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Ebook: Identity, Security and Democracy
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Many people think of personal identification as only part of the security/surveillance apparatus. This is likely to be an oversimplification, which largely misrepresents the reality. ‘Personal identity’ means two separate concepts, namely that an individual belongs to specific categories and also that this individual is distinguished by other persons and understood as one. In other words, there are two different aspects involved in personal recognition: distinguishing between individuals and distinguishing between sets of people. The latter is likely to be the real issue. Dictatorships of any kind and totalitarian regimes have always ruled by categorizing people and by creating different classes of subjects. When rules want their subjects to humiliate themselves or their fellows, they create categories of people or exploit existing categories. From social and political points of view this allows a process known as ‘pseudospeciation’ to be produced. Pseudospeciation is a process which turns social and cultural differences into biological diversities. It promotes cooperation within social groups, overpowering the selfish interests of individuals in favor of collective interests, yet it also inhibits cooperation between groups, and it fosters conflict and mistrust. This work is dedicated to the thorny and multifaceted relations between identity, security and democracy. Identity, Security and Democracy shows how full of nuances the process of human identification is.
The visitor who goes to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem may happen to come upon a tree planted in honor of a Polish Catholic woman, Irena Sendlerowa (Sendler).
See Sendler Irena, Poland, http://www1.yadvashem.org/righteous_new/sendlerova.html.
For that she was suspended from the university for three years.
See Paulsson G. S., 2002, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945, Yale UP, New Haven.
Fifty six years later, in 1999, in a rural school of Uniontown, Kansas (a small village of 288 inhabitants), a teacher showed four students a short clipping from a March 1994 issue of News and World Report, which said, ‘Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942–43’.
See The Irena Sendler Project, http://www.irenasendler.org/thestory.asp.
Irena was pregnant, and she lost her second child because of the hard interrogations.
Only in 1983 did Irena finally go to Israel.
That year the prize was eventually given to Al Gore.
Quoted by The Times, May 12, 2008, Irena Sendler Obituary, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3918822.ece.
Many lessons can be learned from Irena's story, and one is worth mentioning in a book that is dedicated to the thorny and multifaceted relations between identity, security and democracy. Irena's life is an extraordinary illustration of how full of nuances the process of human identification is. “Life in a Jar” is more than a metaphor of the life of Jewish children rescued by Irena, it is a metaphor of the whole system for human identification, of its paradoxes and contradictions, lightness and darkness.
Personal Identification
Many people think of personal identification as only part of the security/surveillance apparatus. This is likely to be an oversimplification, which largely misrepresents the reality. The need for recognition schemes is actually inherent to human civilization itself, probably dating back to the first urban societies in the Middle East and China, when societies became as complex as to require frequent interactions between people who did not know each other. Persons that travelled outside of the confines of their home (e.g., military, sailors, traders) needed to be recognized and to recognize.
This was probably at the origins also of the metaphor of the last travel – that in netherworld – where one needs to be recognised as well.
J. Caplan, J. Torpey J., (eds), 2001, Documenting Individual Identity, Princeton UP.
Early signs of recognition also had a religious meaning. In the Classic Greek religion, there was a close link between identification documents (i.e., written tablets, seals, etc.) and the hereafter. All gods of the netherworld (differently from Olympic gods) could write and read. Hades, the King of the Infernal Regions, was called by Aeschylus “he, who writes on the tablet” (Aesch. Eum. 275). Hades and Thanatos (Death) “catalogue everything in their kingdom”, wrote Hesopus (Aesop. fab. 133). Persephones, the Queen of the netherworld, marked on the door of her realm the names of those who are about to die, moreover she had a written list of those who were to be punished in the hereafter. In the Hellenistic period those deceased who belonged to Orphic sect took with them complex instructions written on golden tablets, to be recognised, and to recognise Gods and places of the netherworld (Janko R, 1984). These golden tablets were then a sort of “passport” for a safe travel across the hereafter. Also the alliance between God and Abraham is sealed by a sign of recognition, the circumcision, and many religions imply body modifications which allow to recognise the faithful. Also a tragic pun reminds us of the importance of being recognized by God (and His legates). At the siege of Béziers in 1209, the Papal Legate, abbot Arnaud, was asked how to distinguish the good Catholics from the Jews and the Cathars, and he answered: “Tuez-les tous; Dieu reconnaîtra les siens” (Kill them all; God will recognize his own). More than 20,000 people were massacred in the space of two hours.
The Roman Empire was the first cosmopolitan society in the west and was also the first example of a universal system for people recognition, which was mainly based on badges and written documents. In Middle Age Europe – where the majority of the population never went outside the immediate area of their home or villages – individuals were identified through passes and safe-conducts issued by religious and civil authorities. The birth of large scale societies and the increased mobility associated with urbanization imposed new recognition schemes. The first passports were issued in France by Luis XIV in 1669,
J.Torpey, 2000, The invention of the Passport-Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge UP.
As stated by the Final Report of the LSE Identity Project (http://is2.lse.ac.uk/IDcard/identityreport.pdf) “The relationship between Identity Cards and ethnic profiling is strong, yet poorly studied”.
The “J” stamp
The story of the infamous “J” stamp used in the Nazi regime in Germany, Poland, France, Hungary, and other countries is quite known, but few know that a similar “J” stamp was first used in 1910 in democratic Switzerland on East European Jewish refugee documents, as recently demonstrated by the Bergier Commission.
Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War (ICE) (http://www.uek.ch.en/index.htm).
On November 28th 2006, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) had passed a Law defining the Holodomor as a deliberate Act of Genocide, a method to ethnically cleanse Ukrainians from the territories of Ukraine.
The role plaid by Rwandan ID cards in another genocide, the Tutsi genocide, is also well known. An estimated 500.000 to 1 million people, primarily ethnic Tutus, were exterminated by the majority Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. Scholars suggest that prior to the rigid quota system imposed by Belgian colonial authorities, the Hutu and Tutsi were social caste groups rather than ethnic groups. However when the genocide broke out in April 1994, thousands of roadblocks were erected all over the country to filter out Tutsi, who were identified and selected for killing because the IDs mentioned their ethnic group.
Jumping to the present, ethnicity appears on China, Sri Lanka, and Singapore ID cards; the religion of the card bearer is noted in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Laos, Malaysia, Pakistan; in Syria special stamps on the regular ID card identify Kurds and Jews.
Both groups have restricted rights.
Quoted by Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/research/rir/?action=record.viewrec&gotorec=440951.
According to James Fussell, Executive Director of Genocide Watch, the role played by ID Cards in discrimination against ethnic and religious groups, is threefold,
Group Classification on National ID Cards as a Factor in Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, paper presented on November 15, 2001 to the Seminar Series of the Yale University Genocide Studies Program, http://www.preventgenocide.org/prevent/removing-facilitating-factors/IDcards/.
Irena's story then reminds us of the terrible risks entailed by any group classification. The yellow Star of David – forced on Jewish clothing during the Shoah – and “J” stamp on ID documents are the obscene symbols of what people identification could produce when it becomes “a segment of a destruction process”. Yet identification does not necessarily entail classification.
“Personal identity” means two separate concepts, namely that an individual belongs to some categories and that she is distinguished by other persons and understood as one. In other words, there are two different aspects involved in personal recognition, 1) distinguishing between individuals, and 2) distinguishing between sets of people. The latter is likely to be the real issue. Dictatorships of any kind and totalitarian regimes have always ruled by categorizing people and by creating different classes of subjects. When rulers want their subject to humiliate herself or her fellows, they create categories of people or exploit existing categories. This is for many reasons; from a psychological point of view it is easier to induce cruelty against groups which are somehow abstract entities, rather than against single, identified, individuals;
This is probably one of the reasons why prisoners in extermination camps are so often anonymized, say, to make it psychologically easier for their torturers to persecute them.
Pseudospeciation is a process which turns social and cultural differences into biological diversities. It promotes cooperation within social groups, overpowering the selfish interests of individuals in favour of collective interests, yet it also inhibits cooperation between groups, and it fosters conflict and mistrust. Erik Erikson, the great child psychoanalyst known for his studies on child's identity, was the first to use this term. He lamented that pseudospeciation produces atrocities and brutality. “What is at stake here – wrote Erikson – is nothing less than the realization of the fact and the obligation of man's specieshood. Great religious leaders have attempted to break through the resistances against this awareness, but their churches have tended to join rather than shun man's deep-seated conviction that some providence has made his tribe and race or class, caste, or religion “naturally” superior to others. This seems to be part of a psychosocial evolution by which he has developed into pseudo-species ... for man is not only apt to lose all sense of species, but also to turn on another subgroup with a ferocity generally alien to the ‘social’ animal world".
Erikson E.R., 1964, Insight and responsibility. New York: Norton, p. 66.
Rights and Identity
We are all victims of the illusory belief that personal identification per se threatens basic liberties, and infringes our private sphere. People are concerned that large scale systems for personal identification can turn democratic states into police states. Of course one can be legitimately worried about giving too much power to governments, but this is a general issue that does not directly concern personal identification. To be sure, any process of personal identification implies that individuals are recognized subjects of rights and obligations, and this could be seen as a limitation of individual liberty. Yet there would be no rights, no liberty, without personal identities.
It was the French Revolution that first affirmed the indivisible unity of citizenship right and individual recognition. Universal rights and individual identity became two sides of the same coin. Absolutist regimes worked through social intermediaries, while the new revolutionary, democratic, order was based on a direct, unmediated, relationship to the citizen. The French citizen became an unmarked individual who was no longer a member of a group but just an inhabitant of the French nation. The citoyen was not a member of a community, a manor, a church, or a guild. It did not matter if he was a man or a woman, black or white, Jewish or Christian, Roman Catholic or Lutheran, he was just a citizen.
There is, however, an important debate among scholars as to what extent all categories were really included in the Declaration. See for instance S.M. Singham, 1994, “Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women and the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” in Dale Van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, Stanford UP.
One can claim her rights, including the right to be left alone, and the right to refuse to be identified, only if she is an identifiable subject, if she has a public identity. Even if one is identified only for being unjustly arrested, this still means that there are some rules to be respected. Personal identification always implies a sort of respect for the law (of course a law can be horrible, but this is a different issue) because it implicitly affirms the principle of personal responsibility. This is evident also in Irena's story. Irena's identity was not cancelled by Nazis, because she was not ultimately a Jew but Polish. She was condemned to be executed but she escaped and could hide herself under a false identity. Could a Jewish person have done just the same? The answer is no, because Jews had not only to hide their personal identity, but also their group identity. In other words, Irena was persecuted according to any rule of law – although the law was obscene and unjust – she was not denied her citizen's rights, while these rights were simply cancelled for Jewish people.
In ancient Greece, slaves were called “faceless”, aprosopon. The word that in Greek designates the face, prosopon, is also at the origin of the Latin word persona, person. The person is thus an individual with a face, this is to say, out of metaphor, that one becomes a person when she is identifiable. In modern terms, one could say that you are who your papers say you are. Take away those papers and you have no claimable rights.
Ironically enough, the Greek definition for slaves was echoed a few years ago by the French controversial legislation on aliens, called sans-papiers (the paperless), who originate primarily from poor African nations.
The Pages of Testimony
There was however, also another, deeper reason why Irena struggled to preserve identities of Jewish children. Not only because there would be no rights without personal identities, but also because there would not be family ties without names. We would lose our deepest roots without our names because they are more than simply identifiers. Names have to do with our inner humanity. It is not by chance that according to the Bible the first task that God gave to Adam (Genesis 2:19) was to name all species of creation.
The reader of the Iliad probably remembers the famous episode when Diomed encounters Glaucus on the battle-field and Diomed asks him who he is. Glaucus, a young warrior without any hope of surviving the fight against the noble and powerful Diomed, answers “Why ask me of my lineage? Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of mankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away. If, then, you would learn my descent, it is one that is well known to many. There is a city in the heart of Argos …”. There is in Glaucus' words the harrowing consciousness that nothing is permanent and that even the pride of belonging to a noble lineage is probably an illusion. Yet, for one of those reversals that are the secret of great poetry, this melancholic poem to human caducity becomes a compassionate praise of all humankind. Diomed was once hosted by Glaucus' family and when the expert warrior recognizes it, he gives up crossing his sword with the young man, who had his life saved by his name.
Names crystallize history and stories, they are symbols that remind us that each one of us is the point of arrival of generations of men who lived, dreamt, loved, suffered, and deluded themselves before us. Names hold human history and are the hallmark of culture on the natural, merely biological, flow of human generations. They are what link humans both vertically – through generations – and horizontally – across families and communities. Without their names Jewish children rescued by Irena would have been deprived of their cultural identity, they would have become those naked bodies of which Agamben, the Italian philosopher, speaks.
Agamben G, 2004, “No To Bio-Political Tattooing.” From: La Monde, 10 January 2004. Retrieved From www.Infoshop.Org/Inews/Stories.Php?Story=04/01/17/2017978> Accessed 20 November 2004.
Erasing names and using anonymous codes for people recognition has always been an important instrument for dehumanizing people. In late ancien regime France, for example, those sentenced to hard labor were marked on the upper arm with ‘TF’ (for travaux forcés), with a life sentence being signified through the letter P (en perpétuité). UK offenders were sometimes branded on the thumb (with a ‘T’ for theft, ‘F’ for felon or ‘M’ for murder). In Primo Levi's memoir, The Drowned and the Saved, he describes the tattoo as a “pure offense”, as a hallmark by which “slaves are branded and cattle sent to slaughter” (Levi, 1989:119). Yet few know that in the Nazi regime the larger group of compulsory tattooed people was not made up by prisoners but the Waffen-SS. All members of the Waffen-SS were required to have a tattoo on their left arm verifying their blood group. This included also any of the high ranking officers. Officially the purpose of the tattoo was to be able to perform a blood transfusion at the front to save a wounded man's life. Yet the coincidence (the tattoo in gothic lettering was about 7 mm in length and was placed on the underside of the left arm, about 20 cm up from the elbow) is very suggestive: both untermensche and ubermenschen were hallmarked by Nazi regime. One could compare this event with a famous quotation from Hitler's Mein Kampf in which he saw the “great thing” of his movement in the fact that sixty thousand men “have outwardly become almost a unit, that actually these members are uniform not only in ideas, but that even the facial expression is almost the same. Look at these laughing eyes, this fanatical enthusiasm and you will discover ... how a hundred thousand men in a movement become a single type” (http://www.tomeraider.com/ebooks/nonfiction/history/mein_kampf_the_struggle_ebook–BK382.php).
There is then a profound lesson to be learned by the fact that Irena's name is now carved for ever – at least for that “ever” allowed by human caducity – on a plaque adjacent to one of the 2000 trees, symbols of the renewal of life, that have been planted on Har Hazikaron, the Mount of Remembrance, in Jerusalem. On the same mount, in the Hall of Names, there are the “Pages of Testimony”, symbolic gravestones, which record names and biographical data of millions of Shoa victims, as submitted by family members and friends, as a way for “remembering them not as anonymous numbers but as individual human beings”.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/index_about_yad.html.
Expression and use of our identity are changing with digitalization, biometric technology, and the interoperability of information and communication systems and networks. In the developing e-society, digital identity and its management become central to doing business in both the private and public sectors. The trend is in enabling the secure management of user identities and rights across heterogeneous information systems and various domains for e-commerce and e-government purposes. This short paper describes a few challenges relating to digital identity in the current economic and social landscape. It suggests that one of the most important matters for the future of our e-society is to clarify which rights and obligations are attached to digital identity and its management.
Recently, there has been a growing interest in the technologies of identity and identification. Many governments are keen on enhancing identity systems and introducing biometric technology in order to securitize the identities of their citizens. As it happens, the introduction of these identity systems is raising many concerns over the issue of privacy and the protection of fundamental rights. In this article, we draw on some sources in order to suggest a framework for the governance of identity systems. We begin by considering the guidelines of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from which we derive a set of principles that are relevant to the governance of identity security systems. We then discuss the use of Expression of Needs and Identification of Security Objectives (EBIOS) as a valid methodology for governing identity. Finally, we address the issue of security management and its relation to identity systems.
The respect of children's identity is a serious issue which involves aspects relating to security both in industrialized countries and in underdeveloped areas. One of the most commonly used methods for identifying people is their names. Everyone has a name, but the way of assigning names and registering them is different around the world and the use of family names varies among cultures. The transcription of a name from one alphabet into the Roman alphabet, i.e., “Romanization” is a challenge that is encountered almost every day due to the great wave of immigration from North Africa, South East Asia and China. As reported by UNICEF, nowadays many children do not have a formal identity. And, in the western world, the web can be a dangerous place for young people. In this paper, few sections are dedicated to the history of surname attribution throughout the centuries and to various local cultures.
Many of the concepts and considerations which are discussed under the heading of “Identity, Security and Democracy” are the same as those which are found in bioethical discussions of access to medical records, the Human Genome Project, and bio banks. A brief look at some of the great philosophers, Descartes, Hume and Maimonides, leads to the suggestion that we should be willing to do away with privacy and be open with everyone. But this is utopian, ignoring the fact that we have enemies. When security is at stake, there are reasons to be more lenient and reasons to be less lenient about violations of privacy.
Biometric recognition involves methods of automatically recognizing people by their biological and/or behavioral characteristics. Biometric systems have now been deployed in various physical and logical access control applications as well as in forensic applications. This paper describes the architecture and the basic modules of a biometric recognition system, as well as the information flow during the enrollment and recognition (verification and identification) phases of the system operation. Different rates for measuring system performance are introduced. The unimodal systems are discussed and the reasons for introducing multimodal systems, based on integration schemes that fuse the information obtained from sensor to decision level, are presented. Finally, some concluding remarks, open problems and limitations of biometric recognition systems are given.
The article discusses the question of “security versus privacy” in terms of biometric technology as well as perinatal medicine. It does so from two different perspectives: a scientific point of view and an ethical and socio-political point of view. We argue that, on the one hand, the biometric and diagnostic methods available within the field of embryology has some considerable benefits with regard to the possible diagnosis and early treatment of diseases, offering more security for both mother and child. On the other hand however, these methods can also result in the loss of the embryo-fetus' privacy. We also discuss our proposed biometric system which is based on sequential evaluation of both the iris and the cardiovascular system from the neonatal period through adulthood.
In recent years, many debates and discussions have taken place in many European and North American countries regarding the need for issuing a secure ID. It goes without saying that such an ID usually should incorporate biometric data. In other countries, there exist ID cards systems that do not rely upon biometrics. Ethical questions relating to identity, privacy, liberty, human dignity and democracy are raised by the very act of implementing an identification system; incorporating biometrics amplifies and multiplies those questions. This article discusses the unique threats ascribed to the use of biometric technologies. We analyze the risks that are essentially similar to those inherent in all identification systems. We also focus upon those risks that are exclusive to biometric systems. Several criteria are suggested for assessing the rate of sensitivity associated with biometric systems. Three major biometric operational modes are described and evaluated according to those criteria, and the same is done with the five most popular technologies, creating a multi-dimensional matrix of sensitivity levels. The conclusion of the article is that biometric technologies, although useful, possess dangerous characteristics that may constitute threats to fundamental human and social rights. The public, legislators, decision makers, system founders, designers and developers, lack sufficient awareness (or concern) about these dangerous attributes, and biometric systems that are being implemented do not seem to be dealing with them adequately, or at all. As a result, threats to the individual are not identified, minimized or otherwise controlled. The article redefines the practical ethics and legal framework for dealing with personal sensitive information in the context of identification systems in general and biometric systems in particular, and calls for an informed public discussion regarding those issues.
This paper sets out to give a brief overview of the most compelling ethical and social implications of biometrics. It is based on several years of research funded by the Dutch organization for scientific research (NWO), and the EC funded Support Action Biometric Identification Technologies and Ethics (BITE). First, the issue of the status of biometric data is discussed, and second, it is argued that biometrics are an instance of the wider phenomenon of the contemporary redefinition of the body in terms of information, or the informatization of the body. In the third section, the implications of the arguments so far are drawn out by highlighting the ways in which biometric applications are caught in a series of paradoxes and tensions relating to identification, social categorization, surveillance, and democratic control.
The Biometric Society is defined here as a fictive future trend of the Information Society in which our daily life is dominated by biometric identification using a central database. This brings many benefits for users but at the same time enables an almost total surveillance. Already today one can observe permanently advancing data surveillance trends which are a by-product of state-of-the-art technologies and services. This kind of surveillance is claimed to be effectively usable as a measure against terrorism, although it is also suspected to favor democide. Since there is no strong proof that total surveillance is incompatible with democracy, there is little resistance against the small steps towards it. This paper also treats the technical feasibility of Biometric Society. However, the question as to whether or when Biometric Society will ever become realit goes beyond the scope of the present investigation.
The application of biometric technology in the domain of identity management raises important ethical and legal questions. Biometrics has therefore been the subject of heated debates, particularly with regard to its relation to the issue of fundamental human rights. While some experts are calling for the introduction of data protection legislations that are specific to biometric technology, others are claiming that biometric data is personal data and, as such, can be covered by existing legislation. This article looks at some of the principles of the Council of Europe's Convention 108 and how they can apply to the collection and processing of biometric data.