By Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Nathan Payne, Jay Dev, and Shaurya Agarwal
A passport, simply defined, is a method of providing identification for each person in a political, geographic or community subdivision using a number of factors — visual, biometric and coded. It is a tool used by governments (a person/group of people who set guidelines for behavior in a given community of people) to track and control the movements of people who live under its purview. These forms of identification provide a record of where a person has been and where they may or may not travel.
In many ways the structure and function of passports issued by many governments on Earth (the United States included) already are inherently authoritarian. They allow or disallow citizens to travel across political subdivisions; they are used at border checkpoints to collect travel data that is kept and analyzed by governments; and they are issued in a number of categories that in some cases allow special travel privileges to some categories of people. Therefore, extending the foundational authoritarian functions of existing paper-based passports into a substantially more pronounced authoritarian function was not a challenging feat.
We imagined a number of enhancements an authoritarian government would install in a passport should the technology become available and scalable. Currently, passports tend to be issued upon request to citizens, who would like to travel outside their home countries. Passports are also issued voluntarily by governments to certain employees carrying out critical government missions. They store information on its holder, which is monitored both by issuing and foreign governments. Sometimes, the interests of governments are served by monitoring the movements of individuals, who inhabit our planet.
We imagine an authoritarian regime would require “passports” to be implanted in each citizen at birth. It would use the latest in microchip technology and corresponding skin-worn tags to monitor and identify each carrier. The chips would collect biometric, GPS and audio data on each person — information held to exert social control. The models of skin markers would be issued by socioeconomic class and for loyalty to the class in power.
Social controls wielded by such passports would include access to stores, restaurants, supply depots, etc. based on information carried on each chip, including health data, financial account information and loyalty determinations. A government that monitors health and financial information could disallow access to food or products it deems should not be obtained by each passport carrier. Passports no longer will simply control and track movements at borders, instead they will become a ubiquitous form of identification that control access to everything — housing, shops, restaurants, offices, social services, networks, class-designated bathrooms and government facilities.
We envision an authoritarian passports as a tool for policing, carrying remotely accessible identifying information, which could be viewed without consent of each carrier. Likewise, permissions and privileges granted by the government to its citizens could be altered or deleted remotely at any time without consent or knowledge of the carrier and with no mechanism for appeal.
The time we spent both thinking about distilling the current functions of passports and imagining how they would/could be used by an authoritarian regime provided a number of epiphanies. Clearly, passports serve many authoritarian functions already — mostly mechanisms for collecting data on and controlling movements of citizens. Yet, it was easy to imagine how a government not encumbered by protections provided by the documents that formed our republic could quickly install a number of significantly more intrusive controls using existing technologies.