First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance
by Annie Jacobsen
View on GoodreadsJacobsen's narrative of an Army platoon's deployment in Afghanistan — a court-martial story interwoven with the technology of "identity dominance," the biometric surveillance regime the US built across the war zone.
Core ideas
- The Biometric Identification System for Access (BISA) and adjacent programs aimed at a database of every Afghan male's iris, fingerprint, and face — sold as counterinsurgency precision, delivered as ubiquitous surveillance.
- The Taliban inherited the database when Kabul fell in 2021 — an outcome the program's architects considered impossible during the build-out — and that inheritance reframes the entire enterprise.
- The court-martial story (a platoon accused of killing civilians) is the human spine; the surveillance technology is the institutional spine; together they show what the war's domestic intelligence inheritance looks like.
Published2021
Pages399
ISBN9781524746681
ReadMay 2024
