The Social Life of Biometrics

George C Grinnell

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978809086
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Sciences générales de l'informatique

In The Social Life of Biometrics, biometrics is loosely defined as a discrete technology of identification that associates physical features with a legal identity. Author George Grinnell considers the social and cultural life of biometrics by examining what it is asked to do, imagined to do, and its intended and unintended effects. As a human-focused account of technology, the book contends that biometrics needs to be understood as a mode of thought that informs how we live and understand one another; it is not simply a neutral technology of identification. Placing our biometric present in historical and cultural perspective, The Social Life of Biometrics examines a range of human experiences of biometrics. It features individual stories from locations as diverse as Turkey, Canada, Qatar, Six Nations territory in New York State, Iraq, the skies above New York City, a university campus and Nairobi to give cultural accounts of identification and look at the ongoing legacies of our biometric ambitions. It ends by considering the ethics surrounding biometrics and human identity, migration, movement, strangers, borders, and the nature of the body and its coherence. How has biometric thought structured ideas about borders, race, covered faces, migration, territory, citizenship, and international responsibility? What might happen if identity was less defined by the question of "who's there?" and much more by the question "how do you live?"

1 • BIOMETRIC ENCOUNTERS

A commonsense concern with biometric technology is that it is invasive and violates a person’s right to privacy or that it might do so if data is stored improperly or stolen. I have little quarrel with this legitimate concern except to say that this should not be the primary or only concern one has with biometrics. The idea that biometrics may compromise an individual actually conceals a very different insight: many of the most powerful effects of biometric measures are social rather individual. As a practice of verifying identity, biometrics depends upon a set of assumptions that frame and produce a given understanding of reality, and these norms do not belong to or issue from any single individual. I refer to biometric thought, then, as a way to address all of the ways in which biometrics installs and reinforces a set of norms that regulate how identity is attached to the body and how human movement is controlled and understood.

Biometric thought sounds, perhaps, like the name given to a set of reflections upon the practice of biometrics. It suggests that there are activities that involve biometric technology and then that there are ways of thinking shaped by those practices. I want to challenge that linear order and suggest instead that biometric thought is what makes those activities possible, even as this way of organizing and representing reality is in turn shaped by those practices. Key to this perspective is the idea that biometric thought is not a settled and fixed manner of representing reality but an ongoing way of mediating social life and ensuring it makes sense in particular ways. Biometric thought is what makes possible the ways in which one interacts with biometrics and how biometrics interacts with a given population, shaping how one thinks about security, national borders, the physical borders of bodies, the movement of people across the globe, identity as something that is definitively one’s own, surveillance and observation, and how one documents oneself and others. This is not to say that biometric thought is the only social discourse that affects how one encounters these matters, but it has become what Michel Foucault once identified in another context as “an especially dense transfer point in relations of power” (History 103). Biometric thought collects and weaves together a number of distinct concepts and areas of social life and intensifies them by directing them toward operations of biometric authentication and its associated power to regulate identity.

In order to contemplate this broader understanding of biometrics, this chapter presents a series of human encounters with biometric technology and biometric thought. The instances I discuss here capture a range of biometric technologies, from passports to face reading and from DNA to fingerprint scanning. The premise underlying this chapter is that biometrics is not a single force that affects everyone in the same way. Because it draws upon and mediates a wide range of knowledge and regulatory ambitions regarding how individuals exist and what one can know about oneself and others, biometric thought must be situated in the particular instances in which individuals encounter or navigate some sort of expectation of identification, sometimes supported by the force of a law but also often supported by normative social expectations. To the extent that biometric thought conditions a social concept of identity and makes it legible as such, there is always more at stake in biometric procedures than the direct process of confirmation that technical manuals of biometrics refer to as one-to-one matching (confirming the identity asserted by an individual) or one to many (identifying a present stranger). Biometric thought is rooted in such acts but it also produces and reflects a number of social presumptions, reinforcing them or presenting them as if they are natural and commonsense conclusions while ignoring alternatives that are made less imaginable by its operations. What does it mean to live in the midst of such circumstances?

SID HILL

“I’m a citizen of the six nation Haudenosaunee, commonly known as the Iroquois confederacy, one of the original peoples of what is called North and South America. We travel the world on our own passports, embracing the full rights extended by the rules of international law and diplomacy. Too often, our passports are denied by the very countries that took our land. They call them ‘fantasy documents,’ but they are not” (Hill). So writes Sid Hill, the Tadodaho, or traditional leader, of the Onondaga Nation, in The Guardian in October 2015. He recounts an instance in which he was prevented from traveling home from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and Defense of Life in La Paz, Bolivia, because the plane would transit through Lima, and Peru refused to recognize his Haudenosaunee passport, possibly at the behest of the Canadian government:

This is not the first time we have encountered such problems. The best-known incident happened in 2010, when Great Britain refused to allow the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team to travel to the World Lacrosse Championships in Manchester on Haudenosaunee passports.

Back then, when the British asked the Americans if they would let us return after the tournament, the Americans were in a bind. Saying yes would officially recognize our passports. And it was absurd to say no, since this issue began when the Europeans arrived five centuries ago and seized our lands in the first place.

So the Americans said nothing, leading to a days-long standoff before then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, a former New York senator, granted a one-time waiver. That was still not enough for the British, so we were barred from the championship of a game we invented and which is central to our culture. (Hill)

Hill’s account highlights a great deal about the work of passports, one of the most commonplace devices of biometric identification. His experience suggests that for him, traveling on a passport and confirming his identity is not a simple procedure but one that involves forms of historical memory and conflicts over who can recognize the legitimacy of documented existence. When nations refuse to recognize Haudenosaunee passports, it reiterates the dispossession of the Onondaga Nation. Identification, in this context, is the name given to a relation of power and the legacies of colonialism that have invalidated the authority of the Haudenosaunee to govern themselves as a nation and a people. If biometric identification involves verifying official data, who has the power to create that data and what sorts of records are deemed legitimate matters a great deal. The effects of biometric inspection are not limited to comparing pictures to faces and checking travel itineraries. It involves histories of conflict and dispossession as well as conflicts over sovereignty, and its operations may perpetuate colonialism by continuing to forget that history.

What it means to verify and record information associated with identity can entail a great deal more than inspecting a person, then, in both its aims and its effects. At borders, identification may involve not seeing or refusing to see as much as anything else. As Hill notes, these measures constitute a larger refusal to see and respect the Haudenosaunee as a people. The immediate disrespect the Haudenosaunee face at the border is a symptom of a larger refusal to acknowledge their legitimacy as a people. The lived “inconveniences” of the failure to recognize national passports are minor, he notes, “compared to centuries of struggle to maintain our standing among nations of the world.”

This scenario also reminds us that passports can have important nation-building effects. Hill writes,

Maintaining our sovereignty demands that we use our own passport. This is why we stamped the passports of visiting nations—including US Americans and the British—in September when the World Indoor Lacrosse Championships was held for the first time on Haudenosaunee land: to underscore that this has always been and remains our land.

We do not have the option of simply accepting American or Canadian passports. We are citizens of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, as we have been for millennia before the Europeans’ arrival.

That is not negotiable. (Hill)

If biometric procedures tend to isolate individuals and treat them as mobile units capable of moving about the globe, Hill finds that this perception depends upon a mistaken assumption that territory and sovereignty always align perfectly. Before individuals are ever represented by their faces in passports, biometric thought works to erase the land and insist that each one of us exists equally and can in the same way be represented as citizens of a nation. Losing this context means violently forgetting the history of colonialism and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s existence as a nation. Asserting the right to document its citizens, as Hill does, can mean challenging such forces of erasure by refusing to ground identity in a deliberate act of forgetting.

HARUN AL-RASHID

Biometric thought promises to reveal. It confirms identity and establishes trust on that basis. Concerns surrounding national security have cemented assumptions that transparency and openness are the foundations of moral honesty and civic life, particularly in the West, just as they establish that concealment and dissimulation are causes for concern. Curiously, this view is contradicted regularly within popular culture: unnoticed random acts of kindness, hactivists such as Anonymous, and fantasies about masked superheroes whose social value is indexed to their anonymity. There is a powerful cultural undertow drawing attention to the possibility that if openness is desirable, it does not follow that the opposite is true. This has long been the case. The Bible tells of numerous figures who assume disguises for instructive ends, including the well-known call to hospitality: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Heb. 13.2).

Harun al-Rashid, the eighth-century caliph of Baghdad who is known to English readers as a hero of Richard Burton’s Victorian-era translation of One Thousand and One Nights, walked incognito as a beggar among his subjects. Like many historical figures who have entered popular culture, this version of Harun likely bears little resemblance to the actual person. But that in itself is instructive. What is it that is so appealing in the figure of a leader who mixes unseen among his people? As every politician knows, such representations humanize individuals. And what a curious admission this is: that being human is the effect of performances that in some way humanize oneself, which is to say one performs a norm of what it means to be human. That one must act in a way that appears human might sound odd, but there is a long history of doing so. For Harun, just as it is for so many others, becoming human is a process of putting on a mask that can be recognized by others. Biometric culture tends to evoke the opposite: we must strip back all the layers of how one might present oneself to arrive at an essence. But perhaps the very idea of an essence is yet another mask, especially if it is one that relies on others to discover the truth beneath the surface.

In the novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1981), Italo Calvino writes a provocative opening, and nothing more, to a story that might have taken place alongside One Thousand and One Nights:

The Caliph Harun-al-Rashid … one night, in the grip of insomnia, disguises himself as a merchant and goes out into the streets of Baghdad. A boat carries him along the waters of the Tigris to the gate of a garden. At the edge of a pool a maiden beautiful as the moon is singing, accompanying herself on the lute. A slave girl admits Harun to the palace and makes him put on a saffron-colored cloak. The maiden who was singing in the garden is seated on a silver chair. On cushions around her are seated seven men wrapped in saffron-colored cloaks. “Only you were missing,” the maiden says, “you are late”; and she invites him to sit on a cushion at her side. “Noble sirs, you have sworn to obey me blindly, and now the moment has come to put you to the test.” And from around her throat the maiden takes a pearl necklace. “This necklace has seven white pearls and one black pearl. Now I will break its string and drop the pearls into an onyx cup. He who draws, by lot, the black pearl must kill the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid and bring me his head. As a reward I will give myself to him. But if he should refuse to kill the Caliph, he will be killed by the other seven, who will repeat the drawing of lots for the black pearl.” With a shudder Harun-al-Rashid opens his hand, sees the black pearl, and speaks to the maiden. “I will obey the command of fate and yours, on condition that you will tell me what offense of the Caliph has provoked your hatred,” he asks, anxious to hear the story. (257–258)

Told with the logic of a dream in which individuals and structures seem to unfold before Harun as he moves through the scene, this is a tale about stories and how they structure a life. Harun does not know what offense he has committed. Assuming he is not simply inattentive and unaware of how his reign affects his subjects, this points to the possibility that Harun’s identity is not so firmly attached to his body, such that some attribute to him actions he would not claim or understand himself to be responsible for. This same insight is repeated by the misrecognition that leads Harun to be invited to sit with this group in the first place. In neither instance is his knowledge of himself authoritative or sufficient. The narrative demonstrates the extent to which identity is outside of oneself, in the hands of others, and beyond one’s control.

It also describes the sense that official identity may emerge out of narrative conventions or what Groebner calls the “aspects of fiction … inherent in systems that endeavored … to record real historical beings on paper” (219). The actual Harun al-Rashid likely did none of the things attributed to his many fictional portraits, and this mode of telling a story may not be so different from what official records of identity do when they select some details as relevant in order to track who one really is in the world. And it is on this basis that the threat of the black pearl is so disturbing: knowing that others will act on the basis of a fiction and possibly forget that it is an invented or partial account of who one is.

Disguise can mean a great many things. It has come to be seen as that which biometrics alone can overcome. But biometric identification is a way of telling stories about a person that, however true they might be, may not align with other modes of identification. It may veil as much as it unveils. It may even function as a black pearl that instructs others to act on the limited knowledge it records. Perhaps what the example of Harun demonstrates best is that disguise is always a question of who has the power to identify what is and is not a disguise. What openness means and what concealment suggests are far from settled matters, but discussions of biometrics frequently make it seem as if they are.

ELIZABETH CRAVEN

In 1789, Lady Elizabeth Craven published her travel narrative, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople. Presented as a series of letters, it records her travels eastward beginning in France and culminating in the Ottoman Empire. A recently divorced aristocrat, Craven was a notorious celebrity, and her narrative celebrates her newly found independence from her husband, from whom she separated after both had very public affairs. Much of Craven’s account of Turkey at the end of the eighteenth century involves forms of sociality mediated by the intercession of the veil, an object of curiosity, desire, and intense fascination in the book. The reasons for this are several, not the least of which is the promise of freedom that such an article of clothing might provide an English woman whose movements had become the subject of public gossip.

It might seem strange to reach so far into the past in a book concerned with biometrics, but part of my argument is that biometrics draws upon existing cultural assumptions about visibility and transparency, alongside how such concepts mediate identity. In short, biometrics has a history, and Craven’s interest in veiled faces reveals some of the complicated assumptions that lie at the core of this history.

Animated by what Filiz Turhan identifies generally as the “desire and disdain” common to British representations of this region (41), Craven’s narrative is an early expression of preoccupations with the East that coincide with Britain establishing its empire in the region. Writing about the Orient was largely a mode of hallucinating Middle Eastern and Indian cultures, and eventually Pacific Rim cultures, for the British imagination. I say hallucinating because such writing did not describe the Orient as it was, but instead offered what Edward Said has called Orientalism, a mode of seeing what one chooses to see there. While the Orient and the Occident are academic terms for an empirical reality, Orientalism refers to the widespread social and cultural project that invented a reality it claimed to represent. It was a way of speaking about the Orient, “authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism [was] a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3). My attention to biometric thought is inspired by Said’s recognition of the ways in which regimes of truth that frame reality are the product of a range of social modes of knowing and ways of acting on that knowledge.

Craven exemplifies early expressions of prejudicial recognitions of the nature of life in the Middle East that have not yet ended in the West. Thus, it is not surprising that...