Biometric technologies as the production of knowledge of threats are indeed revealed in the actual operation of contemporary biometric borders. Louise Amoore (2006) analyses the introduction of biometric technologies in the context of U.S. border control under the US-VISIT programme, which was introduced in 2004 and implements biometric technologies to identify all foreign visitors upon their arrival.
Like Dillon and Bigo discussed above, Amoore (2006) also emphasises the crucial role that uncertainty plays in the War on Terror, and in the mechanism of the US- VISIT programme. She argues that governing mobilities through biometrics is not solely conducted through a traditional understanding of identification (i.e., a bi-polar verification between an individual data and a body). While the US-VISIT programme certainly engages with the traditional mode of identification such as checking foreign visitors against the watch list, its scope of identification is well beyond checking the
watch list. This is because, Amoore (2006: 339) argues, biometric identification under the US-VISIT programme is networked and connected to over twenty existing databases – including those of police authorities and others relating to health, financial, and travel records – in which individuals are categorised into degrees of riskiness. It is then the calculation of risks through multiple points of identification that enables a divide between legitimate and illegitimate mobilities rather than a pre- given division of legitimacy of mobilities that is simply applied to the process of verification. To borrow David Lyon’s words, biometric surveillance under the US- VISIT programme is more of social sorting than of verification: “To consider surveillance as social sorting is to focus on the social and economic categories and the computer codes by which personal data is organized with a view to influencing and managing people and populations. … Information itself can be the means of divisions” (Lyon 2003: 2).
Biometric identification is consequently better understood as a precautionary measure, in terms of preemption, which has been characterised as a core mechanism of politics in the War on Terror by a number of political and social scientists (Amoore and de Goede 2008; Aradau and van Munster 2007; 2008; de Goede 2008; Vaughan- Williams 2007). Brain Massumi vividly captures the logic of preemption in ‘Smoke of Future Fires’:
It is the question of how a sign as such dynamically determines a body to become, in actual experience. It is the question of how an abstract force can be materially determining. The question is the same for a non-existent present fire signed in error, and for the futurity of a fire yet to come. There is one difference, however. For the future-causal fire, there can be no error. It will always have been preemptively right. (Massumi 2010: 65)
By the ‘future-causal fire’, inverting a sequential relation from smoke to fire, Massumi (2010) depicts the politics of preemption in which acting in the future constitutes the present (see also Vaughan-Williams 2007: 188-9). Biometric borders are no exception to the logic of preemption: they not only fix and secure individual identities in a preemptive manner, but also its calculated threats could result in further preemptive consequences such as detention and deportation.
The calculation of risks and its preemptive identification under the US-VISIT programme are arguably distinct features from its predecessor, namely, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which was established on 11 September 2002. Like its successor, the NSEERS was one of the post-9/11 counterterrorism security measures in the United States that introduced the deployment of biometrics for its border control in order to detect and prevent risky aliens. Unlike the US-VISIT programme, however, the structure of the NSEERS was the system that exclusively targeted certain nationalities that deemed to be ‘risky’ prior to the network of calculation of risks. One of the NSEERS’s distinct features is that not all foreign visitors but certain nationalities such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria were automatically made subject to biometric registration (Hassan 2002; Epstein 2007). The feature was, quite unsurprisingly, criticised as racist (Hassan 2002); and its discriminatory nature, conflicting with human rights, was received by the U.S. Justice Department and subsequently introduced at the Senate (Human Rights Watch 2004). At the same time, it was also criticised not only for its racist function but also for its incomprehensiveness since it automatically removed other nationalities from being subject to biometric identification (Epstein 2007: 159). Whether it was solely due to the respect with the latter and/or with the former, the NSEERS was terminated in December 2003 and replaced by the US-VISIT
programme in which every foreign visitors are made subject to biometric identification.
The shift from the NSEERS and the US-VISIT programme can be understood in terms of two different modes of surveillance, which Michael Levi and David S. Wall (2004) differentiate in terms of reactive surveillance and proactive surveillance. The NSEERS can be understood as the instrument that is “reacting to events by the surveillance of suspect individuals within suspect groups that had been identified by traditional forms of intelligence gathering” (Levi and Wall 2004: 199-200). This is not to say that the NSEERS is similar to ‘traditional forms of intelligence gathering’ as such. Yet, it can still be understood as reactive surveillance in the sense that it targets a particular population prior to the operation of surveillance. The US-VISIT programme, by contrast, can be understood as proactive surveillance, which is a form of surveillance “of what effectively become suspect populations, using new technologies to identify ‘risky groups’ by their markedly different patterns of ‘suspect behaviour’” (Levi and Wall 2004: 200; see also Amoore 2006: 339).
Under its preemptive nature, the US-VISIT programme, moreover, monitors various kinds of data in which Amoore agues, ultimately the everyday life of individuals become subject to the calculation of risks. It blurs the conception of immigration control that is traditionally thought to be conducted at the moment of border crossing:
[T]he biometric border is the portable border par excellence, carried by mobile bodies at the very same time as it is deployed to divide bodies at international boundaries, airports, railway stations, on subways or city streets, in the office or the neighbourhood. (Amoore 2006: 338)
Drawing on Bigo’s (2001) conceptual application of the Möbius ribbon in the context of internal and external securities, Amoore (2006) argues that risky bodies are to be identified not simply outside of a country but also within countries.
Such indistinction of biometric border control is captured by Étienne Balibar’s earlier suggestion for the re-conceptualisation, or the relocation, of borders.13 He suggests:
[B]orders have changed place. Whereas traditionally, and in conformity with both their juridical definition and ‘cartographical’ representation as incorporated in national memory, they should be at the edge of the territory, marking the point where it ends, it seems that borders and the institutional practices corresponding to them have been transported into the middle of political space. (Balibar 2004: 109; see also Balibar 2011: 89)14
In the context of contemporary Europe, Balibar further illustrates the function of ‘security border’ in which borders operate as the production of the stranger as political enemy:
[I]ncreasingly it is the working of the border … which constitutes, or ‘produces’, the stranger/foreigner as a social type. … the status of borders determines the condition of the stranger/foreigner and the very meaning of ‘being foreign’, rather than the reverse. (Balibar 2009: 204)
If one analyses the politics of border at this level of subjectification, Kenichi Ohmae’s (1990) post-Cold War provocation of the ‘borderless world’ has an ironical consequence: the ‘borderless world’ is indeed manifested not because bordering
13 Balibar’s suggestion for the re-conceptualisation of borders has recently been taken up by Critical Border Studies (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009).
14 Here, Balibar (2004: 101-114) is not referring to biometric identification but identification in general, that is, the production of the subject in a similar manner to the biopolitical configuration of populations discussed above.
practices are disappearing but because the static geographical location of border is now highly blurred: bordering practices themselves are potentially borderless.
The mechanism of biometric borders such as the US-VISIT programme is then not just about the biopolitical border but also indicates a biopolitical production of collective subjectivity beyond the location of borders. Amoore argues:
As a manifestation of what Walters … calls the ‘biopolitical border’, biometric borders extend the governing of mobility into domains that regulate multiple aspects of daily life. Subject to biopower, the crossing of a physical territorial border is only one border crossing in a limitless series of journeys that traverse and inscribe the boundaries of safe/dangerous, civil/uncivil, legitimate travellers/illegal migrant. (Amoore 2006: 337-8)
In this sense, a core dimension of biopolitics appears to lie in the production, and its correlative governance, of populations rather than exclusively in the act of border crossing. What is at stake is the biopolitical, and biometric, act of drawing the boundaries of such as ‘safe/dangerous’ and ‘civil/uncivil’.
The concept of the biometric border aptly characterises the mechanism of contemporary border politics in which individuals are continuously monitored and calculated and in which governing populations – concerned with their health, wealth, and security – are enacted. In the meantime, however, despite its contribution and the proliferated problematisation of the contemporary biometric border, within the literature discussed above it is possible to point to the lack of an historical account for biopolitical and biometric inscription of boundaries. I suggest that the lack of an historical account is where the question of race and racism intervenes and where the scope of this thesis is initiated and makes its distinctive contributions to studies of the biopolitics of security through biometrics. The biometric act of drawing the
boundaries such as ‘safe/dangerous’ and ‘civil/uncivil’ has a much longer history, which can be traced back to nineteenth-century European racial sciences that had persistently attempted to calculate bodies and to articulate such boundaries in racial terms. In the next section, I will explore the European history of biometrics in which the idea of race operates in biopolitical terms. After the discussion on practices of biometric identification in the late nineteenth century, the section also critically examines extant analyses of race and racism in contemporary biometric identification.