1.1 The International Regime

Evolving out of national archival systems such as the extensive legacy records maintained by the South African Police Services [1], the international biometrics market is highly politicised having germinated from post-WWII transformation of Euro-Atlantic Security institutions (2) and a complex form of North American public-private venture capitalism (3). In this sense, a technology-dense biometric market emanates from extensive cross-linking and inter-organisational dyads by regime formation processes known as ‘complex inter-dependence’ (4). The biometrics market as an international regime is thus constituted by norms, decision making rules and procedures creating a formal mechanism that binds contracting entities and facilitates effective collaboration among industry participants. As depicted at 2.2 Biometrics Regime Flowchart, the industry regime is pragmatically meta-theoretical, proffering a unified rationalist schemata inherently grounded in characteristic neoliberalism and realism.

e-government uptake is theorised to be predetermined by country enmeshment in the international regime given the contours of endogenous and exogenous pressures to start and advance cooperation [5] specific to the country context and experience, namely: (i) Issue Density, depending on the task environment; (ii) Issue Duration, subject to mounting problems; and (iii) Failure, of past policy and political relations. Aggrandisement of the international regime builds on both Inter-Organisational Relations Theory (micro-level analysis) and Network Theory (macro-level analysis) conditional to the intensity of extent network ties: strong tie strength, implies real compromising and promotes synergy; weak tie strength, tends to be limited to information sharing and implies less synergy (ibid). Internationalisation thus shifts the unit of analysis to organisational aggregates and their autonomous effects (network-level) and refocuses on effectiveness of the total regime rather than its formative processes [6]. The non-military nature of biometrics affords a standard of lasting cooperation and regime stability that leads some theorists to argue the possibility of a ‘post-hegemony’ order in which contracting states benefit from the regime and may be willing to retain it even after a hegemonic state declines [7].

1.1.1 Contract Streaming

Subject to internationalisation, contracting states are conditioned and disciplined beyond the domestic polity as ‘self-supervising’ entities whose sectors and agencies are charged with ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘empowerment’ producing a degree of autonomisation of state entities. This is comparable to the global customs regime [8], where prospective biometrics has the potential to delineate new sites of state power, and ‘new spaces of state-making’, also known as ‘biopolitics’ [9]. Similarly, international law and conventions auguring for the international Human Rights regime attaches to the international biometrics regime in terms of the human rights obligations of contracting vendors [10] and their observance of labour rights in the supply chain [11]. While states retain the lead role in regimes [12], industry norms are also shaped by other intermediaries [13] such as the International Biometrics Industry Association.

1.1.2 Value Streaming

Closely aligned with e-government, value streaming in biometrics is reliant on standards in service delivery and improving user benefits in order to improve user uptake. Social preferences in the value stream capture both (i) technological leverage; and (ii) risk-benefit trade-offs.

Society gains improved efficiency and effectiveness by automating work processes to yield technological leverage, especially the alleviation of administrative burdens such as deployed in the modernisation (administrative panopticism) of citizen knowledge bases collected in South Africa [14]; and agency burdens such as in states of the global north where biometrics is capable of removing the biases of human agents attending to asylum seekers at national borders [15]; as well as discovery burdens which may be obviated by access to actuarial intelligence through automated mass surveillance and datavaillant technology for use in policy development, as was implemented in the United States following September 11 [16]. Moreover, technological leverage enhances standardisation by reducing the risk for the contracting state, integrating agency, and end user by simplifying integration and enabling vendor substitution, technology deployment and development [17].

The risk-benefit trade-offs encompass personalistic abstractions of both (i) public; and (ii) private, identities. In the public realm, biometrics has cultivated the persona of ‘the stranger’ [18] the citizen-subject who is constituted as a suspect, facing an expansive set of physical, psychological and sociological boundaries, which subsists in an omniscient and pervasive ‘paradigm of suspicion’. Biometrics applications are argued to have the effect of conflating the perceived threat of crime, immigration, and terrorism in such a manner as to incriminate the person of the contracting state acting contrary to its public intent and beyond the reach of the law [19]. At the same time, the private realm of the citizen-subject becomes rendered ‘objectified’ as governments utilise a host of continuity tracking technologies to operationalise the individual’s many characteristics such as names, number assignments, personal records, family descent, medical records, and other biometric data. Since the fragments of individuality are considered a single individuality, the person of the citizen-subject suffers a social ‘de-construction’ of control over their multiple social identities [20]; and an attenuation of their ‘human essence’ tantamount to a sense of ‘disembodiment’ [21].

1.1.3 Development Streaming

The technology architecture of biometrics is comprised of mandates for system design and dissemination. In terms of system design, the over-generation of data leads to the invariable tendency for ‘function creep’ whereby biometrics applications collect and process surplus personal data that are liable to be used for purposes other than originally nominated; similarly, a process of ‘informatisation of the body’ (ibid) predicated on the capturing and transmitting to the global information network details of the communication structure of the human body (ambiance, human details, gender, categoricals, and individual details). Such digitalisation of personal features effectively turns the human body into a passport or password, and leads to the scenario of excessive ‘system handling’ (akin to manhandling) compelling the case for due regard for ‘privity’ of the person by the stratum of technology, per se, and the contracting vendor(s). Further to the dissemination of biometric technology, contracting states are actively implementing inter-operable systems and cross-domain identity management, based on adaptive systems and shared services [22].

1.1.4 Application Streaming

Application streaming in the biometrics industry proceeds by segmentation according to public sector (Bi2G), private sector (Bi2B) and retail sector (Bi2C). This article further discusses the realm of biometrics to government (Bi2G) (see 2.1 Biometric Authentication Flowchart).

cf. Biopolitics References

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[1]. Beckenridge, 2005; [2]. Bierman, 2008; [3]. Rothkopf, 2002; [4]. Buzan, 1993; Keohane & Nye, 1977; [5]. Bierman, 2008; [6]. Gupta, 2010; [7]. Hira & Cohn, 2004; [8]. Chalfin, 2006; [9]. Wilson, 2006; [10]. Ruggie, 2004; [11]. Sepala, 2009; [12]. Hira & Cohn, 2004; [13]. Haufler, 2000; Cutler, 2002; [14]. Breckenridge, 2005; [15]. Wilson, 2006; [16]. Levi & Wall, 2004; [17]. Aphrodite, 2011; [18]. Shamir, 2005; [19]. Froomkin, 2000; [20]. Davis, 2007; [21]. Mordini, 2007; [22]. Corradini, 2007

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