Identity, privacy and technology: DNA fingerprints, identity cards, and CCTV HI 269 Week 5

Recap: from then to now 15 th -17 th c. increasing social, institutional, political concern about fixing identity in fluid populations, during times of population movement (eg wars of Reformation )and for official purposes; C. 15 th c. to present: emergence of the modern ‘administrative’ state, with its apparatus of taxation, written registrations, and defined rights and benefits for ‘belongers’ of various kinds; 18 th c. emergence of notions of citizenship and the state which presumed unique individual identity; Late 18 th -19 th c. rise of ideas of an embodied individuality, measurable through distinct physical quanta which offered multi-dimensional data.

Recap: from then to now 19 th c. Sciences of identity and identification Phrenology Craniology Anthropometry Anthropology Criminology So what are the 20 th and 21 st century sciences of Identity and identification?

Imposing Identity For travel (from 15 th c) For control and administration of civil status (e.g. citizenship status in revolutionary and republican France) For military or labour conscription (e.g. UK National Registration Act, 1915) For discrimination and criminalization

Selling identity Fear (eg of terrorism, ‘identity theft’ spies, etc) Exclusivity (e.g. as a marker of ‘belonging’ and [earned] entitlement) ‘parasitic vitality’ (identification as gatekeeper to benefits) Also: ‘data creep’ (active or passive circulation of identification data between collecting authority and other bodies)

Identity for all, but what kind? Luftwaffe Officer’s ID card Polish Worker’s ID card

Identity for all, but what kind?

Identification and national identity In Paris, every person arrested for any offence is at once subjected to the process of measurement and is sometimes photographed before being brought before any magistrate. It would not be consistent with English ideas to entrust to the police an arbitrary power of measuring or photographing every person arrested without authority …and without regard to the necessity for the purposes of justice of discovering his antecedents and character.’ Troup Committee, 1893 ‘No system of legal obligation and penalties…will induce and compel the population to take steps which from their point of view are difficult and complicated and the point … of which they cannot realise. This … has its cause deep down in the genius of the nation, the freedom of its private life from bureaucratic incursions, its unfamiliarity with and distaste for … “red tape” ’ ‘ Memorandum on the NR Scheme’, July 1, 1915

Identification and national identity ‘Such a system could only be successful when enforced as in Germany, by a rigorous and ubiquitous police system upon a nation accustomed to be regulated in all minor matters of life.’ ‘ Memorandum on the NR Scheme’, July 1, 1915

In other words, by a bureaucratic panopticon…

Panoptic Britain? Shetland Islands Council has more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department. The City of London [borough] has 619 cameras, but a population of only 9,000. This represents 68.7 cameras per 1,000 people. 3.2 Million cameras in the UK Circa 1 crime solved for every 1000 cameras in London

BBC News, ‘The Statistics of cctv’ 20 July 2009 (accessed 31/10/09 at

Points to consider in the seminar debate What are the dangers of using DNA as a primary form of identification? Compare and contrast DNA to other biometrics. What unintended consequences do we fear? Will our security – national or individual -- be increased by wider networks of surveillance, and larger databases of identification? And what happens when biometric identity and identification become commodities?

Websites exhibits/1920s/pages/citizenship2.asp exhibits/1920s/pages/citizenship2.asp