HIIDE & Seek

Ever wonder what the world would be like without having a birth certificate, social security number, a drivers license or some other form of identification -- a world without any identification databases at all? 

That's Afghanistan today, with very few exceptions. Unless you work for the government, or have been recently arrested (yikes!), chances are that there's no formal record of your existence at all. Think about it: without databases, there is no way to prove that you are who you say you are, no proof of where you live, no standardized records of what you own or who your family is.

This can be a real problem for individuals who are living in a country where terrorists purposely conceal themselves within the larger population. Meanwhile, there's an active ongoing search going on to locate those who plant improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the roads, would-be suicide bombers, arms traffickers, home made explosive (HME) cooks, and other bad characters who are hell-bent on killing in the name of beliefs, affiliations, or for some quick cash. (Photo at the left: a picture that I took while tagging along when Afghan police and US Army MPs were preparing to enter and search a typical qalat -- or private compound -- one morning not too long ago.)

It can be pretty scary to have a bunch of cops and foreign military forces knock on your door when you realize that they really don't know who you are, and what you may know or don't know. On the one side you're happy that they're there providing security and actively looking for the bad guys who are in fact known to work out of your very own neighborhood On the other hand, you also know that some security personnel are also threatened on a regular basis and they have very real reasons to be worried for themselves and their own families too. Some of them even cover their faces since they often have no idea who's a terrorist and who's not, or exactly who's looking at them with bad intentions, when they patrol and search through neighborhoods. For these reasons you understand and don't want to make them nervous, and just want to go on record as a good person who belongs while everything is A-OK.  (Pictured: a masked Afghan security officer walking past a handmade mud-constructed animal shelter inside a residential qalat, as a chicken looks on. For additional insight take a look at Gordon's short article "Who is that Masked Man?" here).

Next thing you know, one of the US Army Military Police (MP) soldiers accompanying your local cops whips out this weird little box and invites you to open your eyes wide for a teenie little camera inside. Pass your fingers over the touch-pad on top and viola, your prints will be entered into a database that can record and prove who you are and where you belong at long last -- a real benefit from the perspective of many Afghans villagers.


The little box that some MPs carry is called a HIIDE system, short for a "Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment" system. It scans your fingerprints and the retinas of your eyes to create an identity record for you, and is used in conjunction with interviews to help you describe yourself, where you belong, and what you're really about. In effect, instead of going to the DMV (which doesn't exist), the DMV comes to you. 


Most Afghan villagers who I've seen "getting HIIDE'd" were anything but intimidated by the process. This is undoubtedly because they knew that being entered into the system doesn't mean you're suspected of wrongdoing at all -- that the goal (reachable or not) is to eventually add all Afghans into a database that will help to identify the innocent as well as those guilty of horrible crimes. No discrimination, just sheer necessity in a land plagued by violence. 


Sadly, one soldier privately told me that one villager had once asked if having such a record made could help verify his remains someday if something bad were ever to happen to him... as what happened to a neighbor of his (unsaid but presumably referring to some kind of mass casualty situation). It makes you think hard, about a world without any identification databases and the various pros and cons to that thought.

Pictured above: a few of the many interesting people who were included during a HIIDE session. The goal (acheivable or not) is to eventually add everyone into an identifying database to help sort out who's who in a country that's still plagued by terrorism.