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项目是如何在两个不同的背景下进行政治合理化、技术设计和公开竞争的：英国，这样的项目在2006年立法，然后在2010年被取消；以色列，一个在2009年立法，2017年实施。英国和以色列的计划都要求为本国公民创建强制性的国家生物识别身份证和数据库。论文项目将生物特征数据概念化为构建个人和国家身份的同时的生物和数字站点，并探索国家生物特征识别计划如何创建新的国家、公民形式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、政治和伦理利害关系。它可以作为未来讨论是否以及如何收集和存储个人数据的有用资源；此外，它还将扩展监控的概念化，以包括多种政府动机、公共关切和社会影响。该项目使用国家生物识别作为镜头，探索英国和以色列的技术、监控和身份政治；它将探索生物识别如何以及为什么成为(或没有)成为这些国家验证公民身份的首选技术。这项研究的结果将有助于STS关于技术和身份之间的关系，技术的联合生产和治理形式，以及技术政治和国家政治之间的关系的文献。该项目的一个关键的概念创新是它引入和阐述了一个新的概念，即身份的生物识别，它涉及人们如何应对将个人身份的轨迹放置在人体的数字数字表示上的方式。该项目将利用这一新概念作为一个窗口，通过利用STS的一个关键洞察力，探索第二个主题，即“生物识别国家”的技术和政治发展，即人们将技术与自己联系起来的方式也塑造了技术被管理的方式。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.