Martin, Aaron 

a.k.martin@lse.ac.uk

Biometric futures in “a surveillance society?”: a case study of the United Kingdom’s National Identity Scheme

Today’s information society is increasingly mediated by automatic identification technologies (AITs), such as bar codes, optical character recognition, magnetic stripes, smart cards and radio frequency identification. While biometrics appear to be the next AIT for incorporation into daily life, their widespread introduction and mass diffusion into society by way of a compulsory national identity scheme would represent a sea change in identification as it would involve the capture and digitization of biometric information of an entire national population, plus certain visitors.

Such a scheme is currently underway in the UK, in the form of the National Identity Scheme (NIS). At the same time the public continue to debate the merits and drawbacks of living in a so-called surveillance society, made possible by the much maligned “database state”. However, social scientists and IS researchers have yet to explore the social psychological and related public policy aspects of the proposed biometric technologies in the Scheme.

Drawing on concepts and insights from research on public understandings of science and technology, the sociology of expectations, and the IS literature on technological framing and organizing visions, I am studying how the public conceptualize and construct such an innovative technological system as a national biometric identity scheme before it is a material reality. Future expectations of the system are of special interest to the research as the NIS is not expected to be fully in place until 2017.

I pose three research questions. First, how are biometrics in the Scheme portrayed by their governments sponsors? Second, how do the media and public receive and interpret such portrayals? And third, in what ways do these various political and public understandings of biometrics interact to constitute the NIS as an artefact?

My ongoing empirical work includes the analysis of public statements by officialdom regarding the NIS and the concurrent media coverage, with an emphasis on how biometrics are portrayed. In addition I am running focus group interviews with relevant social groups and studying user discussions on the now disabled, Home Office-sponsored mylifemyid public engagement website.
 

Supervisor: Dr Edgar Whitley

Aaron Martin’s personal website

page last updated 26 May 2009

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