Move over, mobile phones. There\u2019s a new technological fix for poverty: biometric identification. Speaking at the World Bank on April 24, Nandan Nilekani, director of India\u2019s universal identification scheme, promised that the project will be \u201ctransformational.\u201d It \u201cuses the most sophisticated technology \u2026 to solve the most basic of development challenges.\u201d The massive ambition, known as Aadhaar, aims to capture fingerprints, photographs, and iris scans of 1.2 billion residents, with the assumption that a national identification program will be a key ingredient to \u201cempower poor and underprivileged residents.\u201d The World Bank\u2019s president, Jim Yong Kim, effusively summed up the promise as \u201cjust stunning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although few can match Nilekani\u2019s grand scale, Aadhaar is but one example of the development sector\u2019s growing fascination with technologies for registering, identifying, and monitoring citizens. Systems that would be controversial\u2014if not outright rejected\u2014in the West because of the threat they pose to civil liberties are being implemented in many developing countries, often with the support of Western donors. The twin goals of development and security are being used to justify a bewildering array of initiatives, including British-funded biometric voting technology in Sierra Leone, U.N. surveillance drones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and biometric border controls in Ghana supported by the World Bank.<\/p>\n
This vigorous adoption of technologies for collecting, processing, tracking, profiling, and managing personal data\u2014in short, surveillance technologies\u2014risks centralizing an increasing amount of power in the hands of government authorities, often in places where democratic safeguards and civil society watchdogs are limited. While these initiatives may be justified in certain cases, rarely are they subject to a rigorous assessment of their effects on civil liberties or political dissent. On the contrary, they often seek to exploit the lack of scrutiny: Nilekani recommended in another recent speech that biometric proponents work \u201cquickly and quietly\u201d before opposition can form. The sensitivity of the information gathered in aid programs is not lost on intelligence agencies: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Mazzetti recently revealed that the Pentagon funded a food aid program in Somalia for the express purpose of gathering details on the local population. Even legitimate aid programs now maintain massive databases of personal information, from household names and locations to biometric information. <\/p>\n