This website has been archived and is no longer updated.

The content featured is no longer current and is being made available to the general public for research and historical information purposes only.


Powerhouse Museum - Home


Back


 
Identification and tracking system
Refugee tagging

In the middle of 1994 thousands of refugees from Haiti and Cuba tried to sail to the USA. The United States Government immigration officials didn't want to simply let them in. The refugees could apply for official refugee status, but they couldn't just show up. The officials picked up as many of the refugees as they could while they were at sea, and took them to refugee camps outside the USA to be processed. They would get refugee status if the United States Immigration Service decided they would be persecuted if they went home. Otherwise they were sent back.

View the refugee background section to find out why there were so many Cuban and Haitian refugees in 1994.

refugees from Cuba and Hait
Thousands of refugees from Cuba and Haiti were taken to a US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. How would the United States keep track of who everyone was? They used wristbands with microchips like the ones some people put in their pets. It doesn't hurt. The chip is in a wristband the refugees wear on their arm (or their ankle if they're a small child). The soldiers read the chip with a scanner using technology called AVID. Photo: Lynne Brakeman

The United States ended up with refugee camps filled with people. They had to make a decision about each and every one of them. They had to know who was who, and what their stories were. To make things harder, many of the refugees didn't speak English. The United States needed a sophisticated information system to control the situation.

They used a system called DMPITS (Deployable Mass Population Identification and Tracking System).

To start with, the military had just used colour-coded plastic bracelets originally designed to use with prisoners of war. These bracelets had a printed label giving some information about the person. But some of the refugees started changing their labels, or throwing the bracelet away. Some pretended they were people who had already been accepted as refugees by the United States.

The refugees were not just a component in an information system in the same way that an object is. They could decide they didn't want to fit into the system the way the United States wanted them to, and do something about it. They could try to subvert the system. So the United States wanted to come up with a more effective way of controlling information about the refugees. How could they make sure they kept track of who everyone was, no matter what the people themselves wanted? That's where DMPITS came in.

DMPITS
DMPITS was much harder for the refugees to subvert, because it used much more sophisticated technology. It used three different ways of identifying each refugee:

  • microchip each refugee had to wear
  • digital fingerprint
  • video image.

AVID: Microchip technology
Gone were the printed labels. Instead, each refugee had to wear a plastic wristband that had a microchip sealed into it. This used technology called American Veterinary Identification Devices (AVID) that was originally developed for identifying pets. Each microchip had a unique ID number. The soldiers had a scanner they could use to read the number on the chip, and feed that into a computer to bring up the person's file. But there was no way the refugee could read it, or change it in any way. The two ends of the wristband were riveted together around the person's wrist so they were impossible to take off without destroying them. (Some refugees still cut them off or chewed through the plastic bands.)

Anyone who wanted to know the identity of a refugee would simply scan their wristband to read their ID number.

AVID technology
How can you tag a person or animal so you can always tell its identity? One way uses a chip worn by a person or implanted under an animal's skin. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has a display of AVID technology used to identify people and animals. This technology was invented for pets, but it has also been used to tag refugees.
Powerhouse Museum collection.

Fingerprints electronically scanned
The refugees also had their fingerprint electronically scanned into the system. This was recorded against their ID number. It was a backup. If a refugee cut off their wristband, they could be finger scanned again to check who they were. Also, if anything really important was supposed to happen with one of the refugees, the soldiers could double check the microchip and the fingerprint to make sure they had the right person.

Video image
The video image meant that the United States authorities could also check someone's identity by comparing their face with the video image.

Refugee data
The following data for each refugee is recorded under an ID number:

  • finger scan
  • video image
  • name
  • age
  • sex
  • where they were from
  • medical information
  • what stage their application was up to
  • camp number
  • tent number
  • bed number in the tent.

Once the refugees were processed they were compelled to be part of the system. Not only were they a number on a database but they were also physically tagged with the microchip wristband.

wristband
When ID chips were used to identify people they were worn inside a wristband like this. Powerhouse Museum collection.

Tagging animals and people is not a new concept. To find out more about view the tagging page of this site.

After a few months the refugee crisis was over. Some of the refugees were accepted by the United States. They were granted asylum, and allowed to settle in the USA. The rest were rejected by the US Department of Immigration and Naturalization Service and were sent back to Cuba or Haiti.

Want to know more? Read the full story.

What did the refugees think about being part of a high-tech information system, and about wearing the ID wristbands? View the reactions to tagging section to find out.

HSC technology syllabses support - HOME spacer Refugee tagging