ABSTRACT
Identification, surveillance and democracy stand in paradoxical tension with each other. Democratic participation, as it is understood within liberal democracies, requires that everyone be registered to vote. This ensures fairness: everyone eligible within a nation-state has the opportunity to vote, but only once, within an election. The list of voters, however, must include some means of identification to distinguish between one voter and another, as well as some basic details such as residential address and citizenship status. The election system must verify the identification to maintain the “one person, one vote” rule. But that means of identification and its placement on the list is a way that the government department concerned may keep tabs on the population, if only for election purposes. It is, in other words, a surveillance system as well, for better or for worse (Abercrombie, et al., 1986). This paradoxical situation, exemplified by voter lists but visible in many
other forms of identification and classification in the modern state, gets to the heart of the dilemma of democracy and surveillance. The very instruments that are intended to ensure equality of treatment for all, or fair and appropriate treatment for each group, as in cases such as health-care or education, may also provide opportunities for authoritarian or arbitrary treatment. These sometimes occur as unintended consequences of particular ways of organizing a given system, but they may also arise from, say, racially or nationalistically skewed policies, or from the re-use of government data for purposes different from those for which they were gathered. The use of census data for population control in Israel (Zureik, 2001) or for targeting specific population groups for negative treatment, such as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two (Ng, 2002) are cases in point. In democratic societies, citizenship depends upon some sort of national
identification system. By identifying who is and who is not a citizen-or who might have intermediate or temporary status, such as a permanent residentgovernments may determine not only who may vote but also who has access to certain rights and who may be expected to fulfill certain responsibilities. The bureaucratic systems for regulating citizenship that emerged in the nineteenth
century became increasingly subject to computerization in the later twentieth, processes which were also both cause and consequence of growing mobility. A combination of technological and commercial pressures, and a tilt towards “national security” priorities in the early twenty-first century converged in a number of proposals, plans, and procurements for national identification systems integrated by citizen registry databases, often referred to simply as “national ID cards” (Lyon and Bennett, 2008). Given the importance of electronic records in national identification regis-
tries, a development that enhances surveillance capacities significantly, it is crucial to understand how national ID cards are being developed today. While it is important to be aware of their genuine benefits, it is also vital to consider their possible negative effects and uses. The same goes for all new ID systems, dependent as they are on networked computer databases and-especially since 9/11-harnessed to goals such as national security, understood as “antiterrorism.” Critics argue that numerous values, taken for granted in Western liberal democracies, are jeopardized both by reducing identification to abstract personal data and by various post-9/11 measures. In the latter case, the monitoring of movement, encouraging spying on neighbors, detention without trial, and even the use of torture are now countenanced, along with the massive processing of personal data in quest of “national identification.” Even those systems that downplay the relationship between identification and national security still raise questions about democracy and citizenship because they touch directly on governance and the terms of membership in the nation-state. Considering ID cards in relation to citizenship requires attention to four
questions. First, how has citizenship been understood in modern times? This must be answered in order to see how contemporary modes of identification may affect citizenship, for better or for worse. Second, what aspects of identification and social sorting are enabled by new ID systems? New identification methods affect citizenship especially in relation to how Others are defined and treated. Third, how might citizenship be affected when the sorts of governance represented by new identification systems go well beyond the nation-state, across different nations but also across different institutional spheres? Fourth, under what conditions can ordinary citizens make a difference to how they are classified and administered through new ID systems? Before turning to these questions, however, a few comments are needed about how citizen identification might be evaluated.
