Are Aid Agencies Abetting ‘Surveillance Humanitarianism’?
UN and charity organizations are taking biometric data from refugees, prompting some critics to worry about how it could be misused
When a fingerprint scanner senses skin, it glows green. It’s not a natural green but a toxic-colored one; a shade associated with alien slime or dystopian futures. Yet to the United Nations, this green is the color of order amid chaos, a symbol of the organization’s efforts to catalog biometrics wherever it works.
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has so far collected 8 million biometric records. In 2018, the WFP started using similar devices in Yemen, a country embroiled in a grinding proxy war between the Saudi-led coalition and the Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels. Against a backdrop of fighting and mass hunger, the WFP began by collecting fingerprints in Aden, an ancient port city and temporary capital of Yemen.
The agency has since amassed the fingerprints of 450,000 Yemenis living in areas controlled by the Saudi-backed government. In early August, a new deal was made with the Houthis that will enable the WFP to dramatically expand its biometric database with new permission to register the fingerprints of the 9 million Yemenis living under Houthi jurisdiction.
