There is a rapid increase in the number of scholarly investigations on the relations between security and biometrics, and between security and surveillance more broadly, since 9/11 and in the context of the War on Terror. However, the deployment of biometrics for immigration control was already operational prior to 9/11, and cannot be reduced to a post-9/11 counterterrorism measure. In Europe, for example, it emerged as the control of migrants from non-European countries who are sometimes dubbed as ‘Third Country Nationals’ (TCN): it emerged as what may be called ‘the securitisation of migration’ (Bigo 2002; Huysmans 1995; 2006; Wæver et al. 1993).8 For example, as Irma van der Ploeg (1999) noted, the debate on the introduction of fingerprinting for the regulation of asylum seekers in Europe – the system that is today known as the ‘Eurodac’ (which stands for European Dactyloscopy) – had already emerged in the 1990s, namely, under the Dublin Convention (also known as the Dublin Regulation).
The Dublin Convention, which was initially signed in 1990, is a European measure to control asylum seekers by legally determining the responsibility of the member states of the European Union. Under this measure, the first member state where asylum seekers arrive will be responsible for their application (van der Ploeg 1999: 298). Establishing this responsibility, the aim of the Dublin Convention is to
8 My use of the term ‘securitisation of migration’ here is only to note the articulation of migration as a security issue in general, not ‘securitisation’ as a theoretical approach of the Copenhagen School, who nevertheless contributes to earlier studies of migration in terms of security (Wæver et al. 1993). In particular, I do not agree with particular theoretical formulations of the School including their emphasis on the ‘speech act’, their conceptual division between ‘kinds’ of security – for example, between societal security and political security – and their conceptual division between ‘politicisation’ and ‘securitisation’ (Buzan et al. 1998). With regard to the former, too much emphasis on the speech act neglects, for example, the role of technologies including biometrics (which I will discuss in the following). With regard to the latter, following the poststructuralist approaches to security that I discussed in the previous section, the idea of security is already constitutive of the political condition of subjectivity. For a succinct overview of the securitisation theory, as well as its critiques, see Columba Peoples and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2010: chapter 5).
prevent refugees moving from the initial country of entry to another as well as multiple application at the member states by a single applicant. In order to monitor asylum seekers’ applications and movements within the European Union, digitised fingerprinting with a centralised database was introduced under the 1997 Draft Convention on the establishment of the Eurodac System for the comparison of fingerprints of asylum seekers (van der Ploeg 1999: 298).
Van der Ploeg’s analysis of the Eurodac project is noteworthy not only because she indicates the operation of biometric control prior to 9/11.9 She also makes important conceptual points for the analysis of the politics of biometrics. She suggests that the political question on biometric identification is not so much about ‘privacy’, which is generally thought to be a main issue for the use of biometrics and more broadly surveillance technologies. For example, the issue of privacy has been identified in the context of Japan (see also the fourth section in this chapter), where, as in the case of Western countries, various digitised surveillance technologies have been introduced in recent years, and where the relative lack of privacy law has been pointed out (Abe 2004; Wood et al. 2007). Privacy, a right to control one’s own information, as well as human rights more broadly, are important with respect to concerns about the abuse of individual information by the government, commercial industry, and other third parties, as well as the potential leak of sensitive information. As Toshimaru Ogura argues, “individuals should have the right to control data about them that is held by others … As long as the data belong to others … it is unavoidable to be jeopardized by leaks, manipulation, unjust usage and so on” (Ogura 2006:
9 The Eurodac, whose development was already seen in the 1990s, eventually became operational in 2003 (Broeders 2007: 82).
283).10 While acknowledging the importance of privacy, van der Ploeg (1999), however, emphasises that the issue of biometric identification such as the Eurodac system is not merely a technology of verification, discerning individual information; it is not just to verify the true identity of asylum seekers such as if they are telling truth with regard to their record of asylum application.
Instead, van der Ploeg suggests that identification under the Eurodac may be better understood as a political act in which their identity is constituted. She states, “rather than determining any preexisting identity, these practices may be better understood as ways to establish identity, in the sense that ‘identity’ becomes that which results from these efforts” (van der Ploeg 1999: 300). For her, the identity of ‘illegal migrants’ as such does not exist prior to its very identification process; they are not to be identified by the Eurodac system but the system itself makes such identity possible. In this sense, van der Ploeg (1999) argues that biometric identification becomes the technology of marking illegality rather than identifying illegal migrants (see also van der Ploeg 2003).
Moreover, the emphasis on the process of identification, rather than identity, in the operation of biometric control is important not just in terms of legality that van der Ploeg emphasises. It is more broadly the question of the politics of security in which biometric technologies do not simply identify a dangerous individual but ‘marks’ or constitutes the idea of danger and a dangerous body. Dillon (2003) captures this by the term ‘becoming-dangerous’, which emphasises the process of (in)securitisation, thereby opposing to a static and fixed conception of ‘being-dangerous’, in the context of the War on Terror (see also Dillon 2007a).
10 Ogura (2006) is nevertheless critical of the ‘privacy’ approach to surveillance, and emphasises more on the right to own information and that of anonymity. However, none of these seems similar to the important point made by van der Ploeg on identity and identification discussed here.
As demonstrated above, the deployment of biometric technologies was already under way prior to 9/11. Nevertheless, the deployment of biometric technologies for the pursuit of state security seems to have proliferated in the post-9/11 era notably in North America and Europe. Dillon (2003), for example, looks at an early debate on the introduction of biometrics in the United States as a counterterrorism measure that is found in a report to the Congress in 2003 on a programme initially entitled the Total Information Awareness (TIA) – soon renamed as the Terrorism Information Awareness programme – that was established by the US Information Awareness Office. The aim of the TIA is, the report states, “to integrate information technologies into a prototype to provide tools to better detect, identify and classify potential foreign terrorists” (cited in Dillon 2003: 552).
While the TIA programme itself was short-lived and suspended by the Congress in the same year, Dillon’s interpretation of the impact of biometric identification as a security measure is worth paying close attention to here. Dillon articulates biometric identification introduced under the TIA programme in terms of a broader political architecture of the War on Terror in which the object of security became ‘uncertainty’: “‘uncertainty’ said … to be the enemy that replaced the Soviet Union with the dissolution of the Cold War and whose manifestation now takes many other forms in the War on Terror” (Dillon 2003: 533). Under the politics of uncertainty, the notion of danger becomes virtual in which the field of security has also transformed:
[Under] the virtual danger of ‘terror’, nothing and nowhere is strategically marginal. Everything and everywhere becomes potentially critical. The War on Terror … exemplifies the point. The field of possibility for politically and epistemically authorising what is significantly dangerous where, when, and how has thus been transformed. It now traverses the potential for everything
and anything to become dangerous, as nothing in the digital age consists of fixed properties – benign or malign – independent of the information systems in which they are produced and reproduced, or in which, autopoetically, they reproduce themselves. (Dillon 2003: 541)11
The introduction of biometric identification under the TIA programme is an exemplar of this logic of virtual security. This is not to say that, as I will discuss shortly, there is no dangerous elements to be identified. At the same time, virtual security politics are not reducible to the identification of dangerous elements either. What Dillon (2003: 554) emphasises here is that what may be regarded as dangerous is embedded within the operation of biometric technologies themselves, within the process of biometric identification. Confronting uncertainty, dangerous bodies are, therefore, formed by and in information, which Dillon (2003) characterises as ‘bodies-in-formation’ (see also Dillon and Reid 2001).12
Similarly, Didier Bigo (2002) emphasises the importance of the inverse relation between the securitisation of immigration and its technologies of management. In his article, Bigo (2002) is particularly critical of the securitisation theory of the Copenhagen School that, drawing on the speech act theory of John L. Austin, emphasises the role of speech in security studies (Buzan et al. 1998; Wæver et al. 1993). For Bigo, while the Copenhagen School contributed to the earlier articulation of migration as a security issue, thus widening the scope of security studies beyond the traditional conception of security in military and interstate terms, they did not comprehend the importance of routines and everyday practices of securitisation (Bigo 2002: 73). This is because of the conceptual divide that they make between the
11 The theme of virtual security is also elaborated by Vaughan-Williams in the context of the United Kingdom (Vaughan-Williams 2010).
12 The inextricable relation between bodies and information under biometrics was also captured by van der Ploeg (1999; 2003).
nonpoliticised, the politicised, and the securitised realms: “‘Security’ is the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics” (Buzan et al. 1998: 23, emphasis added).
In the framework of the securitisation theory of the Copenhagen School, therefore, everyday technological practices of identification themselves are not considered to be practices of securitisation – if not practices of politicisation at large (see Edkins 1999: 11) – but only exceptional claims that presents migration as an existential threat are taken into account. Consequently, technologies are understood simply as a means to develop the management of whatever is presented as a threat. Biometric technologies are thus understood as a means of managing and identifying illegal and/or risky immigrants. Contrary to this approach, Bigo argues that in the context of the management of uncertain dangers, or more generally the management of fear or unease, this technological relation of a-means-to-an-end needs to be reversed:
Securitization of immigration is the result and not the cause of the development of technologies of control and surveillance. It is linked to computerization, risk profiling, visa policy, the remote control of borders, the creation of international or nonterritorial zones in airports, and so on. (Bigo 2002: 73)
Under this inverse relation between security technologies and referent objects, therefore, biometrics are not just something to be developed, or indeed that has been developed, in order to manage threats that are discursively articulated. Rather, biometrics are now understood as something that makes the very securitisation of immigration possible.
From the points of van der Ploeg, Dillon and Bigo above, therefore, what matters is the technological production of knowledge of individuals. From these perspectives,
biometric identification can be understood as a combination of two forms of the seizure of power that Foucault theorised (see Introduction). Both disciplinary power and biopower are operational in multiple ways. For example, biometric identification does not only take place on literally individual bodies, at an anatomical level, but it also functions as a surveillant technology to control individual bodies such as immigrant bodies (see also Epstein 2007; Pugliese 2010: 7-10). At the same time, the disciplinary power of biometric knowledge is also correlative to a biopolitical configuration of a population and to a biopolitical incentive of fostering its security. As the authors above suggest, biometric identification for immigration control is not just a technology of verification and surveillance of bodies, but, perhaps more crucially, it enables drawing the boundaries at the level of population, demarcating between a risky population and a healthy population, under the biopolitics of security.