Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-372) and index.

"An urgent investigation into warfare in the age of biometrics, and the dangerous implications of new technologies that would allow the government to identify anyone, anywhere, at any time"--,Provided by publisher

At first it might sound familiar at first: a platoon of mostly 19-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the US Department of Defense's quest to build the world's most powerful biometrics database, with the power to identify, monitor, catalogue, and police people all over the world. Jacobsen's book is part war story, part legal drama, about identity in the age of identification. She reveals a post-9/11 Pentagon whose identification machines have grown more capable than the humans who must make sense of them-- and a people at its mercy. -- adapted from jacket