Recognizing friend and foe: Biometrics, veridiction, and the iraq war

Abstract

In analyzing the deployment of biometrics in Iraq, argue that whereas the body was seen as a site of verification in 20 century surveillance and identification practices, in the ongoing War on Terror, and the Iraq War more specifically, it became a site of veridiction—a site in which the truth about the security of the state can be analyzed (Foucault 2008: 32). The body thus became the basis for determining not so much one's unique identity but one's friendliness to the normative state order. Enemies could thus be identified and confined as a group, and in this process the state could be secured. In the ongoing of the War on Terror, the visual regime of veridiction has been further articulated to the logic of digital technologies in order to categorize an unfamiliar diverse population into a binary simplistic schema consistent of true and false, therefore friend or foe, and thus "go"—allowed to move through the country—or "no go"—destined to be detained. In other words, the digitization of veridiction as the primary goal of biometrics is evident in the automation of the recognition method, the conversion of the archive into database, the transition away from the anthropological station onto mobile dispersed data-gathering enterprise, and replacement of scientific expertise with easy-to-use automated intelligence.