[lthornberry]

For anyone interested in this story, or in the politics of biometric identification more broadly, you should get your hands on a copy of Keith Breckenridge's new book, The Biometric State, which is a history of the South African government's efforts to create a biometric identification system to help enforce racial legislation. Breckenridge argues that these efforts mostly failed, but set the stage for the post-apartheid use of biometrics to facilitate South Africa's social grant payments system (many, many poor South Africans live on government cash payments, mostly old age pensions or child grants). He further argues that the technology developed in South Africa is now being exported elsewhere in the developing world, where similar grant systems are used to justify increasingly intensive population registration and surveillance programs.