IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 57

Michel Foucault. Foucault's concepts of governmentality
establish how the desire for the State to reaffirm its own
power generates a biopolitics that depends upon the
lives of its citizens [13]; by extending its biopower, the
State is then given the power over the life and death of
its citizens [14]. From this, Agamben explores the construction of " homo sacer, " a figure who arises in a biopolitical system wherein " bare life " has been subsumed
within a political system such that there become populations that can be killed, in the name of the further
existence of the State, without it being considered a sacrifice nor a homicide [15]. Recalling this paper's earlier
discussion of " non-citizenship projects, " immigration,
and refugees, at the heart of homo sacer is, Agamben
argues, questions of identity and more specifically citizenship: homo sacer is sorted from other members of
the population exactly by asking " Are you a citizen " and
by extension " What resources do you deserve? " and, in
extreme cases, " Do you deserve to live? " 7
Much has been written about Foucault's theorizing of
the panopticon and its central placement within his
eighteenth century understanding of the emergence of
disciplinary power. While there are obvious examples of
disciplinary power within airports, panopticism doesn't
fully address mechanics like the BAE, nor the use of
FRS within those virtual power exchanges. FRS, in the
context of the BAE, is not a panoptic technology and
has far less to do with surveillance than it does governmentality: it is utilized as a way to maintain State control over the normalization of the majority, aimed at
homo sacer, those who are included within the biopolitical system (as potential holders of a legitimate visa)
while also being excluded (as non-citizens, as potentially guilty of not having a legitimate visa). Therefore, biometrics, and FRS more specifically, is a part of what
Didier Bigo calls the " banopticon " [16] or technologies
that sort those who are banned from those who are not.
Under the rationality of national security, economics,
health, identity (or any number of potential reasons), the
banopticon depends on databases and networked technologies, the aforementioned State and corporate identity systems, all working inter-operably to identify the
individuals and populations within those systems. Ajana
further clarifies that the sorting done within the banopticon is achieved " through the administrative convergence and compulsory cross notification which allow

7

More recently, scholars like Achille Mbembe have expanded Agamben and
Foucault's work to include " necropolitics " or instances of political power
aimed not at the production of death; Mbembe, as well as thinkers like
Jasbir Puar and David Mitchell, have done excellent work identifying and
addressing the limits of Agamben and Foucault's biopolitics, and extending
both theorists' concepts to more actively include critical considerations of
race, settler colonialism, and disability. Given the space restrictions of this
paper, I was not able to fully address these thinkers but know that their work
will be essential in thinking through the problems of this paper in the future.

DECEMBER 2020

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(and impose) the merging and sharing of personal information across a plethora of public and private bodies " [5,
p. 73 (author's italics)]. Administrative regulations merge
with the individual body, and its attached identifying public/private markers and biographic information, to create
a system that is capable of deciding the categories of life
and citizenship resources attached to that person.
Returning to Foucault, he reminds us that when a
technology is centered on life it is " a technology which
brings together the mass effects characteristic of a population, which tries to control the series of random
events that can occur in a living mass, a technology that
tries to predict the probability of those events " [17].
Recalling this paper's earlier exploration of FRS as prob-

The politicization of citizenship
and the use of biometric technologies,
have produced a form of citizenship
based on identity management and
authentication in the name of
national security.
ability-centric, biopolitics must include " forecasts, statical estimates and overall measures " because " their
purpose is...essentially, to intervene at the level at
which these general phenomena are determined to
intervene at the level of their generality " [17, p. 246].
FRS's probabilistic nature aligns with bio-political concerns in that it can easily be used to predict the likelihood of a State threat so as to enact governmentality:
as part of the BAE, the forecasts FRS undertakes examine the life it takes into its vision and sorts it into those
who deserve the privileges of citizenship and those who
are banned from those resources. The politicization of
bare life into citizenship and the use of biometric technologies, like FRS, have produced a form of " securitized
citizenship, " a form of citizenship that is built on the
mechanics of identity management and authentication
in the name of national security [5, p. 10].
Again, the sorting mechanics, and the national
desires feeding those mechanics, are not particularly
novel: however, that FRS is incredibly efficient and flexible to whatever " threat " is perceived by a nation, while
also being probabilistic and bias prone, makes it vulnerable to actors who may wish to use a massive biometric infrastructure, and/or assemblages like the BAE,
in harmful ways. Whether that is in the day-to-day

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