Where on earth are you?

Globalisation promised a borderless world, but it has delivered an age of neurotically policed zones and cubicles. To cross a border legally now involves an unprecedented level of scrutiny: fingerprint and iris scans, chips embedded in your passport, hidden sensors to detect your heartbeat and carbon dioxide emissions from thirty feet away, the tick-box confessional of ‘Are you now or have you ever been . . .’ Frances Stonor Saunders inspects the complex apparatus of today’s border regimes and their obsession with the verified self.