Article:
Big Data Biopolitics: Computing Racialised Assemblages in Terrorist Watchlist Matching

dc.creatorKafer, Gary
dc.date.accessioned2021-05-06T14:08:16Z
dc.date.available2021-05-06T14:08:16Z
dc.date.issued2019
dc.description.abstractThis article considers the medial logics of American terrorist watchlist screening in order to study the ways in which digital inequities result from specific computational parameters. Central in its analysis is Secure Flight, an automated prescreening program run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that identifies lowand high-risk airline passengers through name-matching algorithms. Considering Secure Flight through the framework of biopolitics, this article examines how passenger information is aggregated, assessed and scored in order to construct racialised assemblages of passengers that reify discourses of American exceptionalism. Racialisation here is neither a consequence of big data nor a motivating force behind the production of risk-assessment programs. Both positions would maintain that discrimination is simply an effect of an information management system that considers privacy as its ultimate goal, which is easily mitigated with more accurate algorithms. Not simply emerging as an effect of discriminatory practices at airport security, racialisation formats the specific techniques embedded in terrorist watchlist matching, in particular the strategies used to transliterate names across different script systems. I argue thus that the biopolitical production of racialised assemblages forms the ground zero of Secure Flight’s computational parameters, as well as its claims to accuracy. This article concludes by proposing a move away from the call to solve digital inequities with more precise algorithms in order to carefully interrogate the forms of power complicit in the production and use of big data analytics.en
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/15782
dc.identifier.urihttps://mediarep.org/handle/doc/16617
dc.languageeng
dc.publishertranscript
dc.publisher.placeBielefeld
dc.relation.isPartOfissn:2364-2114
dc.relation.ispartofseriesDigital Culture & Society
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 Generic
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
dc.subjectÜberwachungde
dc.subjectTerrorismusde
dc.subjectDiskriminierungde
dc.subjectBiopolitikde
dc.subjectBig Dataen
dc.subjectsurveillanceen
dc.subjectWar on Terroren
dc.subjectdiscriminationen
dc.subjectbiopoliticsen
dc.subject.ddcddc:791
dc.titleBig Data Biopolitics: Computing Racialised Assemblages in Terrorist Watchlist Matchingen
dc.typearticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typeArticleen
local.coverpage2021-05-29T02:32:58
local.identifier.firstpublisheddoi:https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2019-0103
local.source.epage42
local.source.issue1
local.source.issueTitleInequalities and Divides in Digital Cultures
local.source.spage23
local.source.volume5

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