John Cheney-Lippold of University of Michigan, in his paper coined the word “jus algoritmi” as new form of citizenship in the digital world.
The algorithmic citizenship is a mode of identification that governments use to determine users’ citizenship status when no documentation is available, through an algorithmic analysis of available data such as IP addresses etc.
Classified U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) documents released in the summer of 2013 detailed a trove of controversial surveillance programs, igniting a debate about state power and the rights of citizens.
But how can citizenship be evaluated in a digital, networked world?
In response to this question, the NSA created an algorithmic, databased version of citizenship (and foreignness), where a user is legally foreign if his or her “selectors” are “at least 51 percent confidence” foreign. These selectors, which can include telephone numbers, Internet protocol addresses, or language, became effectual arbiters of citizenship online.
Historically, the citizen—the subject of more than a century of privacy law—was an identifiable individual. She was a unique person with a name and a body who could be assigned the status of citizen or foreigner based on existing credentials. These credentials originated from the political legacies of either jus sanguinis or jus soli (Brubaker, 1992; Henriques & Schuster, 1917). If an individual was a citizen according to jus sanguinis, it was because her blood carried her citizenship—if one’s parent or spouse was a citizen of a country, one became a citizen, too.
If an individual was a citizen according to jus soli, it was because her birth founded her citizenship—if one was born in a country, one became a citizen of that country. The eventual artifact that proves citizenship, be it a birth certificate, passport, or state-issued identity card, is derived from one or both of these bona fides. As verified government documents, these artifacts confer onto individuals the right to formal citizenship (Torpey, 2000).
But online, people possess no government documents. When mediated through the technologies that compose the Internet, the identifiable, individual citizen is unrecognizable. The same technologies that facilitate ubiquitous surveillance also make it impossible to understand with certainty who is and who is not a citizen of the United States.
An Internet protocol (IP) address, such as 93.45.225.191, is just a location for transmission control protocol packets to be sent to and from a device. A unique media access control address for a phone or computer, such as 00-50-5A-46-18-C1, is merely an identifier for network interface hardware. Neither has a political character, and neither is permanent; thus, neither has the ability to establish one’s jus sanguinis or jus soli right to citizenship. User profiles, e-mail accounts, and even Facebook pages are all functionally disconnected from a singular, rights-bearing self.
Without a unique index to assign as either citizen or foreigner, the NSA was at a legal impasse. If the NSA really wanted to “collect it all,” how could it protect U.S. citizens from this global dragnet? Online, the NSA was unable to rely on historical conceptions and theories of the citizen and was thus unable to understand who was, and was not, constitutionally off limits for surveillance.
But rather than shut down its massive surveillance network, the U.S. government instead created a new, ad hoc legal standard of citizenship. This standard is based on the data people produce on the Internet—the messages they send, the language they use, the friends they have—that signal to an NSA computer and analyst the quantitative degree of how foreign (and inversely, how citizen) a user is. If an individual’s foreignness is found to be at or above “51 percent confidence” (Gellman & Poitras, 2013, “Roots in the ’70s” section, para. 6), then that individual legally becomes a foreigner and thus loses the right to privacy. This is what I call jus algoritmi, or citizenship rights according to algorithmic logic.
Unlike its jus soli and jus sanguinis predecessors, jus algoritmi is not a category that confers membership within an imagined national body politic. It is not something that we know about, nor something we can identify as. It is instead a (once-) secret framework that extends the legal reach of NSA surveillance into the depths of the Internet—and into the jurisdiction
This identity, based on how algorithmic logic makes data about people useful, is different from how people have historically understood themselves as having identity—in this case, citizen identity. The algorithmic citizenship of jus algoritmi is a citizenship of technical requirement, one that can neither be intentionally practiced nor remain functionally stable.
Jus algoritmi is instead a dynamic, temporal interpretation, similar to what Johanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie (2004) describe as “speculative computing,” which “suggests that the concrete be replaced by plasticine that remains malleable, receptive to the trace of interpretive moves” (p. 433).
Although Facebook and Google tried to enforce a singular identity onto Internet accounts, this singular identity cannot fully map onto a unique individual identity, because different people may use the same Facebook account, and a full name on a Google profile is not necessarily, nor legally, the real name of the person using the account (Lingel & Golub, 2015). International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Jus Algoirtmi 1723 of “collect it all.” In this framework we move further toward what I have previously called “a new algorithmic identity” (Cheney-Lippold, 2011, p. 164).
