Abdul Habib, 32, a former ANA soldier who lost friends in the Kunduz attack, blamed access to biometric data for their deaths. Regardless, some locals are convinced that the collection of their biometric information has put them in danger. It’s unclear what kinds of devices these were, or whether they were the same ones used by American forces to help establish “identity dominance”-the Pentagon’s goal of knowing who people were and what they had done. Witnesses told local police at the time that the Taliban used some kind of fingerprint scanner to check people’s identities. In one widely reported incident from that year, insurgents ambushed a bus en route to Kunduz and took 200 passengers hostage, eventually killing 12, including local Afghan National Army soldiers returning to their base after visiting family. The Office of the Secretary of Defense referred questions about this information to United States Central Command, which did not respond to a request for comment on what they should do with such data.Īn investigation by Amnesty International found that the Taliban tortured and massacred nine ethnic Hazara men after capturing Ghazni province in early July, while in Kabul there have been numerous reports of Taliban going door to door to “register” individuals who had worked for the government or internationally funded projects.īiometrics have played a role in such activity going back to at least 2016, according to local media accounts. The police ID application form, for example, also appears to ask for recruits’ favorite fruit and vegetable. The information is also of deep military value-whether for the Americans who helped construct it or for the Taliban, both of which are “looking for networks” of their opponent’s supporters, says Annie Jacobsen, a journalist and author of First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance.īut not all the data has such clear use.
He calls it a sort of “genealogy” of “community connections” that is “putting all of these people at risk.” One of the forms for police recruitment alone captured 36 pieces of information, including data on applicants and their families that included details such as "favorite fruit” and “favorite vegetable.” This turns what was a simple digital catalogue into something far more dangerous, according to Ranjit Singh, a postdoctoral scholar at the nonprofit research group Data & Society who studies data infrastructures and public policy. But it also contains details on the individuals’ military specialty and career trajectory, as well as sensitive relational data such as the names of their father, uncles, and grandfathers, as well as the names of the two tribal elders per recruit who served as guarantors for their enlistment.
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