Empowerment or repression? Opening up questions of identification and surveillance in Brazil through a case of ‘identity fraud’

What is it about?

A real but typical case of identity fraud is used to open up the complex web of identification systems in Brazil. It is argued that identification has two poles related to the nature of citizenship—repression and inclusion—and that reactions from citizens to new identification schemes can be attributed to how they view the purpose of the cards in these terms. In Brazil, a sense of inclusion and citizenship based on a fear of anonymity and exclusion predominates leading to widespread support amongst even critics of state activities. However, this may be undermined by the lack of state preparation for an information society, particularly the absence of meaningful data protection laws.

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Why is it important?

The argument of the paper is that there are two broad and opposing categories of fears that drive citizens’ reactions to state identification schemes, which map closely to the two poles of inclusion and repression. The first is the one that is more familiar in states like the USA and the UK, which is the nightmare of order, in which privacy is destroyed as the state becomes over-intrusive and controlling. However the other is the fear of exclusion, in which the citizens’ greatest concern is to be unknown and therefore potentially to disappear as the victim of arbitrary forces. We argue that in the Brazilian case, the latter is almost universal, and that the fear of anonymity and being ‘lost’ is far stronger than any concern about surveillance or control, and that this is far stronger when it comes to the relationship of identification to social class. Here in fact, it is the poorest in Brazil—those who are at the greatest risk of such ‘disappearance’—who are most likely to favour state identification schemes as mechanisms of inclusion. However, throughout Brazilian society, this existential fear, which rests in the nature of Brazilian citizenship, provides a strong basis for support for better state identification. This calls into question universalising theories of the control society of surveillance society, but rather than dismiss them entirely, it leads us to argue for subtle adjustments, arguing for the existence of multiple surveillance societies, with distinct contextual nuances and levels of intrusion as well as different concerns regarding privacy, anonymity and control.