Hiide taliban4/10/2023 What does this situation mean for Afghanistan, for Afghans, and for the wider international community working on digital identification for development?įor Afghanistan and Afghans, it means that the Taliban have sensitive personally identifiable information that they have said they will use to target those they deem enemies or threats. For those in official databases, particularly the APPS, user deletion is not an option. As a result, many Afghans are “frantically going through phones to delete messages they have sent, music they’ve listened to & pictures they’ve taken,” BBC reporter Sana Safi wrote on Twitter on August 15. These include the e-Tazkira, a biometric identity card used by Afghanistan’s National Statistics and Information Authority, which includes fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs, as well as voter registration databases and the Afghan Personnel and Pay System (APPS), used by both the Afghan Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense to pay the national army and police. In addition to the US military’s Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE, biometrics devices), the Taliban takeover means they also have access to and control over the digital identification systems and technologies that had been built through international aid support. The Taliban’s claim was made just days before the formal departure of the coalition forces and the Taliban takeover of the Afghan government. This poses a huge threat to all Afghans who are recorded in these identification systems, and should be a wake-up call to all those working on digital identity and digital public infrastructure for development. On August 27th, the Taliban boasted of using US digital identity technology to hunt down Afghans who had worked with the international coalition. Photograph: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters - from the Guardian’s version of this story Afghan election commission workers transfer data from biometric devices to the main server in Kabul, October 2019.
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