The alleged liveness of “live”

In the context of contemporary societies preoccupied with questions of surveillance and identity veri fi cation, biometric systems are being increasingly deployed across a wide range of institutions and organisations in order to provide security of access. In this chapter, I examine the techniques that might be deployed by fraudsters in order to trick biometric systems into giving them illegitimate access to data and/or controlled areas. In order to counter the tactics used by fraudsters to “fool” biometric systems, biometric scientists and technologists are in-building within the technologies a number of tests designed to detect fraudsters. One of the key fraud detection methods being deployed by biometric systems is so-called liveness testing; liveness testing is being used to determine whether the person being screened by the system is actually present (and “alive”) rather than a simulacrum reproducing a stolen identity. In the course of this chapter, I proceed to situate the procedures of “liveness testing” within a Derridean critique of the metaphysics of presence in order to disclose the unacknowledged philosophemes that inform legal, scienti fi c and technological understandings of the body, the legal subject and identity. I conclude this essay by focusing on the development of a new range of biometric technologies that are attempting to preclude digital spoo fi ng by focusing on the seemingly non-replicable depths of the inside of the body. Regardless of this descent into the depths of the body, I argue that, once again, these transductions of the “raw” organic material of the soma cannot escape either the logic of iterability or its consequent spoofable effects.