Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press.
National ID Cards: Crime-Control, Citizenship and Social Sorting
* Queen's Research Chair and Professor of Sociology at Queen's University, Canada, where he also directs the Surveillance Project. He holds a Killam Research Fellowship from the Canada Council (2008–2010). E-mail: lyond{at}post.queensu.ca
New ID card systems are appearing in countries around the world, based on biometrics and using searchable databases. High technology companies promote these, governments seek them for administrative efficiency and post-9/11 demands for ‘security’ provide a rationale for their introduction. The surveillance issue is not so much the cards themselves but the national registries that provide for processing the personal data. These foster a ‘culture of control’ whose reach expands geographically as identification measures are harmonized and integrated across national borders. They also encourage less inclusive notions of citizenship, and facilitate the sorting of ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ mobilities, based on the criteria of ‘identity management’. The social sorting capacities of new IDs are underplayed, as are the implications for governance of ‘multiple function’ ID systems, with consequences for social justice.
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Identifying citizens is a key theme of twenty-first century life. Indeed, new identification systems—including national ID cards—may turn out to be the single most significant development of information systems for governance, globally. Of course, the very advent of modern forms of citizenship assumes identification (Abercrombie et al. 1986, Caplan and Torpey 2001, Jenkins 2004). In modern times, bureaucratic administration demands that each person be identified to ensure that they are entitled to call themselves citizens. Without identification one can neither take on responsibilities, such as voting, nor enjoy the benefits, such as protection from external or internal threats to well-being. But in the twenty-first century identification processes are changing shape in radical ways that take them far beyond what might have been experienced even towards the end of the twentieth century.
The most visible symbol of this is new plastic national ID cards with a photo and an embedded chip. They are appearing in locations as diverse as Italy (the ‘Carta d'Identit Elettronica’ or CIE), Japan (the ‘Juki-net’ card) or Malaysia (called ‘Mykad’). Much controversy has surrounded the development of these cards in several countries around the world—the UK, the USA, Australia, Japan, Korea to name a few. But the controversy seldom gets to the heart of the changes occurring, largely because it tends to focus on the cards themselves and on issues such as the likelihood of random police demands for their presentation. While such demands, where they occur, are indeed disturbing from a civil liberties viewpoint, new ID card systems are dependent on electronic infrastructures and in particular on national registries. This is where the real surveillance power lies, to discriminate between different categories and groups, for differential treatment.
In addition to this shift towards linking national identity to an electronic registry database, several other changes are also taking place. One is that at a very intimate level, the means of identification is sought in unique body characteristics. Biometrics is increasingly providing the tools for what is claimed to be accurate identification and verification. Secondly, at the level of databases, not only government departments but also other agencies are involved in the production of ID cards. In most cases, they are multi-purpose cards, which pulls corporate and other entities into the picture. Thirdly, at the international level, global—or at least regional—standards of interoperability are sought so that identifications work across national borders as well as within them.
ID cards serve to associate data with a particular person. They enable access to data held in files (the registry) and they are modified by new data coming in from transactions and interactions. The card facilitates interactions between the organization and the individual, and the relation is checked using either a PIN or some bodily feature, using biometrics (Clarke 1997). Biometrics is now basic to new IDs and is used for identification and verification and the key rationale for their use is that while PINs and passwords may be forgotten or lost, the body itself offers some consistent and ever-present means for identification. Software recognizes the pattern of the fingerprint, hand-print, iris or face so that it may be shown that persons are who they say they are (verification) or that their record is in the database (identification) (Zureik and Hindle 2004).
In what follows three aspects of the current state of new IDs are discussed. One, new IDs raise acute questions of what are the real drivers behind the cards (and the consequences of multiple pressures). Rationales differ from country to country and also from time to time but no over-riding rationale is evident. Two, new IDs pose the question of who counts as a citizen and how people get classified, particularly under new regimes of registry databases and biometric software checking systems. Three, new IDs challenge all citizens to consider whether and how social justice can be achieved by opposing or controlling the development of ID cards. The context of risk and safety, especially but not exclusively in the context of ‘terrorist’ threats, makes this an urgent task, especially when ‘social justice’—as civil liberties and human rights—is often seen as less significant than ‘(inter)national security.’
The social shaping of new IDs
The advent of new IDs is not merely a matter of superior technologies being found to improve the efficiency of government administration. New IDs are proposed and promoted for a number of specific reasons, though these differ by context and time. The reasons may be combined or prioritized in various ways, as well. Post-9/11 demands for security certainly helped to place new IDs firmly on some national agendas in the global north, but the notion of introducing such IDs is also generated, variously, by administrative momentum and a quest for greater efficiency through ‘e-government;’ desires among both industry and government to promote high technology ‘solutions;’ fiscal concerns producing policies to eradicate fraudulent use of government services such as health and welfare; pressures to find ways of handling immigration problems in an increasingly (labor) mobile world; and worries about identity theft in the context of growing electronic commerce. In the UK, for example, the Association of Chief Police Officers supported the development of the national ID card. Other groups, such as Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, warn about unnecessary expansion of police powers using national ID cards.1
To show how varied are the rationales, one has only to survey the various countries proposing or implementing ID card systems. While the timing of the UK ID card and the US Real ID system were clearly prompted by the tightened security demands following 9/11, the former has subsequently downplayed national security as a key aim. However in the case of the Philippines, the anti-terrorism justification comes first. In March 2005 President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo announced a national ID system to combat the threat of Abu Sayaf militants involved in recent bombings.2
Alongside the US arguments that Real ID will help combat terrorism, a parallel argument is that ID cards will help frustrate illegal immigration (there are some discussions in the ongoing immigration debate in the USA about issuing a machine-readable Social Security ID card to distinguish between ‘citizen’ and ‘guest’ workers). For Hong Kong, however, the anti-immigration rationale is the strongest, to try to prevent illegal entry from mainland China. Since June 2003, when the program began, Hong Kong has been rolling out a smart ID with embedded data including two thumbprints to all residents aged 11 and over.
In Japan, the Juki-net system, established in 2002, provides a national registry of citizens, and the card was issued to provide registered people with their copy of the basic details of personal information (name, date of birth, gender, address) stored in the registry. In principle, this was an efficiency/convenience type of rationale, although opponents argue that the very existence of the registry and card have a chilling effect and, for some, that it is unconstitutional because it offers no ‘opt-out’ clause.3 Many argue that the e-Government argument for national IDs may in fact be the strongest.
In the British case, a number of rationales have been offered, including anti-terrorism. However, as the debate progressed the emphasis shifted and greater weight was placed on illegal immigration and working, and also identity theft an argument that was aired publicly from 2002.4 In addition, reducing benefit fraud and the abuse of public services feature among the reasons for implementation. Unique to the UK is the argument that ID cards will help to create a shared sense of citizenship and belonging.
The pressure from technology companies to implement national ID card systems has been strong and persistent over a number of years. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, the UK-based Mondex corporation made several trials of multi-purpose cards for commercial use, but none was fully successful (Stalder 2002). However, their technology is now part of the consortium providing the Hong Kong system. Control Data Systems obtained the contract for the Thai ID card, while Unisys plays a large part in the Malaysian Mykad (interestingly, a Unisys spokesperson has expressed doubts about the anti-terror utility of the Malaysian system)5 and is expected to have a leading role in the UK system. In the best-known example, Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation offered to provide free software for a US-wide national ID system, immediately after 9/11.
IDs, social sorting and citizenship
New national ID card systems are appearing at a time when notions of ‘national citizenship’ have attracted considerable criticism. Citizenship has always been a contested concept, of course, but there are significant ways in which new IDs reflect some important dimensions of today's world that challenge older views of citizenship. In particular, many have observed how the figure of the consumer has become in many ways more salient to social life than citizenship and at the same time globalism has thrown doubt on the category of ‘national’ citizenship. Perhaps new IDs reflect these emphases on consumption and on globalism that stimulate fresh thinking on citizenship?
New IDs reflect consumer and global conditions. Many are designed for multi-purpose use, in commercial and public services settings as well as in association with government departments, agencies and police. And the intention of several powerful lobbies in Europe and North America is to ensure some degree of interoperability between ID card systems. They may relate to ‘nationality’ but also beyond. However, at a deeper level, it could be argued that new IDs speak to issues of the displacement of active citizenship by consumer behavior and to the fragmentation of national identity by the forces of globalization. If so, and if this prompts doubts about how positive this may be for the life-chances of citizens and the prospects for democratic participation, one might also ask if IDs may also be used in service of responsible citizenship and of cosmopolitanism?
Under present conditions, however, it is difficult to see what contribution new IDs could make to the ‘solidarity’ aspect of citizenship, or, for that matter, to democratic participation. If the British case is anything to go by, the new ID was itself introduced despite efforts to involve ordinary citizens in informed debate, which augurs badly for future democratic participation in the relation to the system. In fact new IDs seem to have more in common with what David Garland calls the ‘culture of control’ that falls back on technical means of organizing societies in a context of broadly neo-liberal anti-welfare policies. Such outlooks are ‘... more exclusionary than solidaristic, more committed to social control than to social provision and more attuned to the private freedoms of the market than the public freedoms of universal citizenship’ (Garland 2001: 193).
Returning to the reasons why new IDs are established, each of ‘eliminating terrorism,’ ‘combating fraud,’ and ‘controlling immigration’ depend on the setting up of categories of terrorist/nonterrorist; non/fraudulent claimants; and ill/legal immigrants. So sensitive matters are at stake in determining the categories and the software codes by which they will be recognized. Also, the social categories are ones in which there is a high degree of vulnerability. Terrorist suspects are likely to be members of minority groups; claimants to government benefits and services are likely to be already disadvantaged; and immigrants, whether legal or not, are also in positions of relative powerlessness. The social sorting of new IDs touches the lives of the weakest and most marginalized members of the population.
In light of this it is difficult to disagree with the conclusion of Didier Bigo (2004) that new IDs connect not with a surveillance panopticon but with a banopticon. Unlike rights-based notions of citizenship, in which all find a place and at the very least a social safety net, or its related panopticon that include everyone in the gaze, new IDs seem to be geared to singling out exceptions—those to be excluded or sequestered as undesirable—as quickly and efficiently as possible. Moreover, if many post-9/11 events are anything to go by, this occurs with relatively little concern about which innocent individuals might be negatively affected. The concern with national security (often translated into simpler terms of personal safety) in particular trumps civil liberties and privacy concerns, especially in the USA.
One of the ways in which new IDs work is their dependence on biometrics. Apart from the questions about how well biometrics systems perform, it is important to note that the codes that determine in which category individuals are placed are related to bodily and behavioral characteristics. This means that the decisions made about the prospects for individuals in questionable categories are likely to be even further abstracted from the struggles and stories of everyday life of which vulnerable people are likely to be most acutely aware.
At the same time, the biometric and information technology systems that support them enable ‘borders’ to be re-defined in some interesting ways. As Irma Van der Ploeg suggests, the border becomes ‘...part of the embodied identity of certain groups of people, verifiable at any of the many points of access to increasingly interconnected databases...’ (Van der Ploeg 2005: 133). Some identities thus produced, she goes on, are more habitable than others, which is why research on IDs must ever be mindful of ethical and political issues.
Related to this is the phenomenon described by Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild as ‘policing at a distance’ or remote control (Bigo and Guild 2005). They describe this phenomenon in the European context but it can also be seen in the efforts to harmonize border controls across the North American countries. In Europe the Schengen visa policies that began in the 1980s meant that countries both issued and verified at borders passports and travel documents but also established intergovernmental agreements, common databases, good practices, common manuals and eventually a common visa. This means that the ‘technologies of control’ are far from the border itself. Who belongs or does not belong is determined not at the border but remotely. Foreign officials at the EU frontier are involved, along with private security firms sometimes charged with checking documents. In so far as the checking is done in embassies and consulates, it also deals in remote time—would-be travelers across borders may be deemed undesirable on the basis of what they may do in the future.
Lastly, consider the implications of ‘identity management.’ This is now the mantra of border controlling authorities, but it is important to note that these strategies emerged not from the task at hand—determining who should be a legitimate traveler within or outside the nation-state—but from the realm of internet security in an era of electronic commerce. ‘Identity management’ began with the protection of online systems from hackers and fraudsters. It represents the search for means of preventing access for some and permitting it for others, generally for commercial reasons. Fear of economic loss is the driving force behind identity management and it is worth exploring what might such practices really have in common with the far from merely technical and commercial matter of who is a bona fide citizen or traveler (see also Muller 2004).
IDs and prospects for citizenship
Lastly, how could democracy be fostered in the context of the likely implementation of new ID cards in Western Europe and North America, as well as in SE Asia and other places? A number of important questions are raised including: the growing power of technology companies, especially to help determine the categories used in classification processes; the prospects for civil liberties in an era of ‘exceptional measures’ (Agamben 2005; the managerial aims of governments basing their plans on risk management; debates and protests in Korea, Japan, UK, Australia and now the USA and the dangers of new ID cards in the emerging climate of suspicion (lack of trust), secrecy (lack of information access) and control (digital rule, governance). How can ‘citizens’ be involved in the development of ‘technology’ that affects them so profoundly?
Several significant questions demand answers as the prospects for new IDs and citizenship are considered. Do new IDs reinforce the position of some critics that the war on terror is actually a war on immigrants? Does ID management foster ‘digital rule’ and the culture of control? What dangers attend using a single ID for both government and commercial purposes? How does the new ID affect a contemporary understanding of ‘citizenship’?
New IDs may be considered as a stand-in (see Barney 2000, chapter 7) for the kinds of political identities that are important in the twenty-first century. As far as citizenship is concerned, the sorts of characteristics exhibited by new IDs make it clear that citizenship is generally circumscribed, related to nationality but also to country-of-origin, ethnicity, gender, and even religion. The politics of identity is obscured by or at best subsumed under new regimes of identity management.
Citizenship is no longer exclusively about the struggle for social equality but has become a major site of battles over cultural identity and demands for the recognition of group difference. The fact that new IDs may be internationally interoperable does not indicate that some cosmopolitan globalism is informing the concept of citizenship involved. To the contrary, the idea of interoperability is merely a device for strengthening security—policing, border controls and military intelligence—on an international level. This may appear beneficial in principle but it tends in practice to reproduce the distinctions and divisions that are now overlaid with ‘trusted traveler’ and ‘suspected terrorist’ categories generated by the backlash of 9/11 responses.
The very production of new IDs tends to restrict political dissent and the efforts of those who propose modifications in the kinds of functions such cards have. They are the product of a growing coalition between various groups; high technology hardware and software providers, corporations such as banks for whom the card may also have benefits, and government departments.6 And their effects tend to be felt most strongly and most negatively among the most vulnerable sectors of the population—immigrants, suspected ‘terrorists’ and welfare claimants. If the measure of good government is the extent to which the weakest are protected from the worst eventualities then ID cards can hardly be said to enhance such government.
New IDs do what computer networks (on which they depend) generally do best; they contribute to a culture of control. The nature of this control is interesting. It is by definition digital and relates to governance in general, across a range of social realms. It is the product of a long-term historical shift that is visible in the rise of management approaches and neo-liberal political economies (Garland 2001). And in utilizing computer networks it supports a move away from conventional disciplines associated with modernity towards mere control that deflect attention from the demands of morality and democracy to the calculable, to relations determined by computer codes that express social categories. New IDs ‘sort things out’ (Bowker and Star 1999) in new ways, the consequences of which have yet fully to be seen. And, moreover, they do this remotely—at a distance—and using biometric measures, thus removing these markers of ‘identity’ even further from the struggles of daily life and the sphere of political debate.
That the securitizing of identity is also occurring at a juncture when conventional rule of (international) law is being set aside in favor of states of emergency within the so-called war on terror increases the likelihood that new IDs may be used to categorize and disadvantage certain vulnerable groups even further (see Wilson 2006). Add to this the evident power of high technology corporations and the apparent willingness of governments to embrace the ‘solutions’ they proffer and the situation seems still gloomier, at least from the perspective of the politics of recognition and of human rights.
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New ID card systems are being developed without their database capacities for social sorting being fully recognized, let alone democratically debated. One key rationale for their introduction is anti-terrorism, but it is unclear how new ID cards could contribute beyond already existing means of verification and identification. However, new ID cards are likely to have other effects, as their nonelectronic antecedents did before them. Today, the risks of damaging social solidarities and mutual understanding through the sorting, profiling and further marginalizing of the most vulnerable members of the population have to be set against whatever genuine benefits may accrue through the development of ID card systems in the cause of anti-terrorism.
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1 See http://www.cpsr.org/issues/privacy/natidfaq/
2 Philippines prepares national ID card to fight militants, Asia-Pacific News, 12 May 2005. www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/1421991/1/.html/
3 Japan launches ID scheme, BBC News, May 8 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2173003.stm/; Japanese court rules ID system unconstitutional, May 30 2005, www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-228843/
4 Identity Fraud: A Study; UK Cabinet Office, 2002, www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs/id_fraud-report.pdf/
5 Mark Tran, ‘Uncertain identity’ Guardian, May 13 2004 http://business.guardian.co.uk/economicdispatch/story/0,1215828,00.html
6 I discuss this elsewhere as the ‘oligopolization of the means of identification.’
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