Mary Fan has a
review over at Jotwell of Margaret Hu’s new article, Biometric ID
Cybersurveillance, 88 Indiana L.J.__ (forthcoming 2013). Mary
Fan is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Washington who specializes
in cross-border, U.S. and international criminal law and procedure. Margaret is a Duke Visiting Assistant
Professor, who will be joining the Washington & Lee faculty in the fall (we’ll
miss you, Margaret!). Her research
interests include the intersection of immigration policy, national security,
and civil rights, as well as critical legal studies. Margaret previously served
as senior policy advisor for the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and
Pacific Islanders, and also served as special policy counsel in the Office of
Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices (OSC),
Civil Rights Division, U. S. Department of Justice, in Washington, D.C. She also has fabulous shoes, though I suspect
that’s less relevant to most Lounge readers than it is to me.
From Fan’s review:
The dystopian world of “biometric ID cybersurveillance” that
Margaret Hu envisions makes the old passports and smart agents seem
old-fashioned. She catalogues the many
ways the government is working toward expanding its “virtual cybersurveillance
and dataveillance capacities.” She maps
out emerging forms of “bureaucratized cybersurveillance” – more pervasive ways
of technology-assisted identity verification and tracking. For example, instead of those stodgy
information-limited modes of ID checks such as reviewing paper passports, alien
identity papers, social security cards and driver’s licenses, she writes of
biometric ID checks, digitalized IDs and other more information-laden methods
of identification. Automated checks, database screening and biometric IDs may
even “remove[] the matching process from the trained expertise of specific
forensic experts,” leaving us at the mercy of glitchy and hard-to-contest
hardware and software.
Read the whole
thing over at Jotwell.