Biometrics: A Weapon 4 New Worlds

My talk focuses on the emergence of contemporary biometric systems and the growing fear of a “surveillance society” (David Lyon, 2001). In the first part of the talk, I will analyze the history of biometric surveillance, grounded in a long history of physiognomic and racial taxonomy, on the one hand, and the potentiality of “universal suspicion,” on the other. In the second part of the talk, I examine the case of biometric legislation in Israel, aimed at making biometrics – nowadays combined with AI – an expression of technological superiority and what Deleuze and Guattari called the “control society” or the “man-machine assemblage.” Such universal assemblages are used, often as experimental weapons, against populations in the “global south”.