The birth of biometric security

Abstract

We are currently witnessing a rapid rise in biometric security. Borders are apparently becoming ‘smart’; passports are becoming e‐passports, and when you set out on your travels your data double is already at your destination. Access to airports and even continents will increasingly be determined not by your national citizenship but by the security of your identity. Biometric security has received little anthropological attention despite historical associations with the discipline. Here I wish to outline a brief genealogy of biometric security in order to argue that, beyond the apparent newness of the technology, key biometric technologies owe their origins to 19th‐entury deployments and then as now they may be understood as a form of bio‐governmentality in which the security of identity opens possibilities for population control.

Biometric citizenship

“…Although the label of 'newness' is often attached to biometric technology, it is important to remember that biometrics has its origins in various earlier technologies, such as anthropometry and fingerprinting developed during the nineteenth century. (see Maguire 2009, Pugliese 2010 for a brief history on biometrics). 2.…”

“…It is embedded within a colonial past whereby race has functioned as a prominent component within the mechanisms of power and control (see Maguire 2009, Muller 2010, Pugliese 2010. Race remains, as Hall (1993, p. 298) argues, as an 'organising category of [ .…”

On Digital Passages and Borders: Refugees and the New Infrastructure for Movement and Control

“…While blanket surveillance, thus, attempts to "manage migration as a mass phenomenon," biometric data collection practices treat asylum seekers and refugees as "hyperindividualized entities" that need to be identified and controlled (Feldman, 2012, pp. 78-79; see also Epstein, 2008;Maguire, 2009)-and, as the recently proposed lowering of the minimum age for inclusion in the database as well as significant extension of the retention period suggests, identified and controlled at an ever younger age and for ever increasing amounts of time.…”

Subverting ID from above and below: The uncertain shaping of India’s new instrument of e-governance

“…10 In India, Dr. R Ramakumar, an expert witness before the Lok Sabha Finance Committee stated that 'it has been proven again and again that in the Indian environment the failure to 10 Biometric technology entertains a historical relation with other racialised systems of knowledge. Maguire (2009Maguire ( , 2012 recounts the unsuccessful efforts of imperial scientists to define rules for recognising race through fingerprints, a programme driven by the desire to use biometric measures for achieving social classifications. The ultimate triumph of biometric technology promotes an ideology of individualism that stands in contrast to the beliefs in racial determinism of evolutionist science.…”