The Biometric Border World

Abstract

This chapter analyses technologies of border control that operate through recognition. The technologies are used in various border settings, but are united by a shared technotemporal quality, namely that they identify persons and objects by comparing them to already registered IDs and already known threats. The chapter will first describe the principles and visual skills involved in running the Automated Border Control system in Copenhagen Airport, comparing them with face-to-face ('manual') border control and random checks on intra-Schengen flights. Secondly, the use of an X-ray scanner to determine the contents and possible threats of passenger luggage in Gibraltar Airport will be analysed. In all these cases, humans and machines deploy refined and often interlaced visual and sensory skills or methods to determine whether a person or an object may pass or requires further scrutiny. This work engages with a complex combination of data, recognition and memory, and sensing and sensory skills that come to be mutually formative. The machinic operations are largely based on and formed according to human capacities and at the same time format how and what the humans operating the technologies come to sense and see, as well as 'unsee', in an interplay of continued enskillment and deskillment. We could tentatively characterize this integrated human-technological border assemblage as cyborgian (Haraway, Wolfe, and Haraway 2017; Wells 2014) in that human and technological processes and sensory connections supplement and reinforce one another. But, as we shall see, they sometimes also destabilize one another's operations and skills and work in more contested and disconnected ways, thus undermining the analytical pertinence of the connected symbiotic cyborg. The chapter further analyses the kinds of suspicious relations-notably between faces and identities-that arise and undergo scrutiny in border control and the thresholds of resemblance that are required to pass border control: that is, how much one needs to resemble one's ID photo. Finally, the chapter presents a particular element of airport Chapter 3

Securing the Future? IDentity and Security among Migrants, Policymakers, and Tech Developers

“…In the context of the 9/11 attack, biometric technologies were widely claimed as measures that could have prevented the event through the automated face recognition of the attackers and the subsequent possibility to stop them (Gates, 2011;Lyon, 2008). Since then, biometric technologies have been promoted by vendors and the security industry as objective and fool-proof tools that can accurately pre-empt possible threats from terrorism, on the basis of identification of ill-intentioned individuals (Olwig et al, 2020;Scheel, 2019). This led the United States to sign the PATRIOT Act in 2001, which enabled massive investments in both national and global surveillance infrastructures, including biometrics (Masco, 2017).…”

“…Nonetheless, and in spite of the biometric technologies and the restrictions they implied, four years later Fuuad is living legally in another EU country and working for a major international company. Furthermore, although Fuuad's situation was difficult after his biometric registration in the Italian hot spot, he was still able to use the position as a migrant abroad to negotiate his visibility and social identity in Somaliland (Simonsen, 2020).…”

“…Tech developers, industry and policy-makers were also deeply entangled in reciprocal yet unstable, contingent and sometimes conflictive relations. In other words, biometric security was negotiated across a large assemblage of actors (see Olwig, Grünenberg, Møhl & Simonsen, 2020). In the biometric laboratories, tech developers were acutely aware of the potential insecurities of the technologies themselves.…”

“…These types of imagined and real situations of malfunctioning made it paramount for the biometric labs to continuously develop and test new and better systems and sensors, which could accommodate the reality of badly/ imprecisely positioned fingers, or even physically severed ones. As Bourne, Johnson and Lisle (2015) point out, it is in this "looping back of assumptions" about how biometric sensors work "in the wild", and the integration of this knowledge in the ongoing development of the technologies, that the tech developers often inadvertently become part of what we have elsewhere called the European 'border world' (Bourne, Johnson and Lisle, 2015: 309;Olwig et al, 2020): "[...] the sovereign decisions of bordering are made not only by border guards (using devices) at the moment of border crossing, but they are also disaggregated across time and space such that the multiple decisions made by scientists and engineers in their laboratories are also (and necessarily) constitutive of the 'sovereign decision' of the border". (Bourne, Johnson and Lisle, 2015: 309) Thus, researchers and tech developers work to ensure that the laboratory part of the assemblage of fingers, sensors, algorithms, software programs, hardware systems, designers, engineers, as well as ultimately particular border sites, border guards or other official users and a host of other elements, work as intended.…”

‘I know you like the back of my hand’: biometric practices of humanitarian organisations in international aid

“…It is famously stated that ‘[t]echnology is neither good, nor bad; nor is it neutral’ (Kranzberg, 1986, p. 545). Building on this aphorism, some have highlighted the algorithmic bias, contending that technological tools systematically reflect human bias and subjectivity (Olwig et al, 2020, p. 161). Yet, others have argued that the technology is neutral (Gelb and Clark, 2013, p. 17).…”