IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 56

camera, " " Taken in front of a plain white or off-white
background, " and " With a neutral facial expression and
both eyes open " [9]. Superficially, the standardizing of
the photo size, background, and other specifications are
in place to ease administrative management, but such
requirements also serve the purpose of pre-processing
the photo, and the face within, for easier datafication,
that then expedites overall automation of computerized

FRS, as a technology of individual
differentiation, identification, and
validation, is vitally important
to determining the privileges
of citizenship.
identification systems. Further, as the TSA explains " Federal and state identity document issuance organizations
already collect facial images which may be generally suitable for facial recognition capabilities " [10]; therefore, a
passport's requirements facilitate the interlocking of the
passport photo with other identification systems (like
driver's licenses, for example) while also creating standardized documents to populate and train computerized
biometric systems like FRS. As such, passport and visa
photos, with their focus on the face, are extremely useful in general; within programs like the BAE in particular, they both feed data into the State's systems of
citizenship identification and verification, while also
providing data that also sorts citizens from non-citizens. From this, it should come as no surprise that FRS
is at the center of contemporary national security
assemblages: the last three decades of American FRS
development show that the forward progress of the
technology's effectiveness and adoption are most often
due to border security programs, such as the FERET
database, that involve multiple government agencies
working in complex ecosystems; these American ecosystems have evolved to also include the Office of Biometric Identity Management as part of the CBP [11]-[12].
That such citizenship projects require such a sprawling and ubiquitous effort illuminates the intense desire
that a state, and America in this specific example, has
for sorting the identities of those who cross it borders.
From this understanding, Ajana argues that citizenship
is always " performed through modes of inclusion and
exclusion whereby identity is conceived of in terms of
dichotomies of the self and other, of inside and outside,

56

of belonging and alien " [5. p. 26]. As such, national identity is only one, perhaps insignificant, aspect of citizenship: more important to note is that citizenship is " more
about issues of access to resources, services, spaces
and privileges " [5, p. 12]: in this way citizenship is not
simply about national identity, but also about the distribution of resources within a country. The BAE exemplifies that certain people deserve the privileges of
American citizenship. FRS, as a technology of individual
differentiation, identification, and validation, is vitally
important to determining these privileges. Within this
thinking, there will be populations who are alien or
other who do not deserve to cross the thresholds into a
country and will be turned away; there will also be
those who are alien or other who are marginally accepted but run the risk of " overstaying " in a country and losing access to the resources of citizenship. By acting at
the entering/exiting borders of the U.S., the BAE
becomes a massively effective sorting device, identifying who is alien and who belongs, who is part of a
nation and who is other; the BAE also simultaneously
produces and affirms U.S. citizenship and the ideals
and resources attached to such citizenship.
Within the example of the BAE, there is the specific
physical body being photographed (or filmed) for the
purpose of biometrics and then there is the virtual " citizen's " body who belongs to the collective identity of a
country that is established through the interlocking
practices of identity certification. With these simultaneous individual and collective identities in mind, Rose
and Novas's " biological citizenship " focuses on notions
of " biological identity " : this means acknowledging the
individual's somatic identity, and then how the biological history of that individual feeds into the history, and
desires, of a larger State apparatus who is producing
and affirming citizens [4, p, 3]. The authors stress that
certain bodies have more " value " to that State apparatus than others, and that value is often generated by
whether the person is a citizen, and, if so, the category
of citizen that they are. In this way, the face included in
a passport or visa, and/or included in mechanisms like
the BAE, becomes the citizen's way of " proving " their
worth as a citizen and their " belonging " to the membership of that nation. FRS is particularly effective at this as
it can quickly and efficiently connect, identify, and verify
the citizen and non-citizen two bodies: the physical
somatic body is tethered quickly to the political body,
and that body's categorization and access to the
resources of citizenship within that political system.

The Dual Faces of the Citizen
and the banopticon
This discussion of the dual bodies/faces of the citizen is
largely built in from the work of Giorgio Agamben and

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2020
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020

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