In the current issue

Conference Report
Yoel Bergman, "Thirty-Eighth Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology"

Essay Reviews
Simon A. Cole, "The Faces of Biometrics: Lisa S. Nelson, America Identified; Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future"

Orit Halpern, "Affective Machines: Elizabeth A. Wilson: Affect and Artificial Intelligence"

Philip Mirowski, "Minding the Cybernetic Gap: Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain"

Megan Mullen, "Demystifying Some Momentous Changes: Richard R. John, Network Nation"

Casey O'Donnell, "On the Back of a Flying Gryphon: Soaring
Over/Through the Global Game Industry: Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire; Bonnie A. Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest; William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization"

Technology and Culture
January 2012

The Face of Biometrics

Lisa S. Nelson, America Identified
Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future

Simon A. Cole
Biometric-identification technologies—technologies that use bodily attributes to identify individuals for surveillance, social control, commerce, and other purposes—are becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday life in post-9/11 society. Not surprisingly, these developments have sparked increased scholarly interest, and a number of new books about biometric technologies have appeared recently.

Two of these new books are Lisa S. Nelson's America Identified: Biometric Technology and Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Pp. viii+258. $32) and Kelly A. Gates's Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: NYU Press, 2011. Pp. xii+264. $24). Both draw at least somewhat on technology studies writ large, but the former is rooted in policy studies, the latter in communications. Neither really takes the kind of approach that would be taken by historians or sociologists of technology.

America Identified is the broader work, taking on biometrics in general, rather than a specific set of technologies. The book includes a thorough and well-researched account of the history of the development of biometric identification technologies and a cogent discussion of the political philosophy underlying the notion of privacy. Its primary sources, around which the book is centered, are a set of focus-group interviews with eighty-seven participants and a national telephone survey of a thousand participants.

Nelson sought to measure these research subjects' understandings of
such concepts as privacy and liberty as they relate to biometric technology. She found that her research subjects were more nuanced about the relationship between privacy and biometric technology than much of surveillance literature would suggest. Rather than lashing themselves to the mast like Odysseus—asking the government to invade their own privacy for their own good (p. 182)—Nelson's subjects were more inclined to consider carefully whether various privacy invasions were warranted in terms of the nature and seeming appropriateness of the privacy invasion and the perceived gain in security. Moreover, they fully recognized the "irony" (p. 120) surrounding biometric technology: namely, that the same suite of technologies is essential both for state (or corporate) surveillance and for enhanced protection of personal information.

With this data, Nelson proposes "to use societal perceptions of biometric technology to map the public policy considerations that are important and consequential to the integration of the technology into our lives." She argues that a "starting point for technological or policy innovation is to understand the individuals who are subject to its purview."With her data, Nelson proposes "to build a policy paradigm for the integration of biometric technology into the daily experiences of Americans" (p. 4).

Nelson sees this approach as rooted in technology studies research on
users, citing scholars such as Claude Fischer, Nelly Oudshoorn, and Trevor Pinch as inspirations. But whereas these scholars sought to understand the role that users play in the construction of technological systems and artifacts, Nelson's goal seems quite different. If I read her correctly, she proposes to construct technology policy from the preferences of users as measured by focus groups and surveys.

This is an innovative idea, but it would seem to raise a host of questions that are not directly addressed by America Identified. For example: Is the user (like the proverbial customer) "always right"? Should technology policy be constructed around user preferences, no matter what those preferences are? Are there no values in setting policy choices that would trump such preferences? What if users are misinformed or have preferences that are immoral or violate the rights of minorities? How realistic is it to think that policy would be set in this way anyway? In addition, Nelson focuses on how, but not whether, biometrics should be deployed. Indeed, at times Nelson appears to treat the deployment of biometrics as an imperative and views her task as facilitating its "societal acceptance" (p. 185).

Thus, while constructivist sociologists of technology are interested in the user construction of technologies, Nelson is interested in the user construction of policy. Kelly Gates turns Nelson's approach on its head, emphasizing the technological construction of users. She might have Nelson in mind when she writes: "What proponents rather deterministically refer to as 'user acceptance' of biometric technologies, is in fact a complicated matter of creating the kinds of people who will use them" (p. 148).

Our Biometric Future focuses on a single biometric technology: facial
recognition. This is a rich topic, fraught with metaphor, and Gates approaches it in a number of different ways in this slightly episodic book. She first explains why the face remained a bureaucratically and commercially appealing biometric identifier, despite the fact that the technical challenges posed by facial recognition exceed those associated with other biometric markers. For example, facial recognition can be accomplished from a distance without physical contact, and most people in Western societies are culturally accustomed to being identified by their faces.

Gates then analyzes the well-publicized failed experiment in using facial recognition to police Ybor City, a nightlife district in Tampa, Florida. She contextualizes this incident by engagingly tracing the history of this neighborhood all the way back to its origins as one for Hispanic laborers in the cigar industry.

Gates then turns to the role of terrorism in facial recognition. Obviously,
the post-9/11War on Terror played an enormous role in stimulating
the development of facial recognition technology. Here, Gates turns toward issues of race and promises to show"that, in practice, there is nothing neutral about the way computers are being programmed to 'see' the face" (p. 102). This is not surprising, given the long, intertangled histories of photography and race; Francis Galton, for example, used composite photography to try to reveal pure racial "types" (p. 19).

What is surprising is that we then learn that "facial recognition systems
were being designed to identify individual faces, not classify types" (p. 110). How is it then that Gates characterizes facial recognition as "technologies designed to target specific types of faces and bodies" (p. 106)? It turns out that she is referring to the use of the notion of "the face of terror" as metaphor by the government and the media. Thus "[a] though facial recognition algorithms were not expressly designed to classify faces according to racial typologies, the symbolic authority of the technology in the post-9/11 context very much depended on the idea that it could in fact be used to identify a mythic class of demonic faces that had penetrated the national territory and the national imagination" (p. 101). In other words, government and media encourage the public to believe that facial recognition works like Galton's composite photography, but, in fact, it does not. It is to this metaphorical connection, and only this metaphorical connection, that Gates is referring when she defines "[t]he 'facialization' of terrorism [as] defining non-state forms of political violence with recourse to the racist logic of amythic demonized facial type" (ibid.).Whatever the merits of this argument, we seem to have become several steps removed from our original concern—the writing of race into the technology itself.

The most interesting chapter is the last, in which Gates analyzes the
development of Automated Facial Expression Analyses (AFEA), a far more exotic and technically challenging area. It is only in this chapter that she really opens the proverbial black box and delves into the technical debates and challenges behind the technology. Interestingly, the machines have human challengers, in the form of psychologists like Paul Ekman and his Facial Action Coding System.

Gates argues that "[t]his process cannot help but transform the meaning and experience of affective relations, remaking them as technical processes that exhibit a level of precision, differentiation, and standardization uncharacteristic of their complicated, culturally and historically variable analog forms" (p. 189). In short, she worries about reductionism not just for the body, but for bodily expression. But Gates seems to take this argument too far in implying that biometric engineers need to understand "that there are many ways of seeing the face, and that the meaning and experience of face-to-face interaction is a historically and culturally variable set of practices" (p. 11). Biometric engineers may well understand this on some level . . . and still do what they do.

Readers of this journal may find themselves wishing that more of Our
Biometric Future were like this last chapter. One finds oneself wanting to know perhaps less about the media hype that surrounds facial recognition and perhaps more about standard technology studies questions: How does facial recognition work? What competing designs were there and how was the competition resolved? What design choices are written into the technology? Perhaps the difficulty is that it is too soon to write the history of facial recognition; we still do not know how the technology will develop, what it will become, and what it will do. We still do not know our biometric future.

Simon A. Cole is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (2001).

©2012 by the Society for the History of Technology.