Death Mask

Any of us lucky enough to travel through US Customs and Immigration in the past decade will have no doubt suffered the indignity of first-world travel. The biometric passports, the full body X-Ray, the retina scan. They each serve to compile a digital data portrait to be shared instantaneously with numerous national and international security agencies. Such profiles, we are told, are blind to conditions of ethnicity and race and are in our own best interests. Some advocates argue that such gleaning of physiognomic details has the capacity to be used to enforce racial profiling that singles out undesirables based solely on their physical likeness to known terrorist forms.