Doctoral Dissertation: From Documents to Data: The Politics of National Biometric Identification Systems in the 21st Century

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project will use historical and ethnographic methods to examine how national biometric identification programs are politically rationalized, technologically designed, and publicly contested in two distinct contexts: the United Kingdom, where such a program was legislated in 2006 and then cancelled in 2010, and Israel, where one was legislated in 2009 and implemented in 2017. Both the UK's and Israel's programs entailed the creation of compulsory national biometric ID cards and databases for their own citizens. The dissertation project conceptualizes biometric data as simultaneously biological and digital sites of individual and national identity construction, and it explores how national biometric identification programs create new forms of states, citizens, and the relationships between them. The results of this project will speak to the social, political, and ethical stakes of creating technological infrastructures of personal information collection. It may serve as a useful resource for future deliberations about whether, and how, personal data should be collected and stored; in addition, it will expand conceptualizations of surveillance to include a plurality of government motivations, public concerns, and social implications. This project uses national biometric identification as a lens for probing the politics of technology, surveillance, and identity in the UK and Israel; it will explore how and why biometric identification did (or did not) become these states' preferred technique for verifying the identities of their citizens. The results of this research will contribute to STS literature on the relationship between technology and identity, the co-production of technology and forms of governance, and the relationship between the politics of technology and national politics. A key conceptual innovation of the project is its introduction and elaboration of a new concept, the "biometricization of identity," which concerns the ways that people contend with the placement of the locus of individual identity onto digital, numerical representations of the human body. The project will make use of this new concept as a window for exploring a second theme, the technological and political development of the "biometric state," by drawing on a key STS insight, that the ways people relate technologies to themselves also shape the ways technologies are governed. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.