Biopolitics Biometrics And Border Security Notes

Biopolitics, Biometrics & Border Security

INTRODUCTION

In the aftermath of 9/11, attention has increasingly been paid to the ways in which (homeland) security has become reliant on new technologies of surveillance that are deployed, often covertly, on the ‘everyday’ level. Much of this discourse has arisen out of a Foucauldian concern for biopower and the management of populations.

WHAT IS BIOPOLITICS?

• In The History of Sexuality, Foucault [1978] discusses the emergence of a new technology of power during the mid-18^th century called ‘biopower’. At this time, new statistical/epidemiological methods pioneered by early demographers gave rise to new knowledge about birth rates, morbidity, life expectancy, marriages, burials, criminality, etc.

• ‘Life’ thus became a discrete, scientific and measurable factor that could be separated from the singularity of individual bodies/experience; and administered, optimized, controlled and governed at the level of populations – i.e. cohorts of biopolitical individuals.

• The ‘population’ – not the state, humans or the environment – is the referent object of analysis/security. Subsequently, it is dealt with ‘as a political problem, as a problem which is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem, and as a power’s problem’ [Foucault]

• Sovereignty is no longer constituted by the ability to ‘take life and let live’ (an individualizing politics of death or ‘thanatopolitics’), but the ability to ‘make live and let die’ (a massifying politics of life). This places the emphasis on regularizing – not disciplining – life by promoting positive enabling elements (e.g. circulation, flow and movement), and managing contingencies through statistical knowledge.

Circulation & the dispositif of security

• In this way, the modern problematic with which biopolitical security practices are concerned, ‘is no longer that of fixing and demarcating territory, but that of allowing circulation to take place… of eliminating its inherent dangers, sifting the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’, and maximizing the former while eliminating the latter’ [Foucault]

• Differentiating between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ flows requires sophisticated means for identifying probabilities, patterns/correlations and profiles.

• One example is the deployment of biometric surveillance technologies at borders to govern both the mobility and enclosure of bodies This has become a central feature of homeland security policy in the context of the ‘war on terror’.

BIOMETRICS, ALGORITHMIC SECURITY & BIG DATA SURVEILLANCE

• Rapid advancements in automated and digital interconnectivity have spawned new ways of imagining/practicing security.

• Of special interest is the advent of biometrics – i.e. the measurement of life – which refers to ‘the technology of measuring, analysing and processing digital representations of unique biological data’ such as fingerprints, eye retinas, facial patterns and hand geometry for purposes of identification, verification and access control.

• The allure of biometric technologies is its ability to automate the process of linking bodies to particular identities that may or may not be inclined towards ‘suspicious behaviour’.

• Here, biometrics relies on ‘dataveillance’ – the monitoring or ‘mining’ of personal data (e.g. financial transactions, online searches, patterns of travel) – in order to generate ‘data-driven algorithms’ that ‘connect the dots’ in unintelligible mass datasets, and predict the likelihood of threats on the basis of data anomalies.

• The reconfiguration of ‘otherness’ as anomaly

Aradau & Blanke claim that the production of anomalous dots, spikes and nodes offers a different vocabulary of otherness – ‘Rather than the enemy or the risky abnormal. The ‘other’ is algorithmically produced as anomaly’.

• As Bruce Braun suggests, ‘security’s principal answer to the problem of ‘unknown unknowns’ today is the speculative act of pre-emption, which takes as its target potential rather than actualized risks’. Dangerous signatures or patterns of life are assessed on their very potential to become dangerous.

China’s Social Credit System

• In 2014, the Chinese government proposed a ‘Social Credit System’ (SCS) that gives every citizen/enterprise a score of ‘trustworthiness’ based on various behavioural traits – e.g. spending habits, criminal records, online activity and opinions expressed on social media.

• Points are added for ‘positive’ actions like volunteering, donating blood or buying diapers (a sign of ‘responsible parenting’); and subtracted for ‘negative’ actions like jaywalking, tax evasion or neglecting to care for elderly parents.

• These scores are publicly available, and can affect one’s eligibility for certain jobs or welfare benefits; internet speed and one’s ability to book flights or send their children to certain schools.

• A national roll-out of the SCS will take place in 2020, with the goal of establishing a ‘sincerity...

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