Infrastructuring data-publics: Implications of design and governance of transnational biometric database systems

• In Event: Collating Publics In Collections Of Human Biological Material And Data 1

Abstract

In recent years we witness the growth of transnational biometric database systems which derive from attempts of surveilling suspect populations in order to anticipate and investigate criminal and terroristic threats. This paper deals with the implications of database systems – in particular their design and governance, but also their organic unfolding within environments – on understanding and regulating data-publics. How do we know about and understand data-publics constituted through transnational biometric surveillance technologies and what are limits of knowing? How do the IT governance systems and the organizational work design of database systems (infra)structure how data-subjects are entitled to and have access to exercise rights?
This paper focuses on two examples of transnational biometric database systems set up for criminal identification and migration control purposes in the European Union: the decentralized forensic DNA data exchange system regulated under the Prüm decisions and the centralized fingerprint database system EURODAC. The empirical basis are policy documents and secondary literature representing the EU internal IT and security discourse reflecting the composition of transnational biometric database systems.
Engaging with the literature on epistemic and bureaucratic authority structures of “e-infrastructures” the paper investigates their impact on constituting data-publics and enabling or disabling data-subjects. It explores 1) how DNA or fingerprint technologies provide different authority of knowing about data-publics; 2) how centralized and decentralized architectures of database systems shape different classifications of data-publics; and 3) how governance and designs of database infrastructure produce different vulnerabilities to potential function creep with impact on framing data-publics and data-subjects’ rights.

Author

• Nina Amelung, University of Minho