Article ID: CBB695441230

Security Glitches: The Failure of the Universal Camouflage Pattern and the Fantasy of “Identity Intelligence” (May 2018)

unapi

Focusing on the paradoxes revealed in the multibillion dollar mistake of the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP) and the expansive ambit of a leaked National Security Agency briefing on its approach to “identity intelligence,” this article analyzes security glitches arising from the state’s application of mechanized logics to security and visibility. Presuming that a digital-looking pattern would be more deceptive than designs inspired by natural forms, in 2004, the US Army adopted a pixelated “digital” camouflage pattern, a print that rendered soldiers more, rather than less, visible in the field; it acknowledged this error in 2012. Two years later, “Identity Intelligence: Image Is Everything” visualized the episteme of National Security Agency surveillance with an illustration detailing hundreds of different types of data—biometric, biographic, and contextual—that the agency believes it could exploit to identify and monitor “targets of interest.” These glitches originate in technofetishistic convictions about the nature of digital images and information, limited ways of imagining bodies and lives, and reductive understandings of complex relationships between power and perception. Together, they expose the paradoxes that arise as the state tries to extend its power over the body and the contingency of that power on the smallest of things.

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Authors & Contributors
Henry, Emmanuel
Prudham, Scott
Rijcke, Sarah de
JafariNaimi, Nassim
Kris Hartley
Greenhough, Beth
Concepts
Governance
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Power (social sciences)
Science and politics
Expertise
Regulation
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
Places
Hong Kong
United States
Sweden
China
Canada
India
Institutions
National Cancer Institute (U.S.)
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