The Supreme Court, which Wednesday declared the Centre's flagship Aadhaar scheme as constitutionally valid, has extensively relied up on a power-point presentation made by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey to conclude that the scheme was safe. Bhushan had on March 22 got a unique opportunity to make a PowerPoint presentation in the apex court to defend the government's ambitious scheme. The bench said the Centre and the UIDAI had "rightly pointed out" that there were sufficient safeguard mechanisms for data protection. The bench also noted that there were sufficient security technologies for round-the-clock monitoring, data leak prevention so that "the authentication process is not exposed to the internet world". Pandey, a 1984-batch IAS officer of Maharashtra cadre heading UIDAI since 2010, had allayed concerns about data security and said the Aadhaar data was protected by a 2048-bit encryption and "once biometrics comes to us, it will never go away".

Source: dna September 26, 2018 16:07 UTC