Fractal actors and infrastructures:
the case of DNA surveillance
Abstract
As we move into an age of ever more cameras and databases, monitoring and
identity checks, surveillance theory paradoxically turns away from the totalitarian
gazes of Big Brother and the Panopticon, looking for fresh theoretical resources.
Scholars have put forth a plethora of interesting approaches and concepts such as
social sorting (Lyon ed. 2003) and the surveillant assemblage (Haggerty &
Ericson 2000), thus adding encouraging variety to a previously much more
homogenous field. In the wake of this development, some have sought to bring
the fruits of the successful actor-network-theory (ANT) into surveillance studies
(Ball 2002, Adey 2004, Gad & Lauritsen 2009). In this paper, I further explore the
potential of this connection by experimenting with Marilyn Strathern’s concept of
the fractal (1991), which has been discussed in newer ANT literature (Law 2002;
Law 2004; Jensen 2007). I argue that the concept fits nicely into the ANToriented situated surveillance approach (Gad & Lauritsen 2009), not because it
explains surveillance, but because it brings empirical sensitivity to our efforts to
understanding what comprises a surveillance actor, its network and its relations to
those under surveillance. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2008 and 2011 in
relation to my Master’s thesis and PhD respectively, I illustrate fractal concepts
by describing the acts, actors and infrastructure that make up the ‘DNA
surveillance’ conducted by the Danish police.
Please note that the author considers the paper to be a work-in-progress!
Keywords: Fractal, Situated Surveillance, ANT, DNA
Introduction
Surveillance is increasingly becoming woven into the fabric of ordinary life.
Responding to the fast pace of surveillance societies, surveillance studies has
grown rapidly over the last decade. In the wake of this development, the field has
been enveloped in fruitful theoretical discussions about surveillance and, in
particular, the usefulness of Big Brother and the Panopticon (e.g. Lyon ed. 2006).
Interesting new approaches and concepts have emerged out of this debate, most
notably David Lyons understanding of surveillance as social sorting (Lyon ed.
2003) and the manifold Deleuzian contributions (e.g. Haggerty & Ericson 2000;
Hier 2003; Bogard 2006). In addition to their work, an undergrowth of other
conceptualizations of surveillance has emerged, including attempts to relate ANT
(Ball 2002; Adey 2004) and Marxist analysis (Fuchs 2011) to surveillance studies.
In this paper, I further investigate possible connections between ANT and
surveillance studies, by exploring fractal conceptualizations of objects, actors and
infrastructures. I argue that these concepts are helpful in studying situated
surveillance (Gad & Lauritsen 2009), not because they are able to explain how
surveillance works, but because they add empirical sensitivity through cognitive
dissonance. In contrast to aforementioned surveillance concepts, the fractal is
useless without detailed empirical descriptions, because it leaves all questions of
“who”, “what” and “how” open. This quality makes the fractal fit into the infralanguage of ANT (Latour 2005) and thus the ANT-oriented situated surveillance
approach.
Focusing on concepts that offer empirical sensitivity rather than strong
explanatory theories is relevant because of two related imbalances within
surveillance studies. First and foremost the field continues to “suffer from an
overabundance of speculative theorizing and a dearth of rigorous empirical
research” (Walby 2005: 158). Rarely are we invited through rich ethnographic
descriptions to meet the actors that are doing or are under surveillance. Secondly,
scholars tend to focus on the extraordinary and unjust and neglect the ordinary.
Apart from the normative ethos of surveillance studies, I believe that there are
normal methodological causes for this bracketing of mundane practice. One factor
is the difficulty of getting real access, which is substantially enhanced in
surveillance studies due to polarized politics and privacy concerns. Another
restraining factor is that describing surveillance can be a difficult enterprise
because the acts that make up surveillance (e.g. data collection, analysis and
control) are often spread in time and space amongst actors that are only partially
connected. When this is the case, the empirical realities themselves resist
description because surveillance – no matter where you position yourself – always
seems to be elsewhere. This paper tries to address this problem of doing situated
studies in partially connected surveillance assemblages by presenting the concept
of the fractal, which opens up a different venue for thinking about what we
observe when we are grappling with the difficult and elusive object of situated
surveillance.
In the paper, I illustrate the fractal concepts through observations and interviews
made in connection with my study on ‘DNA surveillance’ as conducted by the
Danish police force. I define DNA surveillance as the collective of police and
forensic actors that collect, analyze and retain DNA profiles from suspects and
crime scenes in order to control a population of suspects. I invite the reader into
the daily work of police detectives, forensic personnel and the administrators of
the police DNA database. First, however, I describe the main attributes of situated
surveillance and the fractal image.
The situated surveillance approach
Situated surveillance is an approach coined by Christopher Gad and Peter
Lauritsen (2009). Aligning themselves with the known critiques of the Panopticon
and Big Brother (Lyon 2006; Haggerty 2006) they distance themselves from the
all-seeing eye as a fruitful metaphor. Drawing on Donna Haraway and Bruno
Latour they argue that vision is instead always embodied, partial and limited and
that surveillance can be multi-directional. They furthermore emphasize that we
cannot assume that surveillance flows freely, but that it must be seen as work that
involves effort, friction and resistance, and that surveillance may be used for both
control and care (see also Lyon 2001). In order to capture these qualities, they
propose Latours notion of the oligopticon (Latour 2005; Latour & Hermant 1998)
and Haraways situated knowledges (1988) as guiding concepts for a situated
approach.
Situated knowledge is Haraway’s suggestion of a feminist understanding of
objectivity, which attacks the idea of science as a privileged practice that through
a neutral and elevated gaze has the ability to formulate objective and disembodied
statements. She sees this as a rhetorical device – a “God trick” – that distorts how
science really works. She claims that science cannot be isolated from their
materiel surroundings, but are bound to their technologies (microscopes,
databases etc.), which both serve as making opportunities and limitations at the
same time. But non-situated vision simply does not exist; there are no views-fromnowhere. An important point is that neither Gad & Lauritsen nor Haraway are
interested in defining vision generally, but in investigating how vision is produced
and for whom it works.
Gad & Lauritsen relate the understanding of situated knowledge and vision to
Latours concept of the oligopticon, which further underlines the fragility and
limitations of surveillance. Latour understands oligoptica as specific bureaucratic
landscapes that allow detailed but limited observation that is provided by the
available maps, documents, files, screens, databases and computer programs etc.
The resulting vision is very different from the panopticon:
“Oligoptica […] do exactly the opposite of panoptica: they see much
too little to feed the megalomania of the inspector or the paranoia of
the inspected, but what they see they see it well” (Latour 2005: 181)
The technologies are not allowing a complete overview of the observed. Instead
they create inscriptions that translate the observed (e.g. suspects) into something
more workable (e.g. DNA profiles, criminal records, images, lists of phone calls).
It is these inscriptions that the surveilling actor(-network) has access to and not
the observed itself. In other words, what is observed is out of sight and is
performed by the materiality which is in view inside the surveillance system. But
this view is not a static thing. The observers’ vision may quickly be blurred or
undermined: “the tiniest bug can blind oligoptica” (ibid.). It-systems can break
down, cameras can be turned away, files be deleted and DNA profiles can be
contaminated, planted or falsely identified.
Ultimately, this line of thought leads to an interesting and different a priori for the
situated study, namely the assumption that surveillance does not work and that
making it work requires the constant alignment of actors.
Gad & Lauritsen exemplify their approach and concepts through an ethnographic
study done by Gad on the inspection ship Vestkysten (The West Coast), which is
used by the Danish Fishery Inspection to monitor that the fishermen do not exceed
their fishing quotas. The described surveillance is conducted through a database
containing information on vessels, catches, personal details on fishermen and their
licenses, offenders etc. which the inspectors use as a basis for decisions on what
ships to inspect. In order to find the fishing boats, the inspection ship is equipped
with a GPS monitoring system that tracks all the boats over 15 meters in length
which by law are required to broadcast their position through an installed antenna.
Every hour the system automatically updates and receives information on the
position, speed and course of every boat. At the same time, however, the IT
system allows the inspectors to monitor individual boats more closely as needed.
The surveillance of the fishermen is, however, in no way unproblematic. The
satellite system is slow and prone to breakdowns, which often causes the
inspectors to be late to the scene or base their inspections on rumors and
knowledge about fishermen behavior. Bad weather conditions can also cause the
inspectors to stay on shore. In addition to system failures and weather conditions,
the fishermen sometimes resist the surveillance by covering the boats’ antenna so
that their position is not revealed. They also conduct counter-surveillance as a
collective by telling each other about the position of the inspection ship over the
radio, which makes it near impossible for the inspectors to sneak in on suspicious
activities.
Reiterating the primary aspects of a situated approach, surveillance is, as the case
shows, not a static relationship, but one that is formed everyday through the
actions of human and nonhuman actors on both sides. It is subject to resistance in
spite of expensive technological equipment. And vision is never total and may
suddenly be disturbed.
Fractal actors and infrastructures
The concept of fractals originates in mathematics, but has later been adopted into
social anthropology and ANT as a way to relate naively to scales and ontology.
The job description for the fractal in these types of studies is not to function as a
strong theory that explains social phenomena, but rather to work as a resource of
thought, which opens up for an empirical sensitivity to the situated, complex and
ordinary. It is a mechanism that can be employed to confuse simplistic dualisms
such as micro/macro, one/many and self/other and help us towards a better
starting point for description. In this section, I begin with a brief introduction to
the fractal and follow it up with fractal stories about DNA surveillance.
Living in A non-Euclidean universe
“Fractal” stems from the Latin word “fractus”, which means ‘broken’ or
‘shattered’. In 1975 the Polish born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot used the
concept as a classification for a group of complex geometrical figures that did not
fit into the Euclidean mathematical universe and had thus historically been
considered as pathological curves, unworthy of further study (Abraham 1993).
However, Mandelbrot undermined this critique by showing that natural
phenomena (e.g. coastal line, clouds, lightning, lungs and leafs) often displayed
fractal qualities, thus urging mathematicians to take fractals more seriously
(Peitgen & Richter 1986).
In contrast to classical geometrical figures, fractals have one or more dimensions
that do not follow the Euclidean rules. They are irregular, folded, strange in time
and/or space. The most famous fractal is the image of the Mandelbrot set, which is
depicted below.
Chart 1: Four images of the Mandelbrot set.
The Mandelbrot set is drawn by a computer based on a mathematical formula,
where the result recursively is put back into the equation. As one magnifies an
area of the image, the computer simultaneously calculates and presents the next
layer of details, which at every level reveals a figure, similar to the original image.
Zooming thus results in a sense of disproportion due to this self-similarity. Instead
of coming closer to an object that is magnified or gaining an overview as one
zooms out, the fractal image seems to elude scaling.
In addition it becomes clear as one zooms in that the line that seems to separate
the reoccurring figure from its background is in fact not a line at all, but can more
precisely be described as a ‘fractal region’, where the background is folded into
the figure and vice versa. No matter what is magnified, it reveals both figure and
background. Therefore neither “figure” nor “background” fill the space, but
together they create a complex region where they constitute each other’s existence
(see also Gleick 1988).
The translation of the fractal image from mathematics and into social theory can
be attributed to the British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and her book
Partial Connections (1991/2004). In the book she develops a combination of
ontology and methodology based on the fractal image, which has become a
considerable source of inspiration for actor-network-theorists (Law 2002; Law
2004; Mol 2002: 78-82; Jensen 2007). I briefly explain the concepts “fractal
infrastructures”, “fractal actors” and “fractal objects” below and later illustrate
them by telling fractal stories i.e. stories that identify fractal qualities, thus
undermining dualisms such as micro/macro, self/other and one/many.
Fractal infrastructures
In Partial Connections Marilyn Strathern uses the fractal image to demonstrate
some of her thoughts on the field of anthropology. She points out that
anthropologists are caught in a sterile discussion about whether the micro or the
macro perspective is better: ”[A]nthropologists alternate between accusing one
another now of myopia, now of panoptics” (2004: xv). This distinction is
according to Strathern rooted in a misguided Western understanding of
phenomena as consisting of parts and wholes that determine one another. She
argues that neither the micro perspective (e.g. description of rituals), nor the
macro perspective (e.g. description of cultures) are privileged positions. No matter
what we focus on, we are faced with equally complex phenomena and an equal
loss of information (cf. the magnification of the Mandelbrot set above).
”Despite an increase in the magnitude of detail, the quantity of
information an anthropologist derives from what s/he is observing
may remain the same. Observation thus remains a kind of constant
background to the proliferation of forms” (2004: xxi).
We thus never have access to either the axiomatic parts or the totality of a
phenomenon. We are only ever partially connected to the object of our study
through the specific scale or scales on which we study it. In Partial Connections,
Strathern illustrates this point by examining anthropologists’ descriptions of
cultures, cultural artifacts and rituals from societies in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
Among other things she describes how ‘face designs’ (eyes, mouths and noses)
seem to turn up everywhere across PNG societies on effigies, dance shields,
drums etc. and thus seem to hold the cultures together. However upon further
examination, it is discovered that the designs do not denote faces to all peoples.
To the Pasum people they were instead depictions of spirits, whom do not have
mouths (ibid. 70). Through this and many other examples (flutes, canoes etc.), she
shows that on a certain scale the cultural connections between the different
societies are too close to be dismissed, but upon changing scale, we are faced with
both new information and new gaps, which render the connections partial. And
the supposed “parts” of the overarching cultural “whole” turn out to be no mere
parts, but wholes themselves, with their own “parts-wholes”.
If we take Strathern seriously, then what does this mean for the study of
surveillance infrastructures? First and foremost, I would argue that the fractal may
serve as an undermining mechanism for monolithic concepts about surveillance
systems. Concepts such as the Panopticon and Big Brother represent surveillance
systems as machine-like “wholes” with actors that simply work as part of the
machine. The fractal is a way to maintain that surveillance infrastructures are not
simply coherent wholes due to the distribution of activities and actors, but neither
are they fragmented /non-coherent. They are somewhere in-between. They consist
of partial connections between actors lodged in their own realities. The “parts” of
the surveillance organization can thus be studied as “wholes” in their own right
(ibid. xxix).
Fractal actors and objects
” […] we are in a world of fractionality. We are in a world where
bodies, or organizations, or machines are more than one and less
than many. In a world that is more than one and less than many.
Somewhere in between” (Law 2004: 62).
Besides being used as a weapon against a monolithic understanding of
(surveillance) infrastructures, the fractal also offers other types of analysis. As the
above quote shows, some actor-network-theorists have been deeply inspired by
the metaphor and see fractals everywhere (Law 2004; Mol 2002). In this section, I
try to couple fractality with surveillance actors and surveillance objects.
Drawing on Strathern, the anthropologist Roy Wagner discusses using fractal in
analyzing people. He defines a fractal person such:
“A fractal person is never a unit standing in relation to an aggregate,
or an aggregate standing in relation to a unit, but always an entity
with relationship integrally implied” (Wagner 1991: 163, cited in
Jensen 2007: 845).
Rather than understanding people as simply part of a group, Wagners “fractal
person" is someone who has integrated the relationship. This means that people
may be detached from other people in their group, but the detachment is not final
because of the social relationships created through their social relating. As such
people can be said to fractal as they “carry one another” as integrally implied
relations (Strathern 1992: 125).
This way of addressing the social structure is in fact incompatible with ANT
because it prioritizes humans and the social. If, however, we exchange “person”
with ANT’s concept of “actors”, the problem is solved, because actors in fact
carry the same fractal qualities. The actors in ANT are not to be understood as
actors in a network” (read: part of a whole), but actor-networks i.e. something that
acts because it is attributed action by others. As John Law states, the concept
holds a tension “between the centered ‘actor’ on the one hand and the decentered
‘network’ on the other” (1999: 5). It is inescapably fractal - neither one, nor many.
This concept aligns naturally with the concepts of oligoptica and situated
knowledge/vision described earlier. However, when we highlight the fractionality
of actor-networks, we may also be guided towards “integrally implied
relationships” in the sense that what a human or non-human actor does involves
what John Law understands as absent presences (2002) i.e. something “other”
that is also “within”. In Law’s book Aircraft Stories (ibid.) he illustrates this
oxymoron by showing how different materiel and non-materiel conditions, which
are considered to be “other” to an airplane, are nonetheless inscribed into it.
Among many examples, he describes how pilots’ fear and physical reactions are
written into the mathematical formulas used to design the war plane’s gust
response, and how the Russians’ anti-air defenses are inscribed in its supersonic
capabilities at very low altitudes. Both are examples of “the Otherness of
materials that don’t fit in. But do.” (ibid.: 98). This otherness is not reserved
airplanes, but also occurs within surveillance infrastructures as the following
fractal stories about DNA surveillance will show.
Fractals and surveillance studies
What does the fractal have to offer surveillance studies? As described above, the
fractal can be used as a resource of thought to confuse Euclidean understandings
of ontology (one/more; self/other) and perspective (micro-macro) which exist in
anthropology and sociology. Thus, fractals open up for descriptions of situated
objects multiplicity. The ideas that I have proposed in this section align nicely
with the ANT-oriented situated surveillance. There are especially similarities
concerning the “flat” starting point. Furthermore, the perspectives are also similar
concerning their inherent interest in the complex and the “empty” concepts that
are supposed to bring empirical sensitivity and not ready-made explanations to
our efforts. If the fractal has anything to offer, it is primarily in the form of
renewed confusion about surveillance, which is only relevant to situated studies.
In these instances, however, I argue that fractals have a role in opening up for
studying the partial connections of surveillance infrastructure, studying how the
object of surveillance is performed by and folded into the surveillance system, and
studying the role of otherness in surveillance acts, actors and infrastructures.
Fractal stories about DNA Surveillance
In this section, I tell short fractal stories about the daily virtual control of more
than 75.000 people through the apparatus of the national Danish police’s DNA
database. In the section, I bracket the growing body of literature on DNA
surveillance (e.g. Lazer ed. 2004; Lynch et al ed. 2008; Hindmarsh & Prainsack
ed. 2010), as I want to focus on parts of my empirical data in order to illustrate
fractal qualities.
First story: what is a DNA profile?
The political battles over the construction of a national Danish police DNA
database have to a large degree revolved around the very definition of what a
DNA profile was and what to call it. Proponents such as police officials and
changing Ministers of Justice have insisted on calling it a “genetic fingerprint
based on junk DNA”, while opponents have refused this terminology and
emphasized the extraordinary risks in letting the government “read your DNA”.
Uncertain what to believe, I naturally approached both police officers and forensic
personnel during the beginning of my field for my Master’s thesis work in 2008.
At the forensic institute (Retsgenetisk Afdeling) where they make the police’s
DNA profiles, I interviewed among others the vice director (VD), who told me
that besides making the standard DNA profiles, which are based non-coding
genetic areas, they also do paternity tests and research in genetics. However, in
spite of the fact that the standard DNA profile is based on non-coding areas he
dislikes the term “junk DNA”
A: you call it junk DNA, right?
VD: you could also call it ’non-sense DNA’. It is DNA which does
not code for known features … but if you compare these DNA areas,
we know that the distribution of types are different for different
populations. Therefore, if you have a full DNA profile and know the
distribution of the types in different populations, then it is no more
non-sense than the fact that you can get a likelihood on ethnic
inheritance. We don’t do it routinely though because it requires large
and credible databases to compare with
A: But is it something the police ask you to do?
VD: It is something the police ask us to do sometimes, but they
usually don’t care about it … but sometimes it is nice for them to
know if there is a greater possibility whether the suspect is of
Danish/Northern European inheritance or African or Greenlandic
inheritance. As long as they are aware of the statistical margin of
error.
The genetic fingerprint suddenly seems less non-sense, but an additional surprise
waits around the corner. As I am given a tour in the laboratory, I am introduced to
a young man who sits by a computer and looks at images of just made DNA
profiles. He tells me that in some circumstances, it is also possible to read whether
the owner of the DNA profile has Down’s syndrome. “People with Down’s will
most likely have three peaks in this system [points to the screen], because they
have three copies of chromosome 21”
Chart 2: DNA profile at the forensic institute
In sum, the “genetic fingerprint” is not a fingerprint, as it contains information,
but this information is not usually available, especially to the police who do not
have the required knowledge or technical means to “read the DNA profiles”. To
the policeman the numbers of a DNA profile are just that – numbers.
Second story: DNA surveillance as a fractal infrastructure
The first story showed a fractal quality pertaining to the object called DNA
profiles as being both information and meaningless depending on where one is
situated. In this second story, I focus more specifically on what happens at the
DNA section of the police, which administers the DNA database.
The DNA database has been growing exponentially since 2005, where the rules
for inclusion were changed significantly. Before the amendment you had to be
charged or convicted of a crime resulting in 6 years or more in prison. After,
however, all charges for sentences for crimes punished with 18 months or more in
prisonwould trigger registration. As a result of this change, the database has
grown from 6.141 to 40.500 crime scene profiles and from 3.195 to 75.000
suspect’s profiles today (November 2011).
The national police’s DNA section (Rigspolitiets DNA-sektion) is placed a stone’s
throw from the police headquarters in Copenhagen in a small white and yellow
painted apartment. A small mixture of trusted secretaries and police officers work
here. Less than ten people in total. Their main task is to keep the DNA database
updated, inform local police about “hits”, handle international requests and work
as an intermediary between local police and the forensic institute. The DNA
database consists of a paper-based and an electronic archive. The paper-based
archive is located inside the apartment, while the server containing the electronic
database is physically located in a basement under the Copenhagen headquarters.
Most of the work with the electronic profiles is conducted in a small piece of
indispensable software called DNA2005, which consists of few work areas, which
are handled by at least four different people. The five work areas are
1. Pre-registration (secretary 1)
2. Authorize DNA profile (secretary 2)
3. HIT pre-registration (police officer 1)
4. HIT approval (police officer 2)
5. HIT communication (random police officer)
Pre-registration has to do with sorting between profiles that can be adopted into
the database and which cannot. The secretary adheres to a strict legal framework
when it comes to the identified peoples profiles, but switches to practical
reasoning when sorting the crime scene profiles. These are often too damaged or
mixed to be useful for the police. Depending on the severity of crime, the profiles
are adopted or dismissed. In the second work area of DNA2005, a second
secretary double-checks the accepted profiles from the first secretary. The third
area HIT pre-registration is where the police officers evaluate the hits that
DNA2005 finds. This work is likewise checked by another police officer (fourth
work area) before the hit is communicated to the forensic institute for a scientific
evaluation. While the evaluation is underway, the hits are stored in the fifth work
area and only after they are approved are they communicated out to the local
police where the crime was committed.
Every night around 2AM, DNA2005 automatically starts comparing the latest
DNA-profiles with the entire DNA database. Within seconds it has completed its
task and identified up to a hundred hits. Its search is numerically “democratic”. It
knows nothing about skin color or cases or even the difference between peoples’
profiles and the ones from crime scenes. It simply compares everything new to
everything old and reports the resulting hits. But the computer program does not
only present the “perfect hits”. According to the head of the DNA section, the
program is “loosely set up”. It is programmed to present profiles that fall within a
margin of error. The reason this margin of error exists is that DNA analysis at the
forensic institute sometimes is disturbed by chemicals or substances from textiles
or that there is DNA from more than one person’s DNA in the sample. “We need
human eyes on the profiles … if we program DNA2005 too tightly, we end up
missing some hits” (Head of DNA section).
What is apparent in this story is that there is a concern about human bias built into
the infrastructure, which is obvious in the double checks. These checks are
likewise found at the forensic institute where all tests are done by two separate
teams with separate laboratories in order to eliminate the possibility of
contamination. Also interesting is the “otherness” of the risks of erroneous DNA
analysis which is built into the program at the DNA section.
Third story: The fractal actor
The first two stories have shown fractal qualities concerning the DNA profile
being a multiple object and the infrastructure as being folded in on itself where
different scales are partially connected. In the third story, I switch scale again as I
focus on the specific acts of the police officer (third work area) as he handles the
hits.
It is noon and I have arrived for the second time at the DNA section of the Danish
national police. I am greeted by a police officer who today is first in line to
analyze the hits that were produced during the night. He has waited patiently for
my arrival. Usually he would be done with the matches by now. We sit down and
he opens DNA2005 and we begin immediately. 40-something hits appear on a list
in the lower right corner of the screen. The list shows no names or civil
registration numbers. The profiles are simply named with letters and numbers that
seem incomprehensible at first. But they are not. The police officer tells me that
the letters P or S which are at the beginning of each profile indicate whether the
profile stems from a crime scene or an identified person. The numbers on the
other hand are codes that tell him which type of crime the profile relates to. He
clicks on the first match suggested by Hit Finder – the subprogram in DNA 2005
used to search and compare profiles. A new window with two rows of numbers
and two buttons with the words “Accept” and “Deny” pops up. The officer
explains that once a profile has been denied, it will never come back unless one
does a manual search: “it will never show up again. It is important to be secure in
your knowledge about what is a hit and what isn’t”.
Chart 3: re-creation of a hit
“We are dealing with a rape”, he says while also telling me that the crime scene
profile stems from a specific town on Zealand. He recognizes both from a number
attached to the profile. Quickly, he starts vertically comparing and reciting all the
numbers: “14-14, 16-16, 17-17, 18-18, 10-nothing”. He tells me that empty
systems are automatically counted as hits. He continues to the end and declares it
a hit. He opens the next suggested hit and almost immediately dismisses it as he
spots the lack of a number.
After a while with mixed results, we come to a hit where all the numbers match
between the person and the crime scene profile, but the officer is reluctant to press
the accept button because of many empty systems. “The likelihood ratio is very
low, probably below 50.000”. Likelihood ratio (LR) between profiles is calculated
at the forensic institute, when hits are submitted, which serves as a help to the
justice system in interpreting its judicial value. An LR at 50.000 make the hit a
very weak piece of evidence as ratios over 300.000 is usually expected. “It is from
another rape” he says while going back to the main window where he clicks on a
button named “view case”. A window pops up, showing the history of the crime
scene profile. Four other hits, but the case has not yet been solved, as they are all
crime scene to crime scene hits, indicating that the same unknown person has
“been busy”. Aware that pressing the accept button might lead to a waste of police
resources on a weak lead, the officer still hesitates. He then opens another
program and accesses the criminal register in order to get a read on the man’s
“modus”. The officer tells me that the man in question has earlier been convicted
with different accounts of violence, but before it could result in registration, which
is the reason his DNA profile only shows up now. He also lives in the area.
Despite the fact that he has no prior convictions of rape, it is enough for the
officer, who presses “accept” and the hit disappears from his screen. “Normally I
would not accept this hit, but because of the nature of the case …”. I indicate that
I understand and he proceeds to the next hit.
The described actions of the police officer illustrate both the ordinary practice and
the handling of a special case, where the criminal register is invoked to either
strengthen or weaken the hit. What is interesting is that the usual vision that is
established is one where the suspects can only be enacted as numbers that hit or
do not. But in the special cases, the suspect may be enacted as a number, a modus
and a geographically placed individual. The identified fractal qualities both
adhere to the suspect, who suddenly changes “size” and the police officer who can
be identified as a fractal actor who is large in the sense of his socio-technical
connections with different databases and small in the sense that he occupies such
a small part of a surveillance system over which he has no vision and no control.
Conclusion
In this paper, I described and illustrated fractal concepts in relation to the study of
situated surveillance, while drawing on fieldwork on the Danish police’s DNA
database. I argue that the fractal is an interesting concept because it disturbs old
and established sociological/anthropological dualisms between micro/macro,
one/many and self/other. This quality makes it an interesting experiment for
surveillance studies in dealing with the machine-like “wholes” of the Panopticon
and Big Brother. The fractal makes other types of descriptions possible exactly
because it confuses our concepts of scale and being, without replacing them. The
fractal does not give us anything to hold onto. In turn, this opens up for an
interesting empirical sensitivity towards the complexity of situated and mundane
events.
Ask Risom Bøge is a PhD student at Aarhus University, Denmark. Here he
coordinates the Surveillance in Denmark project and is an active participant at the
Centre for STS Studies at the Department for Information and Media Studies. His
work revolves around police surveillance with a current focus on biometrics and
the use of the National Danish DNA Database.
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