Biometric Technologies, Data and the Sensory Work of Border Control

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among border police agents at Copenhagen Airport and Gibraltar International Airport, the article explores the convergences and divergences between human and technological sensory work and decision-making in the daily operation of border and security control. Presenting two situations in which travellers and their luggage are scrutinised and their intentions and potential future actions are imagined, the analysis focuses on the interface between biometric technologies and human agents, the different technological and human capacities to identify and assess threats, their different capacities for hindsight and foresight, and the constant shifts in modes of seeing, unseeing and reasoning that the interface installs. The analysis concludes by showing that the actual object of assessment in border control is neither an ID nor an identity, but a synthetic and ephemeral figure created in the instant of control as a composite of data inputs and multiple sensory cues.

KEYWORDS:

• Border control
• biometric technology
• policing
• sensory anthropology
• airports

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants in the ‘IDentities and identity’ workshop, Copenhagen 2017, my colleagues in the ‘Biometric Border Worlds’ research project and the Velux Foundation, which funded our research. I also wish to thank readers and reviewers of earlier drafts of this article, notably Greg Feldman and Lotte Buch. Special recognition goes to the three police departments in Denmark, Gibraltar and Spain that allowed me to do fieldwork in their midst and follow their daily work of profiling and of human-machine interactions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A ‘hit’ is a match between database information and traveller ID.

2 Regarding Danish police terminology, Holmberg refers instead to the terms ‘Mr and Mrs Denmark’ as opposed to ‘the suspicious types’ who are more liable to be controlled (2000: 184).

3 Newell et al. and Andreas describe such ‘cat-and-mouse’ ‘border-games’ on the US-Mexican border from the perspective of both the police and migrants in passage (Andreas 2000; Newell et al. 2017).

4 According to the producer of the system, ‘TIP is designed to advance screener proficiency by providing more exposure to threats on a regular basis, and to track screener performance’ (Rapiscan 2018; see also Bassetti 2018; Hofer & Schwaninger 2005).

5 See, for example, http://www.planetbiometrics.com and https://www.biometricupdate.com

6 One Danish security consultant referred to the desire for efficient control through AI-assisted profiling as ‘wet dreams’, alluding to both their phantasmagorical quality and their inability to be fulfilled (Radio 24/7 25 March 2018), while Bigo talks of the ‘myth of mastering the frontiers’ (2005).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Velux Fonden [grant number 10351].