IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 54

individuals as potential citizens, and the ways they [try]
to act upon them " [4].2
The tension of such citizenship projects is that they
also produce non-citizens. In 2020, non-citizenship projects are taking the form of travel bans, attempts to add
a citizenship question to censuses, the political construction of " refugee crises, " and an overall increase in
xenophobic and anti-immigration rhetoric. Knowing all
this, one of the greatest ethical crises that future FRS
use must contend with is its use within national immigration and refugee policies. Just as a globalized economy expands capitalism and its potential markets all

FRS is a probabilistic tool and its
results are vulnerable in that they are,
for better and worse, at the mercy of
the political powers that install and
utilize the technology.
over the world, it also generates immigrants and refugees; countries must, at potentially exponential rates,
make decisions as to who they will accept into their
countries, who they let stay in their country, and who
they will keep out. As Btihaj Ajana explains in Governing Through Biopolitics, biometrics have always been
targeted at restricting " excessive mobility " [5]. The word
" excessive " is likely to be defined along the same political lines as " citizenship, " and access to the resources
of citizenship.
In addition, although this paper was initially written
before the COVID-19 global pandemic, editing this
work while countries utilize various biometrics in
order to generate and enforce both internal and external borders that restrict and/or eliminate national and
transitional mobility makes clear that biometric technologies like FRS will be one of the main tactics that
will be leveraged into solving future problems of
national health and security. Looking forward, the
national and transnational mobility of populations are
extremely likely to be further exasperated by climate
change, and the reduction of resources that will come
with extreme weather, rising sea levels, and the other
effects of a rapidly warming planet. In short, there is a
2

Adriana Petryna's further theorizing in her essay " Biological Citzenship:
The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations " (in Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments .
2004, pp. 250-265) is also useful to consider in combination with Rose and
Novas's work.

54

high probability that an extreme amount of people will
be physically moving from their own countries, and/or
within their own countries, in the decades to come;
immigration and refugee policy, and the security apparatuses that accompany, monitor, and restrict such
mobility, must anticipate this.3
Therefore, FRS as a border enforcement tactic deserves more scrutiny. To begin, it is important to state
that FRS is always probabilistic; the software provides
no certain answers but rather an array of potential or
likely matches between biological data and virtual identity. It is worth remembering then that it does not matter, as a person walks up to a kiosk that utilizes FRS,
whether that person is a citizen or not: they must use
the technology to prove themselves a citizen via the
computerized politicization of their face. In this way,
the actual accuracy or effectiveness of FRS, i.e., how
well it matches a face to its data-defined identity, is
beside the point; FRS does not have to work as it is
designed to work in order to be an effective political
tool, forecaster, and sorter of citizens and non-citizens.
In fact, there is a wealth of research that proves that in
the moments when the software is seen to be being
biased and/or ineffective against non-white, male faces,
it is not malfunctioning at all, but rather working exactly
as it is intended.4
FRS is a probabilistic tool and its results are vulnerable in that they are, for better and worse, at the
mercy of the political powers that install and utilize
the technology. As such, the FRS in the BAE is best
seen a tactic deployed under larger strategies of
national security. Accordingly, FRS does not create
citizens and non-citizens, but only identifies them;
similarly, FRS is one of a long line of tools used to
separate citizens from non-citizens that stretch back
centuries, and is therefore not doing anything particularly new in its basic identifying and sorting mechanisms. However, by examining and tracking tactics
like the use of FRS within the BAE, we are able to
reconstruct the political rationales for such strategies,
identify the political definitions of citizens and noncitizens, and thereafter provide informed and pointed
critique, if necessary. Doing such work makes it clear
that FRS is incredibly flexible to being redefined to
3

There is excellent work being done on the broader topic of AI and the
Canadian Refugee system at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, including Miles Kenyon's report " Bots at the gate A human rights analysis of
automated decision making in Canada's Immigration and Refugee System "
(https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/bots-at-the-gate-human-rights-analysis-automated-decision-making-in-canadas-immigration-refugee-system/, accessed
Apr. 17, 2020).
4
The biases of FRS systems have been laid out clearly by various sources, including Joy Buolamwini's work at The Algorithmic Justice League
(https://www.ajlunited.org/). The application of FRS in non-border instances that then raise further problematics can be seen in the application of
FRS in job applications, mortgage loans applications, the over-representation of non-white populations in the judicial system and the list goes on.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2020
https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/bots-at-the-gate-human-rights-analysis-auto-mated-decision-making-in-canadas-immigration-refugee-system/ https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/bots-at-the-gate-human-rights-analysis-auto-mated-decision-making-in-canadas-immigration-refugee-system/ https://www.ajlunited.org/
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020

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