Published in the Laissez Faire City Times, August 13, 2001
British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and the British border cops are testing a new eye scan recognition technique at Heathrow Airport.[1] The traveler arriving at passport control looks into a video camera, which scans his iris pattern. In one or two seconds, the computer has confirmed the identity of the traveler, and let him in, or called the cops. For now, the system is experimented only with travelers who have enrolled in the database and have been pre-cleared, but universal application is of course the ultimate goal.
The system is marketed by the Eye Ticket Corporation [2], a Virginia firm and pioneer in biometrics. A more limited test with airport employees and airline personnel has been going on for more than a year at the Charlotte, NC, Douglas International Airport. No surprisingly, at least half the spending in the still small biometric market comes from law enforcement organizations.[3]
Biometric technologies like eye scans reduce the cost in time that ID verification imposes on individuals and may be useful in private settings (like for access control to corporate facilities). Used by government, or through public-private partnerships like at Heathrow, such technologies will also reduce law enforcement costs, which at first sight is also a benefit. But this first impression is wrong. Reducing enforcement costs will, other things being equal, lead to more laws being adopted or enforced. If we already have too many of those, a net cost will result.
Consider the following model. Demand for laws depends on the cost of laws. To simplify, suppose that adoption costs (lobbying, legislators' time, and such) and enforcement costs (cops, courts, jails, etc.) were paid only by those who vote for the law. The lower adoption and enforcement costs, the higher the quantity of laws demanded will be. Now, the social cost of laws includes a third component: external costs, which represent the loss of utility by those who don't agree with the law but have to comply or support the penalties. Those adopting a law will consider only private costs, i.e., adoption and enforcement, in their decision, and not external costs. We then get more laws than are really wanted.
To avoid this problem, we would need a perfect state, which would take due account of the external cost of laws or, which amount to the same, adopt only laws that are unanimously accepted. Because the state is not and cannot be perfect, we protect ourselves by creating artificial adoption and enforcement costs that bring private cost more in line with social cost (i.e., cost including external costs). Artificial adoption costs include procedural requirements (for example, laws have to be adopted by both houses of Congress, or after three readings in the British Parliamentary system) and judicial review. Artificial enforcement costs comprise requirements related to trials, to search and seizure, to compensation for takings, to arrest procedures, and other rights granted to individuals who fall victims of laws.
Freedom and ID Papers
During the US Civil War, around 13 percent of soldiers, both from North and South, deserted. What is most striking is that "[w]ell over half the deserters were never apprehended."[4] A large part of enforcement costs used to be the high cost of finding law breakers which, in turn, came from the lack of central government databases and the lack of ID papers that could be tied (through unique identifiers) to such databases. At the time of the Civil War, part of the enforcement costs was real as technology for monitoring the movement of individuals was rudimentary, but part of it lay in the liberal nature of the American government. Indeed, long after the cost of monitoring individuals through databases and ID papers became manageable by modern bureaucracies, Americans, Canadians and Englishmen remained opposed to ID papers. The only way to make sense of this opposition is the desire to establish artificial enforcement costs. It is only during the last few decades that this philosophy has crumbled.
The effects of enforcement costs, real or artificially imposed, is to make some laws impossible to enforce properly and their adoption consequently uneconomical. When I was a kid in Québec, there was no way to enforce, say, bicycle license plates, because nobody was obliged to carry ID papers. Indeed, except for car drivers (an unfortunate precedent), ID papers did not exist. Raise enforcement costs, and fewer laws will be adopted or enforced. Decrease enforcement costs and the opposite consequence will follow.
Imagine what would happen if enforcement costs, both real and artificial, were reduced to zero under our actual states. (Assume, for the sake of this illustration, that the cost of law adoption is also zero.) Groups compete for the laws they want, without taking into account their external costs. Any group that does not like certain kinds of behavior (sodomy or homosexuality, smoking in the street or at home, reading certain books, etc.) would get laws adopted. We would end up with wall-to-wall tyranny.
Perhaps this is what some people want. But others don't: libertad o muerte! Tyranny not only violates the preferences of some individuals, but it also creates economic efficiencies that lead to less utility for virtually everybody. What economists call "rent seeking" is one channel through which this result obtains. If legislating anything is up for grab, individuals and groups will devote resources to make sure that it is their own preferences, and not their neighbors', that get imposed. These resources are wasted, not only because one side looses all, but also because liberty is a less costly way to reconcile conflicting preferences.
Border Eyes
Let's go back to our initial problem: eye-scanning travelers at borders. This would probably lead to lower enforcement costs for preventing violent criminals from crossing borders. I say "probably" because, to the extent that the technique is effective, violent criminals will substitute other means of crossing borders: through forests, coastlines, by private planes, etc. The only thing we are sure of is that the new technique will increase the cost to violent criminals of crossing borders and, in this sense, may reduce enforcement costs because the number of offenders will be lower.
Given the actual cost of screening people at borders, it is already considered economical to try and stop violent criminals. The problem is that it is also considered economical to stop non-threatening but illegal immigrants like, say, students looking for summer jobs, or to stop people with drugs or non-declared foreign-bought panties or cigarettes. This suggests that the cost of enforcement is already too low, not too high, and that artificial costs should be added in order to force the state to take into consideration the whole social cost of such laws. In other words, make border controls so expensive that bureaucrats have to concentrate on the real criminals.
The use of the expression "passenger processing" by the Eye Ticket Corporation is revealing. Many customers would expect their airline to serve them, not to process them. This terminology is tainted by state-imposed arbitrary security measures at airports, and by state-erected artificial barriers at borders, all of which require monitoring travelers' movements and herding them through small gates. We don't need technologies that will make the herding less conspicuous; we need institutions to stop the herding.
The state is already too efficient -- at least for non-violent crimes. We want to reduce, not increase, its efficiency, and make sure that only the real criminals are worth monitoring and catching. We want to make sure that only the laws aiming at real criminals will be worth adopting. We therefore need to create new artificial enforcement costs.
If this is true, we should oppose the use by the state of technologies that decrease the cost of enforcing laws that should not have been adopted in the first place, or should not be enforced. I am not sure this implies forbidding the state to use computers, but it certainly requires forbidding official ID papers and state use of biometric identification. And, by the way, any real "ethical investment" fund would keep away from cronies like the Eye Ticket Corporation.
[1] CNN, "Eye scans to speed air travel, "August 1, 2001, at http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/science/08/01/airports.retina/index.html.[2] At http://www.eyeticket.com/.
[3] CNN, "Biometrics use on the rise," July 26, 2001, at http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/07/26/eye.biometrics.idg/index.html.
[4] Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), p. 248.