Chapter 7: The Politics of Profiling - Profiling Machines [Electronic resources] : Mapping the Personal Information Economy نسخه متنی

Chapter 7: The Politics of Profiling

Overview

A profile . . . is a kind of prior ordering, . . . a model or figure that organizes multiple sources of information to scan for matching or exceptional cases. Resembling an informated form of stereotyping, profiling technology has become increasingly popular in targeting individuals for specialized messages, instructions, inspection, or treatment. Advertisers use it to determine the timing and placement of ads to reach the widest segment of selected audiences. Educators use it to adjust course content to specific populations of students, police to target potential offenders. Profiling, in turn, is only one of a host of increasingly available computer-assisted actuarial and diagnostic procedures that are being used, among other things, to identify individuals for various tasks and or entitlements, to define potential risks or hazards, and to forestall or enhance certain behaviors and traits. Unlike stereotypes, however, profiles are not merely ‘‘false images’’ that are used to justify differences in power. Diagnostic profiles exist rather at the intersection of actual and virtual worlds. (Bogard 1996, 27)

Interest in profiling is at an all-time high in the United States—in films, in books, and on television news programs,^[1] but the practice remains surprisingly abstract. Although profiling maintains a certain enigmatic quality, it does have specific applications, technologies, and spaces—all elements that I touch on to varying degrees in this book. In this final chapter, I discuss the conceptual framework of consumer profiling and its place within previous cultural studies of technology, media, and consumption, particularly as it applies to politics.

William Bogard’s The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (1996) is one of the few sustained critiques of the technology and politics of profiling, but I believe that a relatively simple logic is behind the need to construct a picture out of the seemingly infinite qualities of everyday life. To profile is to attempt to account for the unknown—our inability to adequately capture, contain, or regulate and govern behavior, thought, language, and action. In a recent article (Elmer 1997b), I note the proliferation of television shows that feature profiling (most prominently NBC’s Profiler and Fox’s The X-Files and Millennium) and the inability of their characters to capture the criminal, to know what’s ‘‘out there,’’ or in fact to know who is even human. To combat this precarious state of affairs, the protagonists in these programs and other shows and films that feature law enforcement^[2] try to match patterns of criminal (or alien) behavior to the modus operandi (MOs) of known (meaning catalogued) criminals. The one-size-fits-all profile typically describes a male in his late thirties who is a loner with above-average intelligence.

Such contemporary narratives, stories, plots, and programming all play on the link between the widespread fear of the unknown and the need to profile—to come up with at least some picture of the transgressor. Not surprisingly, social fears of the unknown were also heightened throughout the year 1999 by uncertainties over how computers would react on December 31. The apocalypse that might be triggered by the new millennium was not a moral disaster but a technological crisis for information networks. What the new millennium therefore potentially brings is a systematic, automated corruption of the networks of information—bugs, viruses, and outdated chips that can disable the simplest tasks of everyday life.

Although this book has focused on the complex technological elements of profiling within our consumer culture, the fields of criminology and psychology have also provided insights into its discriminatory applications. The historian and novelist Caleb Carr, for instance, offers a compelling look at an early use of criminal profiling through a mix of narrative fiction and historical fact. Set in New York City in 1896, Caleb’s The Alienist (1994) opens with a detailed description of a series of unimaginably gruesome murders. At first it appears that the authorities have failed to recognize the relationship or pattern among similar crimes perpetrated over a period of two years. Later, however, readers learn that the police department’s lack of interest in the crimes was in no small part due to the nature of the victims, who are all teenage male prostitutes. The crimes are invisible to the public eye, and the book’s chief protagonist, a crime reporter for the New York Times, notes that his editors view stories about such crimes as unfit to print. The book’s first chapters also introduce the members of what becomes the city’s ‘‘unofficial’’ investigations unit—the crime reporter, two marginalized Jewish New York City police detectives, and Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, an enigmatic psychologist (or ‘‘alienist’’).^[3]

In The Alienist, Carr provides a lavish description of the moral landscape of late nineteenth-century Manhattan as well as a discussion of the social implications of the convergence of mathematical statistics (specifically, the establishment and significance of patterns) with behavioral psychology. Consequently, his main characters are developed largely through their relationships to the production and utility of simulated pictures of probable social, political, and criminal transgressors. Thus, whereas academic authors such as Ian Hacking (1990) and Armand Mattelart (1996) offer compelling discussions of the relationship between statistics, measurements, and the governance of the nation-state, Carr’s piece of fiction sheds light on the social and political dimensions of tracking, profiling, and hence governing individual behavior. As Carr’s most engaging character, Dr. Kreizler, notes (Carr 1994,61):

We know nothing of the person we seek, and are unlikely ever to find witnesses who know more than we do. Circumstantial evidence will be sparse at best—he has been at work for years, after all, and has had more than enough time to perfect his technique. What we must do—the only thing that can be done—is to paint an imaginary picture of the sort of person that might commit such acts. If we had such a picture, the significance of what little evidence we collected would be dramatically magnified. We might reduce the haystack in which our needle hides to something more like a—a pile of straw, if you will.

One of the politically questionable results of this shift in tactics— from attempting to track the actions of individual criminals to researching the qualities of possible or probable transgressors through patterns of behavior—is the production of broadly defined ‘‘deviant’’ social profiles (such as the aforementioned white male loner as the quintessential one-size-fits-all criminal profile). When such broad and all-encompassing descriptions are produced, profiling virtually (literally and figuratively speaking) ‘‘guarantees’’ and ‘‘serves up’’ a phalanx of typically marginalized individuals for surveillance (Bogard 1996, 28). Given that such profiles are embedded with cultural and social values, alongside or in spite of the hard evidence or clues in any one case, potential discriminatory applications are all too apparent. ‘‘Driving while black’’ is the best- known and most widely reported misuse of racial profiling on highways by law enforcement.^[4] The race-based traffic stop is an example of excessively broad (indeed, biopolitical) profiling in

which African Americans and Latinos are stopped and interrogated by authorities merely because of their race and ethnicity. Racial profiling, then, moves beyond individual acts of prejudice and racism by law enforcement officers to the realm of institutional policy. The power of racial profiling lies not so much in its ‘‘representational’’ status, for example, as stereotypes, but rather as blueprints—or diagrams—that actively serve to discriminate populations in search of possible transgressors.

^[1]Former FBI profiler John E. Douglas has become the profiling expert and star of twenty-four-hour television channels such as Fox News and CNN. Douglas (1998, 1999), whose own book titles proclaim his ‘‘legendary’’ status, has forged a media career out of his ability to profile criminal minds and behaviors.

^[2]Criminal drama programs on television, Law and Order or the British mini-series Cracker, for example, routinely discuss criminal MOs (or modus operandi) to correlate criminal traits to similar patterns from known offenders. Both programs, particularly the latter, also rely on psychological profiling to ‘‘get into the mind’’ of transgressors. Such programming, of course, takes its lead from feature films such as Silence of the Lambs, a gruesome crime drama that arguably started the contemporary fascination with the FBI and its criminal behavioral (profiling) unit.

^[3]Carr (1994) includes the foreword note that ‘‘Prior to the twentieth century, persons suffering from mental illness were thought to be ‘‘alienated,’’ not only from the rest of society but from their true natures. Those experts were therefore known as alienists.’’

^[4]The ACLU have been at the forefront of the argument against the use of racial profiles. In the report ‘‘Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation’s Highways’’ (Harris 1999), the ACLU recount the first use of racial profiles by law enforcement agencies in the United States:

The profile, described by one court as ‘‘an informally compiled abstract of characteristics thought typical of persons carrying illicit drugs,’’ had been used in the war on drugs for some time. The first profile was reportedly developed in the early 1970s by a Drug Enforcement Administration ( DEA) Special Agent named Paul Markonni while he was assigned to surveillance duty at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. By 1979, Markonni’s drug courier profile was in use at over 20 airports. The characteristics of the Markonni profile were behavioral. Did the person appear to be nervous? Did he pay for his airline ticket in cash and in large bills? Was he going to or arriving from a destination considered a place of origin of cocaine, heroin or marijuana? Was he traveling under an alias?

In the 1980s, with the emergence of the crack market, skin color alone became a major profile component, and, to an increasing extent, black travelers in the nation’s airports and found themselves the subjects of frequent interrogations and suspicionless searches by the DEA and the U.S. Customs Service. These law enforcement practices soon spread to train stations and bus terminals, as well.