Statistics will tell you strange tales, but I ran across one recently that pretty much dropped my jaw. It was in a story about India’s recent declaration that it’s going to create secure, biometric identity cards (complete with a computer chip containing fingerprints, iris scans, criminal records and credit histories) for every single one of its 1.2 billion citizens. The intention is for each Indian citizen to have a unique number and for all of this information to be linked in government computers, forming one of the largest databases ever created. The goal is to begin issuing the new...
