Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance

Acknowledgments

x | Acknowledgments This book began as a research project in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and I wish to thank all my friends and colleagues who made my experience there so personally rewarding and intellectually transformative. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Media Studies Department at Queens College, and in the Department of Communication and the Science Studies Program at University of California, San Diego. The people who have had the most influence on the pages printed here are James Hay, Cameron McCarthy, Toby Miller, John Nerone, Jonathan Sterne, Paula Treichler, Dan Schiller, and Angharad Valdivia. They have been extraordinary intellectual guides, and their scholarship has served as models for my own. Conversations with Craig Robertson have likewise made a deep imprint on this book, and Val Hartouni read the complete manuscript and provided valuable feedback at a critical stage. I also owe a major debt of gratitude to Marie Leger, for making the kind of immeasurable contribution that only one’s closest, most trusted friend can make. I consider myself very lucky to have worked with such amazing people at NYU Press: Eric Zinner, Ciara McLaughlin, and Despina Papazoglou Gimbel, as well as the editors for the Critical Cultural Communication series, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kent Ono. Others to whom I offer special thanks are Mark Andrejevic, Ted Bailey, Boatema Boateng, Jack Bratich, Barry Brown, Lisa Cartwright, Tamara Chaplin, Cliff Christians, Sue Collins, Jennifer Dross, Rachel Dubrofsky, Grace Giorgio, Brian Goldfarb, Nitin Govil, Dan Hallin, Larissa Heinrich, Sonja Hillman, Robert Horwitz, Sharon Kehnemui, Marina Levina, David Lyon, Shoshana Magnet, Richard Maxwell, Shawn McLaucic, Dan McGee, Jen Mercieca, David Monje, Laurie Oullette, Jeremy Packer, Lisa Parks, Victor Pickard, Joy Pierce, Carrie Rentscher, Gil Rodman, Max Rodriguez , Francine Scoboria, Ben Scott, Sherri Sebastian, Kumi Silva, Rob Sloane, Gretchen Soderlund, Joseph Turow, Andrew Whitworth-Smith, Sharon Zup- Acknowledgments | xi kin, and my writing group for the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publications Program. I also would like to thank my family, who gave me unending support during the years I spent working on this project: my mother, Thelma Eileen Gates, to whom I dedicate this book; Todd Gates, Andrea Gates, Rege Hovan, Traci Lersch, Alex, Austin, Shawn, Haley, and Aaron; as well as my dad, Stan Bernadowski, and my other family, Judith Tener and David Lewis. In addition, there is no way I could have completed this book without the volumes of encouragement and insight I received from David Philip Tener. I cannot adequately express how much I owe David for the countless hours of unpaid mental and emotional labor he provided in support of this book and its author. And finally, special thanks to Greg Barrett, who made the very end of this project an education and experience unto itself. A still image taken from surveillance video at the Portland, Maine, airport on the morning of September 11, 2001, appears to show two of the alleged hijackers, Mohammad Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, passing through airport security. Courtesy Getty Images. Reprinted with permission. ...