Power and Panopticism-Biometrics

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how biometrics, or technologies of surveillance, operate to produce and regulate certain kinds of subjects. The paper discusses the forms of social power that are produced by gathering visual information. It also looks at what kinds of subjects are being produced by technologies of surveillance and to what ideals they are forced to conform.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Capability Exists
Foucault And Panopticism
Positive and Negative Impacts On Society
Current Direction Of Biometrics
Biometrics In Society Becoming Pervasive
Results Of Biometric Panopticism
Analysis and Conclusion

From the Paper:

"The questioning of the use of this type technology has been applied diligently and there are many and various angles that the use of biometrics may be viewed from in the process of attempting to disseminate what the results of this use might mean to human beings in the future. Foucault took this view and ran with it but for one who reads Foucault, they should be warned that resulting from that reading will be a figurative splinter in the mind of the reader that will fester and produce swells of fear and flushes of embarrassment at the thought of being so completely unveiled before the world-at-large. Indeed, it is this observational trepidation, which effectively indicates, in this brief study how panopticism throughout society and in both public and private space and place would render the individual to nothing more than an amoeba under a microscopic lens completely exposed and completely controlled in fearful adherence to the 'status quo'. Naturally, the entity holding the largest share of power is the individual who is looking through the lens at the very powerless held captive within the all-seeing eye of technological panopticism."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Weber, Karsten (2006) The Next Step: Privacy Invasions by Biometrics and ICT Implants Ubiquity -- Volume 7, Issue 45 (November 21, 2006 November 27, 2006)
• Gray, Mitchell (2003) Urban Surveillance and Panopticism: Will We Recognize the Facial Recognition Society?" Surveillance and Society 1(3): 314-330.
• Foucault, Michel Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-228 translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (translation i?1/2 1977). Online available at: http://www.trust-us.ch/cryptome/03-Cartome-061213/foucault.htm

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