FBI Opens National Fingerprint Repository in Washington
Poet involved
What happened
The FBI established a centralised national fingerprint repository in Washington, D.C. in 1924, consolidating fingerprint records from police departments across the United States. This created for the first time a national identification database allowing local investigators to match crime scene fingerprints against a national archive. By 1939 the repository held over ten million records. The system became the infrastructure for fingerprint evidence matching that persisted, with modernisation, into the digital era.
Literary impact
The national fingerprint archive embodied a new kind of state knowledge — the capacity to identify any individual through their traces, regardless of location. This surveillance infrastructure became a recurring concern in mid-twentieth-century American literature, from the paranoia of hard-boiled fiction to the dystopian visions of science fiction. Poets of civil liberties, from Langston Hughes onwards, wrote about the exposed individual subject to institutional identification and surveillance.
Source: Wikipedia
