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

Biometrics is often described as 'the next big thing in information technology'. Rather than IT rendering the body irrelevant to identity -a mistaken idea to begin with -the coupling of biometrics with IT unequivocally puts the body center stage. The questions to be raised about biometrics is how bodies will become related to identity, and what the normative and political ramifications of this coupling will be. Unlike the body rendered knowable in the biomedical sciences, biometrics generates a readable body: it transforms the body's surfaces and characteristics into digital codes and ciphers to be 'read' by a machine. "Your iris is read, in the same way that your voice can be printed, and your fingerprint can be read", by computers that, in turn, have become "touch-sensitive", and endowed with seeing and hearing capacities. Thus transformed into readable "text", the meaning and significance of the biometric body will be contingent upon "context", and the relations established with other "texts". These metaphors open up ways to investigate the different meanings that will become attached to the biometric body and the ways in which it will be tied to identity. This paper reports on an analysis of plans and practices surrounding the 'Eurodac' project, a European Union initiative to use biometrics (specif. fingerprinting) in controlling illegal immigration and border crossings by asylum seekers. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.