When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity by Shoshana Amielle Magnet (review)

Biometric technologies used for the confirmation of individual human identity are a persistent example of a technological vaporware, probably more familiar to most of us from science fiction than from their slow increase in use in personal travel documents, such as passports and fingerprint locks on cars and laptops. However, particularly in the post-9/11 United States, the biometrics industry is currently expanding, landing multibillion dollar contracts in border control, adding to its existing footholds in law-enforcement, welfare and prison management. Focusing on five main themes surrounding the technology, When Biometrics Fail provides an historical overview of the growth of the industry since the 1970s. Using evidence from a range of contemporary sources, journalism, media and recent research published on biometric technologies, Magnet demonstrates rather compellingly how these technologies fail to live up to Daston and Galison's [1,2] concept of "mechanical objectivity," the idea that machines are capable of making unbiased judgments owing to the privileged link to the physical world (and lack of subjectivity) with which they are associated by marketers, computer scientists, politicians and the media.

In making this point, When Biometrics Fail offers a damning analysis of the technical problems that dog biometric identification, many of which stem from the premises on which individual difference is defined. Magnet explores the implications of these limitations with reference to the range of sites in which biometric technology has been implemented, exploring the social problems that it is posited to be able to solve and showing that in many cases its effect is only to hide, or exacerbate, these problems. As Magnet argues, biometrics fails because it is discriminatory both in the methodology used to identify individuals and also in the social implications of the manner and sites in which it is implemented (prisons, welfare, border control). Further, there is a wider and deeper problem throughout that cannot be separated from the bias of the users of the technology. This is that the whole enterprise is based on a false premise: the idea that the biological body can be fixed upon as an enduring, digitizable and recoverable document. This premise/idea has been challenged in the scholarship of thinkers like Donna Haraway and Judith Butler with the critical concept of "corporeal fetishism." This model of biological identity as an essential and fixed quality both is out of date insofar as the humanities have understood the body for a considerable time (notions such as gender are no longer considered only biological rather than performed) and also positions the body as a commodity.

In four short chapters Magnet makes clear the practical impact of these assumptions and introduces faulty models of biological identity that are both dated and troublingly linked to discredited scientific ideas of biological race and practices of profiling and reading the body, such as physiognomy. By discussing these assumptions as they manifest in the way in which biometrics are applied, Magnet identifies a range of cultural problems that stem from the acceptance of the technology as a cure-all. She is also not slow in pointing out that the research in this area is painfully unaware of how out of date its approach is; the concepts that she draws upon to question it are now basic to the canon of gender and technology studies. In addition to this, the models of objectivity that these technologies invoke in order to state their authority are long discredited and highly simplistic in scientific terms.

The opening chapter analyzes what can be seen as broadly discriminatory aspects of how biometric recognition is achieved. One example, retinal scanning, is only effective on light-colored eyes because of light reflections in darker corneas that interfere with the camera's view of the veins in the retina, making the technology as it has been developed in Western laboratories biased in favor of a particular population. Magnet very effectively places a...