Bombs, bodies, and biopolitics: securitizing the subject at the airport security checkpoint

Abstract

The United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) broadcasts the following warning in airports around the country: 'Making jokes or statements regarding bombs and/or threats during the screening process may be grounds for both civil and criminal penalties and could cause you to miss your flight.' Despite the warning, people continue to be arrested for making jokes about bombs, anthrax, and security policy. This paper examines the persistence of these disciplinary mechanisms in the context of the deterritorialized risk analysis, biometric identity banking, and 'network thinking' that characterize state security regimes. The article first describes how TSA has incorporated theories of complex adaptive systems, networks, and emergence into its strategy. Second, I trace how air travelers move through a series of risk analysis and inspection practices. By combining passenger pre-screening, check-in, visual inspection and 'behavior observation,' TSA seeks to surveil different spatiotemporal slices of passengers' identities, belongings, and future plans. Third, the article situates the banning of the bomb joke in the context of information-driven inspection practices and unpacks the interpretive practices of TSA staff. Finally, I argue that spatial orders are produced in and through the embodied performance of speech, and further, that disciplining speech points to enduring anxieties about the 'securitized subject' in post-9/11 security regimes.

The role of biometric applications in air transport security

“…Since the early years, much research based on static (i.e., leg length) and dynamic walking parameters (i.e., number of steps per minute), using silhouette-based and model-based approaches, has shown reasonable success of gait to differentiate between individuals. 28 , 29 , 30 Further research efforts in gait recognition have focused on improving scalability of the initial results, camera viewpoints, effects of walking speed, carrying objects, shoes and clothing on walking patterns, etc. , 34 At the National Physics Laboratory, Southampton University, UK, researchers have developed a biometric tunnel with twelve CCTV cameras which allows for automatic gait recognition based on a 3D model of a person's walk.…”

Against Stabilization

“…US support to authoritarian regimes in Central and South America in the 1980s can be regarded as an era of securitization in which workers and indigenous rights movements were viewed through a Cold War prism as threats to be extirpated. The War on Terror encouraged a renewed emphasis on securitization, and commentators have declared many areas of life as being 'securitized': the body, food, the environment (Martin 2010;Gueldry 2012). The literature on the securitisation of the humanitarian sector is particularly insightful, with Mark Duffield (2002: 89) charting how development and security have elided over the past two decades: 'A metropolitan consensus has emerged that holds that conflict is the result of a developmental malaise in which poverty, resource competition, environmental collapse, population growth, and so on, in the context of failed or predatory state institutions is fomenting non-conventional and criminalised forms of conflict.…”

Anxiety as Social Practice

“…One is the individual decision to avoid air travel altogether. Another is the introduction of elaborate security checks at airports (Martin, 2010). Both practices try to control the subject of anxiety in the sense that not flying or the thoroughly checked passengers cannot become subject to terrorism.…”