In May, Khalaf al-Rumaithi traveled from Turkey to Jordan on a Turkish passport. He was detained at Amman airport after taking an iris scan, which revealed that he is the same successor to Al-Rumaithi, who was sentenced in 2013 to 15 years in prison in the United Arab Emirates, in a group trial that included affiliated organizations. human rights They attributed this to political motives. The man was sent to the UAE, where he is being held.
Annoying signs
“We are concerned about the increasing use of biometric technology to facilitate close collaboration between repressive governments, something we have seen inThe Middle East “And also in Central Asia,” Yana Gorokhovskaya of the US-based NGO Feridun House told DW.
And not all that is new in the matter. For example, fingerprints have been used to identify people since the late 19th century, and DNA since the 1980s, but biometric information is much more diverse today and includes everything from the iris or the shape of an earlobe, to the shape that identifies the way a person breathes or walks. .
There is some kind of individual verification, for example, when a cell phone is unlocked with a fingerprint. Another method is remote biometric identification (RBI), in which a computer program compares a person’s unique data with large data banks or other files.
More danger, due to artificial intelligence
This is the method that human rights experts are most concerned about, especially if used in conjunction with advanced algorithms artificial intelligence (Amnesty International). There are several aspects that point to change, explains Ella Jakobowska, policy advisor for the European Network for Digital Rights, in Brussels: “One is the number of different ways to identify and track a person. The other is the possibility of Programming Pattern recognition has grown exponentially in the past five years.
In addition, “it is now faster and cheaper than ever to store and process large amounts of data”, he says, warning that this increases “the potential for arbitrary surveillance measures”.
Widespread use in the Middle East
Currently, almost all countries in the Middle East use biometric information at their airports and borders. But some go further than that. For example, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates collect biometric data in records that allow citizens to access state services. Other countries, such as Iraq or Yemen, require them to register for elections.
And experts warn that all this information can be used for other purposes. “A government could create a biometric database of all of its residents and allow it to be used along with surveillance camera recordings from an entire city,” Jakubowska says. “This would give you vivid insight into the more intimate aspects of people’s lives. You could find out who met a journalist, who went to a gay bar, who cohabited with a political opponent or dissident…and that can be very dangerous.”
Discuss limitations
The European Union is discussing what will likely be the world’s first law on artificial intelligence. Among the more contentious issues is how biometric information should be used, or whether it should be used at all.
“What really worries me is that if the EU says there are legitimate use cases for these technologies, we are legalizing them for other countries,” Jakobowska says.
The IA Now Institute in New York is calling for a complete ban on remote biometric identification. And according to his manager, Mba Kak, that’s the only thing that makes sense. And not just in the Middle East, but also in the United States and Europe. The problems of these regimes are not solved by magic in Western liberal democracies, although the grim reality of what could go wrong is usually immediately apparent in authoritarian regimes.
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