Identifying Citizens

ID Cards as Surveillance

David Lyon

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745641560, 9780745641553
• eBook ISBN: 9780745655901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

New ID card systems are proliferating around the world. These may use digitized fingerprints or photos, may be contactless, using a scanner, and above all, may rely on computerized registries of personal information. In this timely new contribution, David Lyon argues that such IDs represent a fresh phase in the long-term attempts of modern states to find stable ways of identifying citizens.

New ID systems are "new" because they are high-tech. But their newness is also seen crucially in the ways that they contribute to new means of governance. The rise of e-Government and global mobility along with the aftermath of 9/11 and fears of identity theft are propelling the trend towards new ID systems. This is further lubricated by high technology companies seeking lucrative procurements, giving stakes in identification practices to agencies additional to nation-states, particularly technical and commercial ones. While the claims made for new IDs focus on security, efficiency and convenience, each proposal is also controversial. Fears of privacy-loss, limits to liberty, government control, and even of totalitarian tendencies are expressed by critics.

This book takes an historical, comparative and sociological look at citizen-identification, and new ID cards in particular. It concludes that their widespread use is both likely and, without some strong safeguards, troublesome, though not necessarily for the reasons most popularly proposed. Arguing that new IDs demand new approaches to identification practices given their potential for undermining trust and contributing to social exclusion, David Lyon provides the clearest overview of this topical area to date.

1

Demanding Documents

The close association of citizenship and identity papers that we take for granted today was not enforced until the early twentieth century.

Valentin Groebner¹

To demand production of the card from all and sundry is wholly unreasonable.

Acting Lord Chief Justice Goddard²

Among the more offbeat items appearing on the American Public Broadcasting Service’s Antiques Roadshow are slave tags. The little tin badges, which slaves were once obliged to wear, have become collectors’ items. They indicate the year the tag was made, the occupation of the slave, such as ‘house servant’, and an ID number corresponding to one stored at the local treasurer’s office. In South Carolina, where many may be found, black slaves often escaped from their white masters. A suspect could be asked to display his or her tag to distinguish local slaves from runaways. A misshapen disc, rather than a document, was demanded.

Now, collecting such slave tags as antiques is not uncontroversial. Some object that this amounts to further exploitation of past pain. Collectors defend the practices, however, claiming them as ‘an inspiring testimony to the strength of human spirit in the face of seemingly overwhelming adversity’.³ To preserve these artefacts is to learn from the past and to help prevent such atrocities happening again, they say. Without entering this particular debate, it is worth observing that contemporary controversies over identification are frequently marked by their lack of historical sense. The purpose of knowing about past identification practices and of seeing reminders of their demeaning, destructive and dignity-destroying possibilities is not to tar today’s initiatives with the same brush so much as to strive to ensure that such egregious errors are not repeated.

Today’s ID cards have genealogies that can be traced back to several historical sources. As well as the evolution of general state administration, especially for taxation purposes, identification is historically important for colonialism, conscription and crime control. Genealogies, as understood by Michel Foucault, are both successful and failed schemes, on the one hand, and local knowledge and experiences, on the other, that may throw light on present-day developments.⁴ Much may be learned from the history of the quest for stable IDs in the modern world that applies to the continuing story in the present.

National identification systems, based on some kind of card or booklet, have existed for a long time, though they were limited initiatives at first. The origins of the modern state system in Europe between 1400 and 1600 signalled the start of administrative schemes for authenticating and identifying individuals.⁵ Couriers, for instance, were obliged to indicate that they were legitimate carriers of messages by wearing special insignia or badges. Certain people, such as Gypsies, were assumed to be carrying false identities in the mid-1500s because illegitimate persons could not have legitimate ID. (This particular example has not gone away, yet. In 2008 a highly contentious plan to fingerprint Italian Gypsies – ‘Roma’ – camping on the edges of cities was extensively modified when the government decided to add fingerprints for everyone to the national ID card.⁶)

Pilgrims and diplomats also had to wear insignia or carry passes, which tended to be largely graphic so that authorities could recognize signs with ease. In sixteenth-century Cologne and Freiburg, beggars were required to change the dates and serial numbers on their badges in order to control copying. Increasingly, weight was placed on the written descriptions of physical characteristics (‘permanent distinguishing marks’ of today’s passports) such that names and faces could be linked at least loosely.

After the French Revolution, citizenship came to be associated with registration and eventually with les papiers, and by the twentieth century – as Caplan and Torpey’s Documenting Individual Identity⁷ shows – a number of schemes for national identity cards had been discussed in places as far apart as Argentina⁸ and the UK. In the latter, registries were set up and cards issued as early as 1915 and, more successfully, in 1939.⁹ Meanwhile, of course, passports for international travel became commonplace. But passports, by definition, are for travellers who wish to cross national borders. The intent of most national ID schemes today is eventually to cover entire populations.

It is important to note that many identification systems were at first partial, designed to control specific segments of the population defined as ‘suspect’ and potentially beyond the reach of the state. Curiously, the cases of crime control and colonialism are closely linked, as we shall see. The early use of fingerprinting in British India was used in the solution of murders, but also to reduce risks of violence in the ‘indigo disturbances’ of the 1860s, in which peasants revolted at the British monopoly of dye production for use in English textiles. (Mahatma Gandhi would champion this cause in 1917.) Limited uses in colonial control or in the police tracking of recidivists marked early uses of fingerprints, but, once established, fingerprinting for identification was to expand steadily.¹⁰

What links early and later efforts to provide stable identification systems is the demand for documents, to discover some reliable means of distinguishing the one from the many and of sorting the alien from the citizen or the imposter from the genuine. This is prompted partly by new travel possibilities, which produce visitors not known through routine face-to-face contact. It was clearly the case that in early modern Europe the mobility of both messengers and migrant groups created problems for which identification documents were the official response, but the demand for ID documents went well beyond this. It is the official demand for documents of personal identity, for a range of related reasons, that links today’s quest for new IDs with earlier practices. Without an historical perspective, ID systems may appear as a novel development, whereas in fact the continuities are quite striking.

Travel is one important factor. Modern modes of transport and communication permit travel of many kinds and for many purposes, but the proportion of populations that can travel and the processes of travel themselves have multiplied immensely since early modern days when transport and communication were still vitally linked. Formerly, communication depended on transport – the horse or ship that enabled the message to be transmitted – but the invention of the telegraph split these two apart.¹¹ Communication could occur without transport. However, there is a sense in which the relation has not disappeared so much as reversed. In a world of new technologies, transport now depends on communication. One cannot travel far without having to produce some marker or message that identifies and situates the traveller. Today, the information communicated often comes directly from the body of the traveller.

In what follows, I trace some identification efforts aimed at making citizens more ‘legible’¹² within the ‘embrace’¹³ of the state and show how these have historically had to do with colonial administration, crime control and the exigencies of war.¹⁴ They have to do with both travel and transactions. The quest for security and certainty of identification has had ambiguous results. While administrative efficiency is sometimes enhanced, new kinds of insecurities and uncertainties may also appear that have on occasion placed bloody blights on human history. The certainties sought often involve clear categorization – the imposition of classifications – that has facilitated the sorting of actual populations, not merely for determining entitlements, but for inclusion and exclusion, and even for mass murder and genocide.

Identification and the Legibility of Citizens

One process that distinguishes the modern nation-state as such is the official attention accorded to individual details as part of the embrace of the individual by the state. John Torpey uses embrace in the sense of ‘grasping’ or ‘registering’ citizens in ways that both include and exclude particular persons.¹⁵ In the telling trope used by James Scott, such an embrace – to mix metaphors – made citizens more legible to the state and this in turn depended on both rising literacy and the growth of official records.¹⁶ However, it should also be noted that although the embrace of the state or the greater legibility of citizens may have deleterious effects, for example, on levels of public trust, identifying citizens may also be the means of ensuring their entitlements and their rights.

Improving citizens’ legibility may be undertaken for all kinds of reasons. In 1666 a detailed census was taken in New France, the first such census in North America. Undertaken by French colonial authorities in part of what was to become Canada, it was largely for taxation purposes, but also to initiate an incentive scheme to encourage families to have more children.¹⁷ Making citizens legible would increase not only revenue but also reproduction, it seems. John Torpey, in his work on the passport,¹⁸ insightfully shows how identification could help to create a monopoly on the means of movement. However, nation-states also document identities in order to mobilize economic resources through taxation, to redistribute resources to citizens in need through welfare programmes and also through health and education, and finally to maintain peace and order.¹⁹ The latter refers both to external threats from other powers and to internal ones from rebellion, violence or crime. It is important to note that each initiative has a stake in adequate documentary identification and the parallel monitoring of populations. Identification has several interlinked purposes.

One of the most ancient reasons for registration and identification was to facilitate the taxing of citizens by the state and, conversely, to ensure that those eligible for state benefits received that to which they were entitled. Worlds touched by Christianity have no difficulty recalling that Jesus’ own birth coincided with a major tax-related registration under Roman rule. The Romans also used tesserae (marked bone or ivory rods) to identify slaves, soldiers and citizens in relation to financial transactions. In ancient China, 656-221 bc, tax and registration occurred in relation to warmaking,²⁰ and similar systems existed in Greece and, even earlier, around 2500 bc, in Sumer. In Crete, perhaps 4,000 years ago, cylinder seals were used to create personal identification devices worn as a stamp or a button in necklaces or bracelets and generally formed from clay.²¹ While these were used to distinguish their bearers, for example by ensuring they were worn in burial chambers at death, it is not clear if they had official status.

Historians have little to say about identification processes in the ancient world, presumably because it was assumed in relatively fixed, local settings with little travel opportunity that by and large people were known to each other for most practical purposes. In early modern times things started to change, although even then such change was very slow and limited. As Edward Higgs has shown,²² identification systems appeared as part of a long-term, uneven process of rationalizing state activities in more modern times, and these were generally expanded as needs arose and new techniques were produced that could make them more administratively efficient. Births, marriages and deaths, once locally registered in European or North American parishes, gradually became a state function. Such data would eventually become basic ‘breeder’ documents from which to create others.

Part of the problem was that in some cases surnames (or ‘family’ names), the basic ingredient of any identification system, were not always stable. Many nineteenth-century immigrants to the USA and Canada, for instance, had no permanent surnames on arrival.²³ Earlier cases of identification marks related not so much to immigration as to indigent people whose impoverished circumstances obliged them to move in search of sustenance. Though, for example, there were early cases of internal passports in sixteenth-century England, where the poor or vagabonds had to wear badges, this system did not last or develop.²⁴

By the mid-twentieth century, citizenship – which involved registration but not necessarily a card carried on the person – had, as T.H. Marshall argued,²⁵ expanded to include not only legal and political rights but economic and social ones as well. Marshall’s studies of citizenship offer some important insights that still have a bearing on today’s world, globalization and neo-conservative restructuring notwithstanding.²⁶ One may query Marshall’s account of citizenship in its details, criticize it for paying insufficient attention to the role of possessive individualism,²⁷ or acknowledge its need for updating for twenty-first-century situations. But, importantly, he showed that the ways in which citizenship operated in Western Europe and North America were broadly beneficial. It incorporated populations within inclusive societies that institutionalized a variety of rights and duties. At the same time, while such processes appeared congenial to majority populations, the growth of citizenship was not in all ways even and fair, and indeed was contested periodically. And, of course, documentary identification is required for each kind of citizenship right to be exercised effectively.

Gérard Noiriel writes about the révolution identificatoire²⁸ that produced various cards and codes for state identification purposes in the nineteenth century. These may have had a positive effect on those qualifying straightforwardly as citizens of France, but the use of such markers is also bound to cut both ways: the embrace of the state includes some but excludes others. Noiriel’s analysis of the rise of the identity card in France and the treatment of foreigners based on certain methods of identification shows how social context and technology both play a role in producing a need for national identification. That such identification was at times used for discriminatory practices²⁹ already rings warning bells about today’s enhanced power – from biotechnology in particular – that could much more readily and profoundly produce discrimination, based on genetic and biological factors over which the individual has no control.

Such processes could be taken far further than they were in France. In the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Demanding Documents
• 2. Sorting Systems
• 3. Card Cartel
• 4. Stretched Screens
• 5. Body Badges
• 6. Cyber-Citizens
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index