Michelle Spektor

When governments started using biometrics over 150 years ago, they mainly deployed them to govern non-citizens and groups at society’s margins, as biometric methods crystallized as tools of exclusion in eugenics, criminology, and colonial rule. Now, biometrics have become a bedrock of ID cards and other apparatuses that states around the world routinely use to identify their citizens. To address this transformation, the project takes two early examples of the twenty-first century biometric turn in state governance—British and Israeli national biometric systems proposed in the early 2000s—and traces their shared history. Dating to 1904, this interconnected past covers nine systems in the UK, Palestine, and Israel that influenced each other through circulations of technologies, experts, and methods. By drawing upon British, Israeli, and Palestinian archives, and oral history interviews with government officials, engineers, activists, and people living under biometric surveillance, the project offers a transnational account of how state power and citizenship have been tied to biometric innovation. As biometrics shifted from paper-and-ink to digital systems, and eugenic to colonial and national state-building projects, states have always used them to designate who does and does not belong in the nation.