Promotional Information

This book examines the proliferation of surveillance technologies--such as facial recognition software and digital fingerprinting--that have come to pervade our everyday lives. Often developed as methods to ensure "national security," these technologies are also routinely employed to regulate our personal information, our work lives, what we buy, and how we live. Magnet considers why we continue to rely on these technologies despite their many technical failures, and focuses on the ways that the technologies reinforce distinctions of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and nationality. Magnet is an up-and-coming scholar in the relatively new interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies, and the book deals with timely issues in an accessible way and would be excellent for undergraduate teaching in a range of fields.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Imagining Biometric Security 1
1. Biometric Failure 19
2. I-Tech and the Beginnings of Biometrics 51
3. Criminalizing Poverty: Adding Biometrics to Welfare 69
4. Biometrics at the Border 91
5. Representing Biometrics 127
Conclusion. Biometric Failure and Beyond 149
Appendix 159
Notes 165
Bibliography 171
Index 199

About the Author

Shoshana Amielle Magnet is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Women’s Studies and the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. She is a co-editor (with Kelly Gates) of The New Media of Surveillance.

Reviews

"When Biometrics Fail is overwhelmingly persuasive, exhaustively researched, eloquently written, and full of mordant humour and bitter truth. Shoshana Amielle Magnet explains the history, science, and ideology of our contemporary biometric moment with great skill and insight. Everyone needs to read this book. An outstanding study of the informationalization of race, gender, and immigration." Lisa Nakamura, author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet "Impassioned, critical, and readable, When Biometrics Fail explores the underside of technologies that have been touted as a panacea for many of the discontents of post-9/11 society. Shoshana Amielle Magnet reveals the seldom-discussed impacts of these new technologies on people marginalized by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and disability, and she challenges the commonplace assumption that human bodies can be reduced to a string of numbers." Simon A. Cole, author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification "The widespread application of biometrics in areas with high stakes, such as crime prevention, social security, border control and asylum and migration management, makes this a non-trivial matter. Taking her [Magnet's] cue from science and technology studies' methods and theories, where definitions of "success" in connection with technological developments are long-standing topics of interest (what does it mean that a technology is claimed to be successful?; whose definition of 2success" is this, and whose perspectives does that exclude?), Magnet focuses on its counterpart, the issue of technological failure. In view of the fact that their often substandard performance seldom seems to play a role in government decisions on whether to opt for the large-scale implementations of biometrics (eg, the US-Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology system, or Europe's use of biometric passports), exposing whole populations to the consequences of their failure, these are timely questions." -Irma van der Ploeg, Times Higher Education, May 31st 2012