Includes bibliographical references (pages 436-533) and index.

The Panopticon -- The two will wests -- The hijacker's fingerprints -- The biometric belly button -- Geography is destiny -- Kabul is burning -- Murder, mayhem, and consequence management -- Battle damage assessment -- Strong point Payenzai -- The god's-eye view -- Abdul Ahad -- The three IEDS -- Getting a platoon -- C-wire -- July 2, 2012 -- The man in white -- Double murder -- The clue trail -- True identities -- The genetic Panopticon -- The court of public opinion -- acknowledgments -- Interviews and written correspondence.

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.