Everyday rules and embodied information: anti-money laundering/counter-terrorist financing practices and radio frequency identification tags as security politics

Abstract

We are attached to ‘our’ information: height, weight, income, address, profession, location, friends, purchases, and more. This embodied information, data that inhere in and adhere to our bodies, can be misappropriated, misused, or accidentally disclosed. Unwanted information can be forced onto us. Yet the mundane nature of moving information around occludes the potential for harm. To uncover the way ordinary practices lead to everyday insecurities, I examine embodied information flows, power, and rules. I conceptualize power as the ability to control the flow of information, defined as its content, its velocity (speed and direction), and access to it. Rules, which are essential to understanding how this power manifests, are analyzed in terms of rule form (discursive or constructed), deontological category (rules that are obligatory, optional, or prohibited), and relation to subject (rules regulating information flows into or out from the subject’s body). I draw on this analytical framework to explore two examples (anti-money-laundering/counter-terrorist financing [AML/CTF] and radio frequency identification [RFID] tags) to illustrate the vulnerabilities arising from the control of the flow of embodied information or, more precisely, from individuals’ inability to control the flow of their embodied information. Ironically, these practices developed for purposes of increasing national security (AML/CTF) and for improving economic efficiency (RFID tags) reduce individual security. Everyday practices of controlling information flows create this insecurity both intentionally and incidentally, which further complicates the political context.

Keywords:

• political power
• information
• AML/CTF
• RFID
• embodiment

Acknowledgements

My thanks, first of all, to Cerelia Athanassiou, Anna Maria Friis Kristensen, and Moran Mandelbaum for their exceptionally constructive critique and encouragement. The anonymous reviewers provided truly insightful comments that helped me improve the manuscript significantly. Many colleagues and students have provided criticism, suggestions, and corrections. Kavi Abraham, Scott Gerber, Yehonatan Abramson, and José Luís Rodríguez Aquino deserve special mention. The errors are, of course, wholly mine.

Notes

1. This article focuses on vulnerability and control of information flow. An alternate story would emphasize how control of information flows provides a means of enhancing security (for example, Mancini and O’Reilly 2013).

2. News reports (e.g., Press 2013) and analyses in the scholarly literature (e.g., Solove 2002) have pointed to the vulnerability of people, corporate entities, and states to harm.

3. Hansen and Nissenbaum define everyday security as ‘the way in which securitizing actors, including private organizations and businesses, mobilize ’normal‘ individuals’ experiences in two ways: to secure the individual’s partnership and compliance in protecting [cyber] network security, and to make hypersecuritization scenarios more plausible by linking elements of the disaster scenario to experiences familiar from everyday life’ (2009, 1165). ‘The International as Everyday Practice’ is the subject of a forum in International Political Sociology (Guillaume et al. 2011). Other examples include Corrin (2003), Ryan (2009), Rowley and Weldes (2012), and Blanchard (2003).

4. Kinds of information flows include, but certainly are not limited to, surveillance (discussed below), advertising, computer hacking, and viral videos.

5. AML/CTF practices are examples of surveillance. RFID tags are sometimes used for surveillance, other times for alternative forms of information flow.

6. On the risks to privacy see, for example, Bennett (2011), Bennett and Raab (2006), Boyd and Crawford (2012), Newman (2008), and Marlin-Bennett (2004).

7. Surveillance practices can empower individuals in some circumstances, as Monahan (2011) and Raab, Jones, and Székely (2015) note.

8. See also Floridi (2011), Chapman (2011), and Shannon (1948).

9. Contrast Bourdieu (1988, 785, n. 5) and Connolly (2013, 7). More simply, I envision a dynamic field of overlapping and interconnected social networks in which information flows continually and spontaneously arise.

10. In the field of surveillance studies, the unproblematic term, ‘personal data’, is generally used. (See Marx 2002 and Lyon 2002 as examples.) I refer to ‘embodied information’ to link to philosophical investigations about the relationship between data (datum understood as ‘a lack of uniformity’ [Floridi 2011, 85]) and information and to connect with the international relations literature on embodiment.

11. Among these are Pettman (1997), Neumann (2008), Fierke (2012), Sjoberg (2012), Reid (2014), and Wilcox (2015). Coole (2007) addresses embodiment and democratic theory.

12. Material conditions can be interpreted as constructed rules. See below.

13. My approach has some common ground with that of Steele (2010), whose concept of counterpower addresses how agents that are not states can, in an unexpected way, create insecurities by using available technologies to spread messages. His focus is on the aesthetics of such messages and how they act on national self-images.

14. The rule is that which is generally complied with. Routinely violated ‘rules’ cease being rules; rules also drift into new meanings through practices.

15. I thank Scott Gerber for this insight.

16. In the case of ‘coordination rules’ (Stein 1982), security politics may be less evident. However, choosing one standard over another may advantage one agent over another.

17. The list includes: depository institutions (banks), casinos and card clubs, money services businesses, brokers or dealers in securities, mutual funds, commodities and futures dealers (including futures commission merchants and introducing brokers in commodities), insurance companies, dealers in precious metals, precious stones, or jewels, and mortgage companies and mortgage brokers.

18. Examples of international relations scholarship on AML/CTF include Amicelle (2011), Amoore and de Goede (2005), Andreas and Nadelmann (2006), De Goede (2005, 2007), Drezner (2005), Favarel-Garrigues, Godefroy, and Lascoumes (2011), FitzGerald (2004), Gardner (2007), Hampton and Levi (1999), Levi (2002), Liss and Sharman (2015), Serrano and Kenny (2003), Sharman (2008), Tsingou (2010), and Vlcek (2015). See also the master’s thesis by Showell, a knowledgeable practitioner (Showell 2007).

19. Identifying suspicious business entities may be difficult as shell corporations are easily established – including in the United States (Sharman 2011).

20. Instructions and examples can be seen on the website of the US FIU, www.fincen.gov.

21. A compliance officer I interviewed several years ago noted that the tendency to over-report is higher in the US than in the UK because of differences in regulatory guidance provided by the respective FIUs (Compliance Officer of a large bank (anonymous) 2008).

22. Originally from the Texas Instruments webpage, http://www.ti.com/rfid/f, aqs.shtml#Gone, accessed June 4, 2013 (no longer available). The same text is posted at http://lux-ident.com/technology/ (accessed April 19, 2015).

23. Examples include laws in the United States (National Conference of State Legislatures 2015) and the European Union (European Union 2007).