Abstract
Identification is a primary need of societies. It is even more central in law enforcement. In the history of crime, a dialectics takes place between felonious attempts at concealing, disguising, or forging identities and societal efforts at unmasking the impostures. Semiotics offers specialistic skills at studying the signs of societal detection and identification, including those of forensics and criminology. In human history, no sign more than the face is attached a value of personal identity. Yet, modern forensics realizes that the face can mislead and, inspired by eastern models (China, Japan, India), adopts fingerprinting. In the digital era, however, fingerprinting first goes digital, then it is increasingly replaced by facial recognition. The face is back in digital AI forensics, together with a tangle of sociocultural biases. Semiotics can play a key role in studying their surreptitious influence.
Highlights
On August 3, 2019, convicted drug dealer Clauvino da Silva tried to escape the prison of Rio de Janeiro during a visit of his 19-year old daughter [76]
Some faces look more similar than others, and some individuals might genetically be more apt than others at distinguishing and recognizing faces, yet these parts of the body have been essential signs of human personal identity for most human history, at least until Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon introduced forensic anthropometry in 1883 [8]
Semiotics promotes the revolutionary awareness that the body is never an object but always a matrix of signs that are constantly interpreted in the interpersonal arena
Summary
On August 3, 2019, convicted drug dealer Clauvino da Silva tried to escape the prison of Rio de Janeiro during a visit of his 19-year old daughter [76]. The same kind of mask would have served the purposes of French-Israeli citizen Gilbert Chikli, nicknamed by French policemen “the king of fraud”, who, in summer 2015, convinced several donors from around the world to transfer to him enormous sums of money; he did so through impersonating, this time through a latex mask, the French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian, claiming the necessity to finance the French government’s fight against terrorism [31].3 The face is both biologically and culturally a compelling sign of identity (or rather, a matrix of signs) [13]. Called, measurements of head length (crown to forehead), head width (temple to temple), width of cheeks, and “lengths” of the right ear remained essential [9]; the same Bertillon introduced mugshots so as to assist, through the new medium of photography [38, 72], the identification of individuals [10]
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