Simon A. Cole. “Suspect Identities”

This is a groundbreaking book by outstanding US forensic scientist. It was published in 2001 by Harvard University Press. Nowadays, they often violate privacy of law-abiding people, using every pretext to fingerprint innocent persons. Essentially, at the beginning of XXIst century Professor Cole warned us about such ominous possibilities of human rights’ violations. Unfortunately, his reasonable opinions have not been promoted globally. And this review of mine is a humble attempt to remind general auidence of his noteworthy treatise.

On page 7, a concise explanation has been given, why IDs were not necessary in smaller communities of earlier times: “From a modern perspective, it is tempting to assume that premodern courts lacked a method of identification because they lacked know-how: because photography had not yet been invented and fingerprinting had not yet been “discovered“. But, in fact, early modern societies were not desperately seeking some means of identifying people because, for the most part, it was unnecessary. Most people were known in their small local communities. Many lived their whole lives without ever leaving the vicinity of their village, and so were enmeshed in the memories and perceptions of their families and neighbors“.

On page 43, identifying techniques of the past, which are still in use, have been mentioned: “It is because of Bertillon’s belief in the identifying potential of the ear that today’s mug shots include the profile“. On page 45, the rise of modern quantitave measurements in forensic science has been outlined: “The answer, Bertillon decided, lay in anthropometric measurements, which, unlike photographs or peculiar marks, could be represented quantitatively“. On page 56, it has been shown how the individualized punishment of criminals lag behind their anthropometric individualization: “The great irony of anthropometry, however, was that the individualization of criminal records was not accompanied by the promised individualization of penology and criminology. The goals of reformist penology and criminal anthropology were to institute individualized penal treatments and cures modeled on medical treatment. But while anthropometry provided access to individualized criminal histories, penologists and criminologists were not able to follow through on the individualizing project“.

On page 89, a troubling disparity between real-life fingerprints — often blurred or partial — on crime scenes and fingerprints, taken under almost perfect laboratory conditions, has been emphasized: “… investigators rarely find a complete set of ten fingerprints at the scene of a crime. Usually they find the impressions of one or two fingers. Often these impressions are fragmentary, so that detectives are not even working with whole fingerprints but with partial prints. Forensic fingerprint identification, therefore, rests in part upon the far more ambitious premise that there are no two identical single fingerprints anywhere in the world. And ultimately it rests upon the still more ambitious premise that no two partial prints are alike, or that fragmentary areas of papillary ridge detail of a certain size (exactly what size is unclear) can be matched to one and only one finger, to the exclusion of all other fingers in the world. Moreover, the impressions are often blurred, smudged, overlaid upon on another, and distorted by foreign matter. The detective must match this distorted crime scene print to an inked print, taken under pristine “laboratory” conditions, to the exclusion of all other fingerprints in the world“.

On page 100, the apparent impartiality of fingerprinting as a scientific tool has been discussed: “By turning the fingerprint into an empty signifier — a sign devoid of information about a body’s race, ethnicity, heredity, character, or criminal propensity — fingerprint examiners made fingerprint identification seem less value-laden, more factual“. On page 177, however, a peculiarity of fingerprints as forensic evidence has been pointed out: “Probabilistic arguments like Balthazard’s, however, were aimed at determining the likelihood of whole single fingerprints matching exactly in every particular. They completely overlooked the question relevant to forensic identification, which entailed matching partial fingerprint fragments“. On page 247, pioneering cases of large-scale totalitarian fingerprinting have been described: “In 1929 the federal government began fingerprinting all civil servants. In 1937 the FBI received the prints of members of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and in 1939 prints were taken from employees of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1940 Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, which eventually delivered over a million fingerprints to the FBI“.

On page 290, boastful claims of dactyloscopy have been criticized in comparison with more sober approach of genetical identification: “It is important to note that, unlike dactyloscopers, geneticists were not making a claim of absolute uniqueness. Rather they were making probabilistic claims, albeit ones with extremely high probabilities, ranging from 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 100 million. In this way genetic identification is more like the other forensic sciences, which frame their conclusions in terms of probabilities, than like fingerprinting, which frames its arguments in terms of uniqueness and absolute certainty“. But, on page 310, the author admits that in some aspects dactyloscopy might be more reliable than genetical identification: “If individuals can be cloned, then DNA typing will be of as little value in distinguishing them as it now is in distinguishing identical twins. Will we have to return to fingerprinting, with its epigenetic environmental influences, to identify clones?“

Professor Cole kindly presented me a with signed copy of his book in August 2024. Incidentally, I proudly mentioned this gift in my interview, published in one of the leading newspapers of Central Asia and Kazakhstan on November 5, 2024. Today, his judicious scepticism towards fingerprinting, touted in mainstream media as a highly reliable tool of justice, is rather useful due to mandatory fingerprinting, forced upon law-abiding nationals. They have already introduced this totalitarian measure in Argentina, China, and Uzbekistan to name a few. Thus, a humiliating dactyloscopic procedure, which was applied mainly to criminal suspects and prisoners, have become a grim reality for billions of ordinary human beings. Even authoritarian leaders, like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, abstained from fingerprinting their subjects en masse. It is praiseworthy that the author used such outspoken, anti-establishment works as Finger-Prints Can Be Forged, 1924, by Albert Wehde and John Nicholas Beffel. Because, only a wide variety of information sources can develop a balanced opinion as for one problem or another.

Several years after the publication of the treatise, the biometric harassment of international travelling began to take shape. Nowadays, they routinely finger-print ordinary visitors to Canada, Italy, and South Korea to name a few. In doing so, certain neofeudal discrimination is being introduced. Like nobility and serfs, modern travellers have been segregated into groups with different rights and obligations. As a top governmental official, the Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev visited New York on June 26, 2024 without submitting his fingerprints to US authorities. By the way, among other things, on February 25, 2022 US Treasury imposed sanctions on Mr. Kolokoltsev for his complicity in “Russia’s unjustified, unprovoked, and premeditated invasion of Ukraine“. On the other hand, a Kazakh top model Aigul Sarkulova dutifully submitted her fingerprints to US authorities in order to visit the United States in June 2024. Who do you think presents a potential danger to the national security of this country: the Russian war criminal or the Kazakh beauty? That is why, we must join our efforts in order to eliminate such biometric absurdities, imposed on us by a ruthless cabal of transnational capitalists.

Perhaps, due to a language barrier, Professor Cole didn’t use valuable data, amassed by researchers in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. No doubt, the author would have got certain fresh ideas, if he had read books and articles by prominent Soviet forensic scientists such as Major General Rafail Belkin, Colonel Aleksandr Ginzburg, Professor Erkyn Dzhakishev, and others. Incidentally, the former Soviet republic of Belarus has minimized dactyloscopic and other biometric procedures for its ordinary citizens. Even foreigners, who wish to get Belarusian residence permit or citizenship, don’t have to submit their fingerprints. Oddly enough, law-enforcement officers and soldiers of Belarus have been required to submit their fingerprints. Thus, the East European nation has set a bright example, how to observe human rights in the field of biometrics. No wonder that Belarus had almost no restrictions for its residents during the Covid Hoax.

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