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

这个博士论文研究项目将使用历史和人种学方法来研究国家生物识别计划如何在政治上合理化，技术设计，并在两个不同的背景下公开质疑：英国，这样的计划在2006年立法，然后在2010年取消，以色列，其中一个在2009年立法，并在2017年实施。英国和以色列的计划都需要为本国公民创建强制性的国家生物识别身份证和数据库。该论文项目将生物特征数据概念化为个人和国家身份建设的生物和数字网站，并探讨了国家生物特征识别计划如何创建新形式的国家，公民以及它们之间的关系。该项目的结果将说明创建个人信息收集技术基础设施的社会，政治和道德风险。它可以作为一个有用的资源，为未来的审议是否，以及如何，个人数据应该被收集和存储;此外，它将扩大概念化的监视，包括政府的动机，公众的关注，和社会的影响。这个项目使用国家生物识别作为一个透镜，探讨政治的技术，监视，并在英国和以色列的身份;本报告将探讨生物特征识别技术如何以及为何成为这些国家首选的核实公民身份的技术。本研究的结果将有助于STS文献的技术和身份之间的关系，技术和治理形式的共同生产，以及技术的政治和国家政治之间的关系。该项目的一个关键概念创新是引入和阐述了一个新的概念，即“身份的生物特征化”，这涉及到人们如何应对将个人身份的轨迹置于人体的数字和数字表示上。该项目将利用这一新概念作为探索第二个主题的窗口，通过借鉴关键的STS见解，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的评估来支持。影响审查标准。

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.