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The illegal body: `Eurodac' and the politics of biometric identification

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Abstract

Biometrics is often described as `the next big thingin information technology'. Rather than IT renderingthe body irrelevant to identity – a mistaken idea tobegin with – the coupling of biometrics with ITunequivocally puts the body center stage. The questions to be raised about biometrics is howbodies will become related to identity, and what thenormative and political ramifications of this couplingwill be. Unlike the body rendered knowable in thebiomedical sciences, biometrics generates a readable body: it transforms the body's surfaces andcharacteristics into digital codes and ciphers to be`read' by a machine. ``Your iris is read, in the sameway that your voice can be printed, and yourfingerprint can be read'', by computers that, in turn,have become ``touch-sensitive'', and endowed with seeingand hearing capacities. Thus transformed into readable``text'', the meaning and significance of the biometricbody will be contingent upon ``context'', and therelations established with other ``texts''. Thesemetaphors open up ways to investigate the differentmeanings that will become attached to the biometricbody and the ways in which it will be tied toidentity. This paper reports on an analysis of plans andpractices surrounding the `Eurodac' project, aEuropean Union initiative to use biometrics (specif.fingerprinting) in controlling illegal immigration andborder crossings by asylum seekers.

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  1. Centre for the Philosophy of Information and Communication Technology, Department of Philosophy, Erasmus University of, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail

    Irma van der Ploeg

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  1. Irma van der Ploeg
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van der Ploeg, I. The illegal body: `Eurodac' and the politics of biometric identification. Ethics and Information Technology 1, 295–302 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010064613240

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010064613240

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