6  Race & Class 51(3)

another meaning as the ability to gather, hold and analyse data exponentially reached a new critical mass. No longer limited by capacity, mega-computers could now hold megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and zettabytes of data. Databases could store masses of detailed and accessible personal information linked to digital images, fingerprints and DNA. Moreover, databases could ‘talk to each other’, enabling data-mining – later to be enshrined in the EU as ‘interoperability’ and the ‘principle of availability’.13 But it’s not only people’s pasts, personal profiles, physical attributes and domiciles that are detailed. The use of CCTV cameras has mushroomed alongside the emerging satellite location and tracking of goods, vehicles and people. Now nanotechnology, potentially incorporated in even the most minor of commercial purchases, promises even more precise tracking. Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century panopticon – a prison designed so that all inmates could be continuously watched while the watcher remained unseen – may become an alarming twenty-first century reality.

All of these technological changes were nearing commercial viability at the turn of the twenty-first century – all the transnationals needed was a ‘green light’ to extend the new technologies entering everyday life in society at large to big state projects with mega-bucks and guaranteed markets: 11 September provided that green light. At a stroke, gone were notions of privacy and rights; if it was technologically possible, why should it not be introduced (as former UK prime minister Tony Blair argued)? So, in the autumn of 2001, the governments of the US and the EU looked to the agencies, both internal (police and security) and external (intelligence-gathering, targeting, apprehending or neutralising) for answers to this perceived new threat. Some of the responses were directly related to tackling terrorism but many others were not. However, many of the measures ostensibly concerned with terrorism extended well beyond the initial remit, and others had little or nothing to do with tackling it.14 Nonetheless, law enforcement agencies turned to the multinationals to develop technologies to meet their ‘needs’, duly reporting back to governments on the costs and changes to the law required.

It was perhaps inevitable – given the attack on the Twin Towers – that the first lucrative market to open up for exploiting the new surveillance market was air travel. If those coming into the US and the EU could be checked and controlled, terrorists could be stopped from entering. But who were the terrorists, apart from the obvious suspects? In the perceived ‘clash of civilisations’ that underpinned and legitimated the war on terror, all migrants from the Third World were potential ‘terrorists’ and, if not ‘terrorists’, then organised gangsters or simply potential criminals. All the arguments for ‘Fortress Europe’, constructed since 1988, were back on the agenda. (One megalomaniac proposal, though, was a step too far, even for the EU. In 1997 the Austrian Council Presidency’s draft Action Plan to combat illegal immigration included the notion that everyone in the world should be fingerprinted!)

The EU-funded European Biometrics Portal in its Biometrics in Europe: trend report 2007 could not have put the new direction better: