A partially CIA-funded company is partnering with the UIDAI.
By Deepak Chitnis
An American tech company called MongoDB has partnered with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for a contract that will help bolster the voluntary individual voter ID system in place for Indian citizens, but some people are concerned about how trustworthy MongoDB is because a large chunk of its funding is from the CIA.
The New York-based startup, founded in 2009, is a database support firm that helps to manage large, loosely structured information systems. The goal of partnering up with the UIDAI is to help bolster the Aadhaar system, whereby voters in India can be tracked by individual identity numbers that each person is assigned. It will reportedly also help track registration patterns throughout the country.
One of the key investors in MongoDB is a firm called In-Q-Tel, which, as it turns out, is actually a non-profit venture capital branch of the CIA. With security leaks being on the front of everyone’s minds due to the Edward Snowden NSA leak fiasco this year, some eyebrows are raised over the CIA potentially being able to track voters in India.
MongoDB has raised over $230 million since its inception four years ago, and it is unknown exactly how much of that funding has come from In-Q-Tel, meaning that the exact amount of involvement the CIA may have in the company is unknown. There’s also absolutely no evidence that the CIA actively influences anything that MongoDB and its affiliates does.
But the Snowden security leaks, as well as the revelation earlier this year that the US government was spying on other governments in Europe and Asia, poses a serious risk to an Indian system that tracks its citizens’ activities. It is not known if the UIDAI knew of the CIA’s involvement with MongoDB prior to doing business with them.
MongoDB has partnered with various well-known clients in its relatively short lifespan. Some other companies that it does business with include MetLife, Cisco, and Craigslist. It employs 320 workers and has around 600 customers. Bloomberg puts the company’s valuation at $1.2 billion.
Max Schireson, the CEO of MongoDB, was in New Delhi last week to officially sign the contract. A firm timeline has not been announced as to when the implementation of the upgraded Aadhaar system will go into effect.