Breckenridge, Keith. "The Biometric State: The Promise and Peril of Digital Government in the New South Africa". Journal of South African Studies, Vol.31, No.2 (2005): 267-282.

Breckenridge, Keith. "The Biometric State: The Promise and Peril of Digital Government in the New South Africa". Journal of South African Studies, Vol.31, No.2 (2005): 267-282.

• In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the USA passed the Patriot Act, which gave the US government increased powers to collect data on citizens, including new biometric tools. This manifested first the introduction of biometric border security beginning in 2002 and 2003 (267-268); this shift has also forced the Europeans to adopt similar measures (268-269).
• Ideas to develop an integrated biometric identification program posed by some, including billionaire Larry Ellison, were abandoned in 2001 and 2002 following the termination of the Office of Total Informational Awareness, partially led by the infamy of its head, John Poindexter (267-268).
• Other systems of biometric data have been successfully collected in the USA, though, particularly through the inclusion of some biometric data on driver's licenses. Americans seem broadly willing to accept the collection of this biometric data by the government or even private companies (269).
• The USA appears to be moving towards some form of biometric system, but without a single database. The primary mode of identification in the USA remains driver's licenses issued by local and state governments that maintain their own, often minimal, databases (280).
• A number of countries have issued universal identity cards with biometric data to their citizens, but only very few have then integrated that data into a national database. Among the few are South Korea, Malaysia, Macau, Hong Kong, and South Africa (269).
• The author chooses to focus on South Africa because, like the USA, it also has a large consumer credit industry that is largely unregulated. It also has a very long period of biometric control, as biometric systems were part of the Apartheid government's policies from 1900 onward (270, 279).
• National identification cards are relatively uncommon; in Europe, only Finland has any kind of card. China has discussed implementing something along the South African model, but has not yet introduced it (279).
• It seems extremely unlikely that Europe will introduce any similar documents in the near future, as many European countries have laws limiting the collection of data, including biometrics, by the government and forbidding a single national identification system (280).
• South Africa's motivation for creating an integrated national identity card is difficult from most other countries because it is not creating a new system to serve a new purpose, but is instead using biometric identity cards to fix the broken system of biometric fingerprint records previously used for the same purpose (279).
• South Africa and the USA are implementing biometric identification regimes for different reasons. In the USA, it is done to better surveillance citizens for security threats, while in South Africa it is linked to making sure that welfare is properly distributed to the correct citizens, to the benefit of poor South Africans and the detriment of immigrants (270).
• Biometric identification systems in South Africa began around the turn of the 20th Century with the collection of the fingerprints of Black, Indian, and Chinese South Africans in a national database by Lord Alfred Milner. Since this point, every single South African government has tried to improve upon the design of this system (270).
• The fingerprint system, which is still in use in South Africa, was extremely slow, with police taking 55 days to respond to a request on average. The delay in fingerprinting was one of the reasons that so many non-prisoners are waiting in South African jails. With the purchase of new biometric scanning equipment in 2002, requests can now be returned in around 2 days, once the files are digitized (270-271).
• There is desire by administrators and government officials to collect the maximum amount of information about those beneath them. Computerization has vastly increased the capacity for this information to be collected and used, allowing these panoptic visions to become a reality (271-272).
• The earliest form of computerized biometrics were implemented for the pension system in the KwaZulu bantustan in 1990. The company contracted by the government, Cash Payment Services distributed pensions in set amounts in cash to pensioners based on a record of fingerprints stored in the back of the pension van (272).
• The program was seen as a brilliant solution to the problems of distributing pensions to rural areas without proper banking infrastructure. By the late 1990s, Cash Payment Services was distributing pensions and welfare based on biometric data in six South African provinces and parts of Namibia (272).
• In 1999, Cash Payment Services was bought by Apiltec, a South African IT company. It introduced cards linked to the biometric data and pension systems, which pensioners could then use as an ATM card. If pensioners chose not to immediately withdraw their money, they could wait and have it on their card; this made pensions saveable and thus able to be used by banks (273).
• A limited initiative to make taxis and buses take Apiltec cards was put in place, but the wider initiative to transition rural South Africa from a cash-based economy to a card economy has been unsuccessful (273).
• Apiltec has extended the services provided on the card to include automatic payments to life insurance policies and short-term loans to pensioners. These services are valuable, although some see them as predatory and an abuse of Apiltec's market position (273).
• The hold of Apiltec over South African welfare and pension distribution continues to increase, as with its acquisition of the contract for pensions in the Eastern Cape, it is now responsible for 70% of welfare distribution in South Africa, including a number of social services besides pensions. In 2004, over 2.5 million South Africans used Apiltec cards (273).
• The success of the Apiltec card has led the initiative to be copied by six other African countries (273).
• Apiltec's dominance over social welfare distribution on behalf of the government has resulted in a strange relationship between it and the provincial governments. A dispute over waits for the pension van led the Eastern Cape government to return to distributions of cash by hand to pensioners, but this merely exposed to atrocious record keeping of the government (274).
• The South African government is now challenging the market dominance of Apiltec by designing and implementing its own biometric identity card to be used for the direct distribution of pensions and other welfare services (275).
• There are practical limitations on the usage of biometric data for social service, as fingerprints can be made unreadable by small cuts or the loss of the finger. Despite these risk, the South African system has shown durability, with technicians scanning fingers multiple times to assure a good copy, as proven by the absence of any reported cases of impersonation (274-275).
• The national population register was created in 1950 to record the essential census information and racial status of everyone in the country. Two registers were created: one for Blacks, and one for all other citizens of South Africa. Only the database for Whites, Asians, and Coloureds was well maintained and by the 1960s the Black population register was in terrible condition (276).
• When Ciskei, Transkei, Bophuthatswana, and Venda adopted their programs of quasi-independence, they became responsible for recording their own census information, as did other bantustans later on. In 1991, South Africa abolished the racialized census system and adopted a universal national register, still not including the bantustans. In 1994, the new South African government inherited all of these conflicting, overlapping, and incomplete census records (276).
• The South African government decided that the only way to deal with properly identifying citizenry from the census was through the use of fingerprints. However, the record currently sits at around 40 million fingerprints collected by the Home Affairs Ministry, with an additional 7,000 being recorded everyday, and is almost entirely unusable (276).
• In 1996, the South African government agreed to adopt a digital fingerprinting system dubbed the Home Affairs National Identification System [HANIS] to crack down on crime, corruption, and welfare fraud. The new scanning equipment was introduced in 2002, although work on digitizing the millions of old records only began in 2005 (276-277). 
• The government hopes that the national identification cards distributed as part of HANIS will be able to be indexed alongside the South African police's criminal database -- itself linked to the court system, social welfare, and correctional services -- the Department of Transport's records, and the Department of Social Welfare's pension and welfare lists (278).
• The government also wants to sell usage of the cards' information to private companies for their own uses, such as limiting access to buildings to designated employees or restricting cigarette and alcohol purchases to adults (278).
• South Africa is capable of rapidly distributing this new HANIS card system to large segments of its relatively small population, meaning that it is likely to become the world's first entirely biometrically linked country (279-280).
• The implementation of a national biometric identification system in South Africa faces four significant obstacles: the likelihood mistaken identity in the database (280); security risks of biometric data being stolen (281); the exposure of data from cards being used in commercial transactions to third parties (281); and the lack of flexibility and responsiveness occasioned by replacing humans with machines (281).
• South Africa should develop a system of robust legal protections to make sure that the information being collected is not being abused and cannot be misused in the future. This should include some restrictions on the kind of data that can be collected by the government (282).
• The South African case shows that technological innovations have a huge and rapid effect on the lives of those in poor and rural areas, as well as the urban bourgeois normally thought to be most effected by advances in information technologies (282).