![Cover for: Measuring the mobile body](https://www.eurozine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/11fc39d53d7d9438b12a7d2d08bc0cc1.jpg)
New border and surveillance technologies are being lauded for their accuracy and fairness. But how ethical can forced identification be? Late nineteenth-century enthusiasts of pinning down the ‘born criminal’ enlisted scientific advances to sinister ends. Might biometric data processing that registers migrants entering the EU risk a similar transgression of human rights today?