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.