IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 58

activities of border crossings or monitoring mobility
during a pandemic, life and death, non-threat and
threat, citizen and non-citizen, are not generated by
FRS, but they have the potential to be efficiently and
ubiquitously determined by the technology by way of
politically constructed categories.8

Moving into the Future of FRS
Biometric technologies have reached a point in 2020
where technologies like FRS are ubiquitous to the point
of near invisibility; as Agamben assures, " biometrical
apparatuses tend to move beyond the police stations
and immigration offices and spread to everyday life "
[18]. In general, Ajana warily calls this spread " feature
creep " [5, p. 4]. As biometric technologies become

The administrative use of FRS
across diverse and invisible
thresholds makes proving one's
citizenship, and the banal violence
that its potential political deployment
entails, regular and omnipresent.
integrated into the everyday life of an Internet user, as
social media filters that utilize FRS or as a way to
unlock a rental car, the casual use of those biometric
technologies become normalized in citizenship projects and polysemic places like national borders and
airports. As the TSA writes, travelers feel that such
technologies and tactics are appropriate security measures in no small part because " travelers increasingly
use biometrics, such as fingerprint and facial recognition, in their daily lives to access their mobile devices,
apps, and accounts " [10, p. 6].
The ubiquity of FRS presents at least two major problems going into the future. The feature creep, into both
the everyday lives of citizens and into contested spaces
of citizenship (like airports), make the borders, the
areas of inclusion and exclusion blurry and extremely
mobile. In this way, the banoptic sort of FRS is not contained to spaces like airports, but encourages the

8
While I was unable to include The European Journal of Psychoanalysis's compelling round-up of philosophers, like Foucault and Agamben,
writing about, broadly, the themes of pandemic and more specifically to
COVID-19, I did find it a useful resource for future thinking. ( " Coronavirus
and philosophers " The European J. of Psychoanalysis; http://www.journal
-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/).

integration of the borders, thresholds, and liminal spaces into daily spaces. Ajana too sees the danger of this,
arguing that " borders are no longer to be found only at
the border. They are no longer constituted around the
'physical' alone. Instead borders are now infinitely and
invisibly actualized within and immanent to mundane
processes of 'internal' administration and bureaucratic
organization " [5, p. 56]. As examples of this, FRS is
already currently being used to determine categories
of citizenship via its deployment in deciding the best
job candidates, granting access to public housing, and
approving bank loans. These applications may not literally depend on the answer of whether the person
under the gaze of FRS is a citizen or not, but it most
certainly determines, through the same automated
decision, whether that person deserves the full
resources of citizenship. The administrative use of
FRS across diverse and invisible thresholds makes
proving one's citizenship, and the profane and banal
violence that its potential political deployment entails,
regular and omnipresent.
As well, more overt nationalistic use of FRS does
occur within (and beyond) the literal borders of a country: in two such examples, the Chinese government was
found to be using FRS extensively to identify and then
target Muslims within their country [19]; the mainland
government has also been utilizing the technology to
scan large crowds in order to identify, then punish, protesters in Hong Kong. In the United States, ICE has
been utilizing Rekognition, Amazon's FRS technology,
similarly, identifying and targeting populations deemed
illegal for expulsion [20]. Methodically included at visible borders (like airports) and invisible " interior " border
(like ICE targeting households anywhere in the country), FRS is being used constantly to enforce national
bans and uphold the notion and privileges of politicallygenerated citizenship.
There is hope, but that hope must begin with public
education and the raising of what Simone Brown calls a
" critical biometric consciousness " [21]. Browne argues
that a contemporary Internet user can look to their " biometric past " and at objects, like the slave ship and the
practice of branding slaves in her own scholarship, in
order " to think critically about [their] biometric present "
[21, p. 91]. Key to this is " informed public debate around
these technologies and their application, and accountability by the state and the private sector, where the
ownership of and access to one's own body data must
be understood as a right " [21, p. 116]. Part of fostering
this informed public debate can take the form of artworks that make the technologies, and their potential
dangers, accessible and digestible. Recent examples
include Shu Lea Cheang's 3x3x6 at the 2019 Venice
Bienniale [22] and Trevor Paglen's work, including his

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2020

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020

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