Vol. 42, No. 3 (2010)
NATIONAL IDS IN A GLOBAL WORLD:
SURVEILLANCE, SECURITY, AND CITIZENSHIP
David Lyon
New IDs, proliferating around the world, portend a new social and political condition. Not merely a response to post 9/11 anxieties about national security, new IDs are a novel means of governance in a world where surveillance is the dominant organizational mode. Showing a token of legitimate ID is now a basic condition for the exercise of freedom. Now that IDs depend on large-scale databases, biometrics, and sometimes RFID, what does the "new social and political condition" mean for surveillance, security and citizenship?
The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a veritable
explosion of new national ID card initiatives all over the world. They appeared
without fanfare, as in Belgium, or with sustained controversy, as in
Britain. They are being installed in vast nations such as India and China
and much smaller ones such as Mongolia or Angola.2 Rich countries and
poor ones, global north and global south, democratic and otherwise, with
previous histories of carrying IDs or not--all kinds of countries are doing
the same thing or at least a similar thing. The idea of having a biometric ID
card associated with a national registry database has quickly been globalized,
although how many national schemes actually take off remains to be
seen. Ironically, though, many of the devices being globalized are a means
of maintaining national identities.
Such ironies deserve exploration, not least because they have a
bearing on three (or more) crucial issues in today's world: surveillance,
security, and citizenship . . .
42 CASE W. RES. J. INT’L L. 607 (2010).
