child Welfare Society & 9 others (Interested Parties) [2020] eKLR that the Open Society Foundation had sourced him as a witness in the petition. His brief was to make the court understand the various aspects of the NIIMS project, and he reiterated that he understands the architecture of NIIMS from its technical purposes which have been disclosed to the public. 48. It was his evidence that while he had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court of India to oppose Aadhaar, the Court had restricted the use of Aadhaar but did not outlaw it. He had not testified before the Supreme Court. He disagreed with the proposition that he is not an expert of international standing on cyber security, insisting that he gives industry- wide technical talks on the subject, and is a key panelist in an international cyber security conference held annually in India. He stressed that based on the pleadings filed in this Petition, he had formed the opinion that NIIMS and Aadhaar are functionally and architecturally similar. He conceded that he had not read any technical document on NIIMS. 49. He disputed various statements made in the pleadings filed by the Respondent’s experts, and his evidence was that deduplication is not based on biometrics alone, and that minimal personal information is required for identification. His opinion was that NIIMS did not observe data minimization and purpose limitation standards. He admitted that most countries develop their data capture programmes and encryption algorithms locally, and stated that he had not seen any such software that was locally developed for NIIMS, nor talked to any of the local experts who designed the system. 50. Mr. Anand stated that although he did not doubt the technological competence of Kenyans, there should be information made available on the NIIMS to build confidence in the system. He stated that identity projects create mistrust for lack of information. Mr. Anand also testified that he was familiar with the distinction between open source and closed source software but disputed that data in closed source software will guarantee the safety of personal data. His opinion was that open source software invites continues scrutiny and improvement, and gave an example of the public disclosure of the Aadhaar system in India. In his opinion, the technology design for NIIMS should be publicly disclosed. 51. Mr. Anand disputed the demonstrable benefits of NIIMS, stating that they are not based on any data. He was emphatic that given its current architecture, NIIMS will not achieve its stated objectives, and that its costs outweigh its benefits. He admitted that he had discussed the disadvantages of NIIMS but not its benefits, stating that people tend to overestimate the advantages and fail to talk about the disadvantages. Further, that the statement that NIIMS is a single source of truth is a conflation between identification and identity, and the database is used for identification not identity purposes. He was also doubtful whether such a biometric system can isolate terror risks or enhance security, asserting, by way of illustration of his position, that there were 45 – 50 reported cases of attempted infiltration of the Aadhaar system in India. 52. Mr. Anand denied that his conclusions on the weaknesses of biometric systems are limited to those that use fingerprints alone, noting that the Aadhaar system used other biometric and demographic markers. In his view, irrespective of whether a system is a single modal or multimodal, it is still exposed to the risk of deduplication. He explained that a multi-modal system uses various demographic and biometric parameters as opposed to only one parameter that is used in a single-modal system. He testified that it was reasonable to state that NIIMS is a multimodal system, but did not accept that it had factored in deduplication. He reiterated that he was skeptical about the use of fingerprints and that data from India had shown the ageing of fingerprints of persons who undertake manual work. 53. While agreeing that biometric identifiers cannot be discounted, Mr. Anand pointed out that there is a threshold required to be met to ensure probability of success, which has not been publicly disclosed about NIIMS. He also noted that the fundamental problem of using biometrics is the impact of failure, and although no system is perfect, there is need for the right architectural design of the system and mitigation measures. http://www.kenyalaw.org - Page 10/174