Digitization, Data, and Distrust in Jamaica
The rollout of the country’s National Identification System raises questions about how to address a digital trust deficit.
In 2019, when Jamaica’s Supreme Court struck down the National Identification and Registration Act (2017), ruling it unconstitutional and in violation of the right to privacy, it leveled a significant blow to the country’s proposed National Identification System (NIDS). Put forward by Prime Minister Andrew Holness of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), NIDS would have established a secure database of demographic, biographic, and biometric data on all Jamaican citizens, and provided each person with a national identification number and a multipurpose ID card. The court ruling, in conjunction with legislative resistance from the opposing People’s National Party (PNP), seemed to be the system’s death knell.
But in 2020, The Jamaica Gleaner, one of the island’s premier periodicals, published a cartoon that depicted the prime minister with a shovel in hand and a sly grin on his face. In front of him was a burial plot with a headstone that read “Here Lies the Unconstitutional NIDS.” The message was clear: NIDS may have been struck down, but it was not to be out for very long. In 2021, Jamaica’s House of Representatives passed a new National Identification and Registration Act, this time with support from the opposition. Its new provisions included making NIDS voluntary, strengthening the protection of data and identity information, and strengthening the oversight and governance structure of the National Identification Registration Authority. With those amendments, the prime minister spoke confidently. “I give the guarantee that every single Jamaican is going to see an improvement in their quality of life,” he said.
Yet the revised system still has the potential to compromise privacy and data protection, and faces challenges to implementation in a country with a serious trust deficit. Leading up to a pilot program rollout, NIDS continues to be touted as a secure and reliable way to verify Jamaican identity in a country that lacks a single trusted form of identification. In Jamaica, where 13 percent and 3 percent of adults are unable to access bank accounts and social protection programs respectively, NIDS has been marketed as a digital welfare infrastructure that will improve government efficiency, democratize access to state resources, facilitate economic enfranchisement, eradicate social exclusion, assist in the fight against crime, and connect the Jamaican diaspora to its homeland.
In essence, NIDS has become the fulcrum point of a new Jamaican digital society and economy — one predicated on state investments in digital infrastructures, cybersecurity, and big data. Central to the state’s rhetoric has been the idea that digitization will lead to development. NIDS is guided by Jamaica’s National Development Plan — Vision 2030, which aims for Jamaica to achieve developed status by the year 2030. As an infrastructure of both digitization and development, NIDS has thus been tailored to align with key Vision 2030 goals and has been central to the state’s vision of postcolonial modernity.
A digital trust society
NIDS has become an exercise not only in population management and datafication governance, but also in the management of and building of trust in a Caribbean postcolonial geography.
Trust has been a central theme of the Holness administration, whose slogan is “prosperity for all.” In his 2016 inaugural address, Holness described his intention to lead a government of partnerships, and his belief that “partnerships require trust.” On the occasion of his second swearing-in speech four years later, he again returned to the notion of trust, acknowledging the strong correlation between the success of the government’s economic and social programs and the trust of the public.
With its tagline “One ID. Many Opportunities,” NIDS has emerged as a vehicle through which to engineer a new mode of connectedness, solidarity, partnership, and trust between the state, citizens, and the diaspora. This centrality of trust to NIDS’s digitization and development enterprise emerged as an important message at the May 2022 signing of a contract between the government of Jamaica and Fujitsu Limited, for the latter to digitize birth, death, marriage, and adoption records. Mervyn Eyre, the CEO of Fujitsu Caribbean and Latin America, situated NIDS as central to Jamaica’s transformation into a more “trusted society,” and positioned digital resilience and innovation at its core.
Such an approach is in keeping with development studies scholarship that suggests a correlation between trust and economic prosperity. Yet, in Jamaica, trust in the island’s two major political parties and in government processes remains quite low, at 22.5 percent. And the emergence of NIDS raises new questions about how to effectively address a digital trust deficit.
Distrust and the fear of disembodied data
Though legislators worked to make necessary amendments to the new National Identity and Registration Act (2021) in order to safeguard privacy and identity information, critical concerns remain. Notably, this legislation fails to sufficiently account for data minimization, an important data protection principle which limits the collection of personal information to only that which is relevant to a specific purpose, and maintains that data should be retained only for as long as is necessary to satisfy that purpose. The new legislation also fails to detail protections for vulnerable groups including the transgender community, Rastafarians, the illiterate, and the disabled.
NIDS is a reminder that trust in Jamaica is not only historically fraught, but has long been tethered to racialized and classed legacies of distrust. Since 2017, grassroots resistance to NIDS from everyday Jamaicans has spotlighted its potential perils, in particular the abuse and misuse of identity data. This resistance has mobilized Black liberation philosophies: on his 2018 song “Naah Register,” for example, local dancehall entertainer Fyah Konkarah likens NIDS to modern day slavery. Should NIDS be implemented, he insists he would be “ready fi repatriate” and “ready fi sail out the Black Star Line” — the latter a reference to the shipping line that was founded by the Jamaican-born Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey.
Read in this light, fears about NIDS fit into a deeper historiography that tethers distrust of the state to the embodied violation of poor and Black Jamaican bodies by various repressive and surveillant apparatuses of the postcolonial order. But even as it recalls recent histories of embodied violation, the everyday distrust of NIDS conjures images of a new violation: the disembodiment and fragmentation of bodily and identity data, and with it, potential for the abuse and irresponsible regulation of this data. Amplifying this fear was the government’s 2021 JamCOVID scandal, which resulted in the exposure of the immigration data and COVID-19 test results of half a million travelers to the island in the midst of the pandemic. The fear of surrendering one’s bodily data and sovereignty is not insignificant in a country irrevocably shaped by the plantation — a geography with its own racialized big data and population management practices — and one whose citizens continue to live with the enduring legacies of colonialism 60 years after independence from Britain.
The counter-hegemonic possibilities of distrust
Even in the face of this distrust, the government is pushing steadfastly ahead; the rollout of NIDS to the general public is set for 2023. In recent months, Prime Minister Holness has lambasted criticism of NIDS on social media as “nonsense” that will only serve to destroy Jamaica and hold the country back. In many ways, NIDS will be a referendum on how Jamaica will step into a digital age.
Yet the sustained distrust of NIDS is a reminder of the ways that structural legacies of the past impinge on and interpenetrate the present order — and their implications for an imagined postcolonial digital future. If we read this distrust not as mere nonsense but as a disruptive counter-hegemonic strategy, it reminds us that the postcolonial digital future is very much in contention. Despite the state’s vision of a more harmonious future — where one inclusive ID will unleash multitudinous opportunities — that future does not rest on settled ground.
Kimberley D. McKinson is a cultural anthropologist who conducts ethnographic research in Jamaica. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Her research is situated at the intersections of security/insecurity, infrastructure, Caribbean postcoloniality, and critical Black historiography and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, the University of California Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design, and the City University of New York.
