File Photo: A U.S. soldier of the 101st Airborne Division takes picture of an Afghan man for identification during a house search with Afghan police in Mandozai, in Khost province, Afghanistan, Friday, April 18, 2008. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)


One of the first attempts to develop a systematic archive of fingerprints was in British India one year after the Sepoy Mutiny/Great Rebellion of 1857. William Herschel, a chief magistrate, began the practice of fingerprinting Indian pensioners on a whim, but soon he required that all contracts had to be signed with a fingerprint. Next, the technology was introduced in the identification of criminals in Indian jails. From there the technology rapidly metastasized and spread back to the metropole.

Of course, the taint which associated fingerprinting with incarceration acted as a restraint against the use of the technology among the general citizenry. However, after 9/11 the US government began to use fingerprinting and other biometric data on all foreigners entering the country. The technology was also quickly deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, initially to verify the identity of local hires at military bases. Digital scans of finger prints, irises, and voices were also made of all suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners taken to Guantanamo. Now the US military is assembling a database of all Iraqis and Afghans using biometrics (see propaganda video at the endo this blog post).

The logic today, as during the Raj, is informed by a pervasive fear of the duplicity of the oriental subject of the Empire (see Simon A. Cole, "Book Review: Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India. By Chandak Sengoopta," Technology and Culture 46.1 (2005) 252-253). For all the rhetoric of engaging the local Afghan culture through "tea drinking diplomacy," biometric data is the way the military is really getting to know the population.




File Photo: Pakistani border officials screen an Afghan traveller at Pakistani border post of Chaman at Pakistan- Afghanistan border, Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007. Pakistan opened its first biometrics system to screen travelers at a land border post with Afghanistan as a meassure to curtail cross-border movement of militia, an official said. (AP Photo/Shah Khalid)


With the exception of a few science fiction films (e.g. Gattaca, Minority Report), there has been almost no debate or even awareness about this issue inside the US, much less the occupied territories. As I have stated before, the overwhelming majority of Americans do not actually believe that those outside the Constitution have rights. Many are familiar with the idea of international human rights, but most do not actualize that concept in their politics except to the extent that those rights can be used to legitimate imperial aggression and occupation. Those beyond the law are objects of scorn or pity; they are treated like animals or children.

Fingerprinting, iris scanning, DNA sampling, and voice prints are a reflection of the American outlook toward non-citizens. As Foucault and Agamben warned, biometric data acquisition is a mechanism for the progressive animalization of the population (see Karla F.C. Holloway, "Editor's Afterword: Private Bodies/Public Texts," Literature and Medicine 26.1 (2007) 269-276). Moreover, the silence of the citizenry has allowed this technology to be recoded with the racial overtones it once promised to reveal to its early pioneers (see Simon A. Cole, "Twins, Twain, Galton and Gilman: Fingerprinting, Individualization, Brotherhood, and Race in Pudd’nhead Wilson," Configurations, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2007).

The reason why Americans ought to be concerned, even if they do not care about non-citizens, is rather obvious. The experiments conducted by the state on those outside the Constitution are eventually imposed on the citizenry at large. Iris and fingerprint scanning technology is already appearing at office complexes, grocery stores, automobiles, personal laptops in the US (Washington Post, 24 September 2002). Face scanning software is also being used to detect individuals in crowds. It is only a matter of time before authentication and identification technologies are sufficiently refined and combined so as to read biometric data from hundreds of yards (if not thousands of miles) away whether it be on a battlefield or a mall.

Thus as the exception becomes the rule...

"... it results, argues Agamben, not only in the appropriation of the legislative or judiciary power by the executive, the suspension of the constitution, and the extension and encroachment of the military's wartime authority into the civic sphere...." (Puspa Damai, "The Killing Machine of Exception: Sovereignty, Law, and Play in Agamben's State of Exception," CR: The New Centennial Review 5.3 (2005) 255-276).

It would be height of naïveté to believe that these developments can now be stopped or rolled back. A society which is already constituted through intensive surveillance by everything from cameras to credit cards will hardly resist en masse. The technology will be refined and the archive will grow. The saddest part is that most American citizens will view their subjugation to this technology and archive as a protection from identity theft and/or as an entitlement which increases security and efficiency at airports, the office, and even at home.




Source: US Forces Afghanistan

Labels: afghanistan, agamben, biopolitics, foucault, security