overview

This profile supplements the guides dealing with Privacy, Security & Infocrime and Wired Consumers, in particular the pages concerned with anonymity, trust and authentication.

It highlights writing about the 'surveillance state' (whether involving government agencies or the media), identity schemes such as passports and national identification cards, and biometrics and other authentication technologies.

     this profile

The following pages cover -

surveillance - the notion of the 'surveillance state' has been a major feature of recent debate about privacy and the governance of cyberspace, with claims for example that US citizens want protection from government more than from business. This page comments on the extensive literature about the 'invisible government' and questions some myths about 'police states' (which in practice were essentially self-policing).

identity - as a German policeman once said, you are who your papers say you are. Take away those papers and you have no identity. This page looks at passports, national identity cards and private cards. It also considers fingerprinting, bertillonage, DNA registers and tattooing.

technologies - this page looks at biometrics (face-cams, retina scans etc) and other technological fixes, such as US proposals for a subcutaneous chip in every citizen.

community - community ambivalence about privacy is demonstrated by what's claimed as the rise of the 'tabloid tv generation', with a supposedly insatiable appetite for information about the private lives of other people. This page looks at the media and community attitudes, questioning some claims about recent developments and considering mechanisms such as media self-regulation and anti-paparazzi legislation

fiction - this page highlights fiction about surveillance and identity, from ETA Hoffmann and Herman Melville to Kafka, 1984 and beyond

film - and a similarly eclectic study of film, embracing Men in Black, Enemy of the State, Zorro, Gattaca, The Truman Show and The Return of Martin Guerre

conspiracy - in conclusion some pointers to writing about the net and conspiracy theory, highlighting sociological studies, opinion polls and some of the more entertaining theories (eg ICANN's fleet of black helicopter gunships).

     orientation

This section is under development. For the moment the Privacy guide points to basic works such as Oscar Gandy's The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Boulder: Westview 92), Jürgen Habermas's problematical The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press 89) and the multi-volume A History of Private Life (Cambridge: Belknap Press 87-) under the general editorship of Philippe Aries & Georges Duby.

Authentication of an individual's identity is generally dependent on one or more of three factors, essentially -

• something that you have - a drivers licence, a passport, an ID tag, an ATM card, a PKI certificate or even a chip under your skin
• something that you know - for example a password or PIN
• something you are - your fingerprint, DNA, iris pattern or even (on the wilder shores of biometrics) your smell.

   next page (surveillance)