ABSTRACT
Heightened security concerns arising from the growth of various forms of crime, including identity theft and terrorism, have led to increased interest in the development and application of ‘technologies of surveillance’ (Lyon, 2001). These are technologies that – following the definition of ‘surveillance’ given by Lyon, a definition which is adopted for the purposes of this book – facilitate the ‘collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been collected’ (Lyon, 2001: 2). Technologies often have an inherent logic or bias which may strongly influence the way in which they are being used. The bias of technologies of surveillance is essential to augment surveillance capabilities. Thus, to some extent, the development of surveillance is also driven by new forms of technology (Bygrave, 2002). A prominent form of such technology is the rapidly expanding use of biometrics, that is, identification and authentication technologies based on unique characteristics of individual human bodies. Biometrics, though, is not exclusively a surveillance technology; beyond surveillance biometrics is also being developed and applied in a range of other contexts including personal computing, entrance security, and automated banking. Nonetheless, it is mainly in relation to their surveillance and control potential that biometric applications are attracting controversy. They are seen by some as part of an array of surveillance technologies that have advanced to the point where they now collectively possess the capability to threaten the most basic democratic notions of individual autonomy and privacy (Nuger and Wayman, 2004a).
