Naked sight for naked sites:
The production of aesthetic mechanical objectivity by Advanced Imaging Technology
(pdf version)

What [TSA officials] have found over the years is we need to be more thorough in our security screening whether that’s with better technology, before AIT was out, or with a more thorough pat down.
-John Pistole, TSA chief administrator in an interview with CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper (CNN 2010a)

In a recent months, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has come under significant scrutiny. The attention began, at least in part, because of a set of technologies called Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT)¹. While the technical details differ depending on the method and generation, AIT broadly encompasses a class full-body screening devices capable of producing high-fidelity visualizations of the body through the barrier of clothing (see appendix). These devices were deployed in response to non-metallic threats (TSA 2010b) incapable of being discovered by tactics such as walk-through metal detectors, personnel visual scans, hand-held metal detectors, and explosive trace portals.

One might be quick to assume the newsworthiness of AIT coincides with its novelty; this assumption, as it turns out, is not correct. AIT was introduced in 2007 (TSA 2010a); in the past year (2010), these devices have certainly gained wider adoption, but are by no means new to airports nor new as a concept (Schneier 2005a). Instead, AIT’s more recent celebrity stems a groundswell of resistance to how it works and how it represents. The more noteworthy instances seem to be more like satire and parody than actual events: a TSA official being teased about the size of his genitals to the point of physical retaliation (Ovalle 2010); a pilot refusing the screening to which all passengers must submit (Hunter 2010); a passenger showing up to the airport in a trench coat and scant bikini to hopefully bypass the device entirely (Mann 2010). As much as these incidents differ greatly, they can all be traced to a single origin: the body, accessed through its representations, as a site of security.
Although the source of the controversy may be stated simply, the current relationship between full-body imaging and security, inherently presumed to be evident, is nothing but simple. Even in light of extensible claims that bring together image-making, fundamentals of sociality, and core neurological functions²) (Stafford 2007), the relationship of images and security requires considerable unpacking of the relevant, culturally-determined epistemes that allow a complex image processor to secure at the body against bodies. That being said, the full articulation of this relationship relies on the answer to a core question:

How does AIT, as a system and device of image-making, secure?

In short, the answer is that AIT secures most primarily at the emotional level; that is, AIT is security theater, a term used by Bruce Schneier to describe the (over-)enactment of the mannerisms of security without the underlying functions (Schneier 2009). AIT accomplishes this through an aesthetic form of an epistemic virtue called mechanical objectivity (Daston & Galison 2007: 371), which is outwardly characterized by a particular type of image and image-making accompanied by the severe repression of the viewing subject. The result is a seamless un-spectacle of ahistoricized security.

What AIT is not: the misleading path of panopticism

According to the TSA website (TSA 2010a), AIT “is an integral part of TSA’s effort to continually look for new technologies that help ensure travel remains safe and secure by staying ahead of evolving threats.” Oddly, no where on the website, nor in recent open letter penned by TSA chief administrator John Pistole, is there any explicit mention of how AIT actually accomplishes its goal. At first pass, one might attest to the obviousness of AIT’s contribution to security. Such a response may go something like this: AIT more objectively visualizes those places previously unseen, thereby securing travelers by being more thorough with regards to known problem areas and literal blind spots. Moreover, AIT makes screening easier by eliminating human error in identifying threats.((While this is simplistic and generalized, this statement can be sussed out from much of language being used by the TSA viz-a-viz AIT and from the media coverage (dominant in the research in this paper by CNN) of the various responses. A prime example of this is John Pistole’s open letter published on USAToday.com. In referring to the increased security measures he states: “I also know and appreciate that the vast majority of Americans recognize and respect the work we do, and are important partners in our efforts to keep our skies safe. I see it every day in airports across the country as passengers report suspicious activities to law enforcement […] In the end, security is a shared responsibility.”)) Even though this appears to be solid logic to support AIT, practice and implementation reveal notable discrepancies, if not blatant falsehoods, about the technology. Even more, as much as this path is a dead end, it is important to spend time debunking its appropriateness to AIT as it tends to be the default notion of how security works (Lyon 2001: 143)

First, and beginning with the last point, the current arrangement of the advanced imaging system relies on a remote observer—someone unseen by, and physically-removed from, the observed person—who reviews the images captured by the device. Additionally, pre-screeners, such as those officials that review identification and boarding passes, channel travelers into the device That is to say, human judgment bookends AIT, and is in no way a non-factor in how it screens (though, as it will be argued later, human judgment appears to be removed, which is vital to AIT functioning as security theater). The system certainly tries to dampen this. The reviewer, who is sealed within a remote room, is (sometimes) partially aided by automated threat detection software that identifies potential areas of interest.³ In the more recent generation of AIT where the body image is no longer seen, the reviewer only sees that there are areas of interest, resulting in more secondary inspections than deemed necessary (i.e. a flood of false positives) (CNN 2010b). The pre-screeners are helped by automatically generated codes printed on the ticket; these are codes secondarily verified at the gate, and overridden by staff upon proper handwritten approval. Where AIT seemingly limits the imprecision of human judgment, it only actually limits human sight in, and so leaves humane judgment intact. These human components seems to be a unavoidable (even necessary in the case of overzealous software as Pistole attested before Congress (CNN 2010b)). To this portion of the first-pass logic, AIT fails.

Second, security and surveillance are not tantamount within AIT; this point requires more consideration than the previous one. The palpability of surveillance-as-security comes from Bentham via Foucault (its cultural popularity probably is more indebted, however, to George Orwell’s 1984 (Lyon 2001: 143) than either theorizing party). Despite the clear flaws to this concept, it nonetheless gets considerable practical application, such as . In this model, to secure people—that is, to secure people against their own misbehavior—one needs to surveil wholly, immediately, and openly. In other words, those observed persons need to know that they are being watched. “Under the watchful gaze, criminals [in Bentham's Panopticon] would gradually mend their ways and, supported by the admonition of the ‘invisible’ supervisor, internalize the feelings of being observed, finally leaving [...] as a ‘civilized’ person” (Kaschadt 2002: 116). Bentham designed the subject of the gaze to be criminals; Foucault extends this outward to “govermentality” as a whole (Bajc 2007: 1576-1577). In other words, all people within “the organization of social space […] regulate their own behavior and discipline themselves according to what they understand are [societal] expectations of normality.” (Bajc 2007: 1576-1577) So, the process of being observed and knowing it changes behavior. There are certainly comparisons between broader panopticism and the formulation of AIT—however it functions differently than notions of panopticism in two significant ways.

Founding the success of panopticism is that both the observed and the observer share the same knowledge of what is being seen. The prison designed by Jeremy Bentham lays everything bear—nothing is hidden or hide-able. The prisoners themselves are able to even congregate and intermingle in common space (Kaschadt 2002: 116) to expose the relational space between people. The generalization of Bentham by Foucault supports a similar concept of shared belief, namely that of normality. AIT, however, does not reveal what, any more than how, it sees. The images are locked behind a door, then (supposedly) deleted—the observed person is always denied the ability to see the self, as much as other observed persons are denied the ability to become observers.

While panopticism never guarantees that the observer and the observed can be interchanged (it seems unlikely that a democratic or rhizomatic panopticism would work at all), it is explicit that the knowledge of all parties is equivalent. This equivalency is what makes panopticism effective at governance—the observed become malleable to what they believe is a shared mental model of their behavior. AIT opposes any equivalency however. Instead the device asserts that epistemic sight is proprietary, and implicitly devaluing common, uncertified sight as non-epistemic. David Lyon states that this type of security (which I group, as discussed in the following section, with dataveillance) depends on hidden knowledge (Lyon 2001: 143-144); this can be seen in how threat is assessed. Knowledge secures in AIT through a criteria of imposed discernment—that is, selection between non-observable options. Here, and only through AIT, do these distinctions become selectively observable and can decisions be made. Simply, the privileged observer becomes an expert through informational access. Daniel Solove by way of Lyon refers to this model “Kafkaesque” as it is more akin to “being in a maze” and reliant on “a constant state of anxiety” within the observed persons (Lyon 2007: 144).

Consider the protocols associated with AIT. A person who enters the device is scanned, either passing without anomaly or being diverted with an anomaly. If an anomaly is detected, the person is subjected to a pat down to confirm or absolve the anomaly. At no point is the scanned person able to know what is known. In contrast to other security practices (such as walk-through metal detectors) where all people must pass through measures to reconfirm their status of non-threat, AIT is framed within a different rhetoric. In AIT, persons are subject to “beauracratic indifference [...] and dehumanization” (Lyon 2007: 144) in as far as the these new measures move beyond the potential of a threat (Everyone must be checked just to be sure.), and assume the inevitability of a threat (Someone here is a threat.). In other words, where systems of panoptic control have been delegated the responsibility of reform through subject awareness (a system that potentiates goodness), AIT, in removing this awareness by splitting act of observation from its content, inherently distrusts the power of self-reforming control (a system that potentiates terrorism). Moreover, the implied systemic distrust removes subject agency, from the act of adherence to passenger protocol; specifically, abiding by the rules of the machine are never rewarded and can only be punished. So, as AIT potentiates terrorism, it also engenders non-compliance amongst all parties since there is no reward for non-threats other than non-punishment. In turn, these measures label all observed persons guilty until they pass into the “sterile area” (TSA 2008: 11) where they are then absolved.

Additionally, AIT fails the criteria for panopticism in how it treats looking. Panopticism is characterized by constant seeing. To gaze is to be watchful of all things and at all moments to control all things and all moments. Panopticism secures through strong or brute force induction. To clarify, as a theoretical stance on security, panopticism secures by constantly enacting a methodology that has (seemingly) secured. If this methodology is used—not just now but always from now—a state of security is maintained. AIT, on the other hand, is weakly inductive, if at all. AIT treats a single moment in time as an accurate sampling of all future moments in time, and to guarantee security in this moment is extensible to these later moments.

Finally, even in gross abstractions of panopticism where there is little discussion of awareness and self-reform (it is implicitly assumed but has been normalized within daily practices), there still is a heavy-handed reliance on centralized surveillance and power (Lyon 2001: 74-75, 143-145). In these models, the power of centralized collection is the cross-referencing of a person’s body of information, often called called dataveillance (Lyon 2001: 74). AIT, on the contrary, “cannot store, export, print, or transmit images.” (Pistole 2010) Therefore, AIT’s images are not associated, in a relational database sense necessary for dataveillance, with any other personal data. That is to say, the images do not contribute to any centralized data snapshot.

As much as AIT does not function panoptically in a technical nor in a philosophic sense, it also fails to fulfill other models of security through looking such an synopticism.⁴ The discussion of why the label of panopticism (as well as other labels) cannot be slapped on AIT hopefully served two purposes. First and foremost, the discussion aims to debunk any application here and to rigorous rethink the applicability more generally what commonly and all-too quickly becomes the prevailing notion of security. Secondarily, the discussion is designed to provoke and fully frame a question: what does AIT really do for security? This question will be subsequently addressed.

What AIT is: more feeling than reality

Security theater, as Bruce Schneier explains, “refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.” (Schneier 2009) Schneier states that “[s]ecurity is both a reality and a feeling. [...] When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn’t truly make them safer.” (Schneier 2009) The former category, security-as-reality, can be substantiated through a binary question, such as have there been incidents? This portion of security is what many, from media correspondents to TSA officials, seem to be speaking about when they refer to AIT: the actual means of keeping air travelers safe from terrorist attacks. Schneier, in analyzing AIT and referring back to his own writing, claims otherwise:

These programs [such as Trusted Traveler and now AIT] are based on the dangerous myth that terrorists match a particular profile and that we can somehow pick terrorists out of a crowd if we only can identify everyone. That’s simply not true. [...] Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back. Everything else—Secure Flight and Trusted Traveler included—is security theater. (Schneier 2005b, Schneier 2010)

The latter type of security, i.e. security-as-feeling or security theater, is a phenomenological affect (not an epistemological quality) of devices, practices, policies, and social norms that have been deemed part of security. For instance, National Guard troops were stationed “in airports right after the [9/11] terrorist attacks [with] no bullets in their guns.” Schneier continues:

As a security countermeasure, it made little sense for them to be there. They didn’t have the training necessary to improve security at the checkpoints, or even to be another useful pair of eyes. [Instead what they did was] reassure a jittery public that it’s OK to fly. (Schneier 2007)

Important to understand in the birth of security theater is that “the security measures that work are largely invisible” (Schneier 2009) and is often deliberately unseen (Ball & Webster 2003, Lyon 2001, Lyon 2007). The security type-method of dataveillance (Lyon 2001: 74) exemplifies this invisibility. More like an act of collecting, dataveillance slowly and secretly gathers a model of a person by compiling and cross-checking all available (largely electronic) behavior, from credit card purchases to government documentation. (Lyon 2001: 74-75) The act of observing, unlike panoptic or synoptic methods, is not made tantamount to security; there must always be a secondary intervention to stop any illegal act, viz. an act of securing. More in accord with the discussion here, dataveillance acts passively and predominantly before any incident occurs. The data collected gains value through mass rather than any single datum that alludes to a potential for crime. It is this invisibility that makes dataveillance work since it relies on observing relativistic normal behavior rather than behavior that is self-aware like in panopticism.

The problem with invisible methods is that people who desire security have no feedback. This is where security-as-feeling becomes useful. Even in his hypercritical stance on security theater, Schneier admits “we cannot neglect the feeling of security, because it’s how we collectively overcome the psychological damage that terrorism causes.” (Schneier 2009) Instead of security theater as the only type of security-as-feeling, Schneier suggests “direct appeals to our feelings” (Schneier 2009) as a more appropriate method since security theater reflects and constitutes reactions of fear.

Even though Schneier initially speaks about AIT as security theater and implies a lack of actual protection because of ontological conditions (namely the faulty hope of total surveillance as security; Schneier 2010), he never outlines how AIT manifests a theater of security-as-reality. In the dyad Schneier establishes, the aesthetics of security theater rely on the cultural perceptions of security-as-reality. While it may be enough to limit certain critiques to exposing the hollow body behind the facade, on another level one must wonder how security theater can so convincingly deceive so many. Simply and generally answered, the facade is often very well made. Investigating further, as will be done subsequently, one realizes AIT as security theater is a carefully designed illusion that invokes complex epistemic ideas.

Now, let us amend the simplistic statement of how AIT works at the beginning the previous section. In light of Schneier’s critique of AIT as security theater, and his failure to elaborate how such an extravagant device might function as a facade, we will flesh out a (partial) list of the main issues that underscore the debate over AIT. First, it is not whether AIT more objectively visualizes those places previously unseen, but instead that AIT presents itself and is present as capable of a particular “epistemic virtue” called mechanical objectivity (Daston & Galison 2007: 371). Subsequently, AIT relies on more thorough mannerisms—as opposed to more thorough means—of representation with regards to known problem areas and literal blind spots. These mannerisms produce and present the vulnerabilities of travel as “ahistorical objects” (Latour 2000: 265) viz-a-viz the body. Lastly, the automation of AIT divorces human error and emotion from judgment, thereby producing the observer-as-worker (Daston & Galison 2007: 371). As TSA officials are seemingly supplanted by their device, decision making is delegated to the machine, in turn producing the first effect of the episteme.

Resolving AIT: aesthetic mechanical objectivity and ahistorical vulnerabilities

To begin, a further unwrapping of this approach to security theater is necessary. Schneier’s definition of security theater states that security theater is composed of empty gestures of security (Schneier 2009) more akin to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulation. Like simulation, security theater, to Schneier, exists as the feigning “to have what one hasn’t” (Baudrillard 1994: 3), that is, actual security where there is none. And, just as Baudrillard, Schneier concerns himself with the residual effects on society this may have, such as confusing real security and imaginary security (Baudrillard 1994: 3; Schneier 2005). The problem with this rigid definition of security theater is it implies that the usefulness of security is simply located in functioning systems. Security objects, on the other hand, whether they be fake cameras or bulletless guns, are not reducible to hollow concretizations only for show since their perceived use ripples into the environment in substantive ways. Secondarily and more importantly, Schneier positions security theater as diametrically opposed to real security as if real security does not rely on outward aesthetics to help produce a feeling. In contrast, security theater is not treated as cynically here, nor is it treat as mutual opposite to real security. Instead, security theater and real security are mutually arising and distinct gradients, where all things deemed security are to some extent theater and to some extent real (this accounts for Schneier’s more extreme viewpoint). Therefore security theater is the negotiated aesthetics of security, where real security is simply the functional components.

The necessity of this revised definition is that it includes a notion of inconsistency. The rigid definition demands that either security does what is seems to do or is simply for show. The liberal definition leaves room for another case: security that does something, but produces a different affect (something easily accomplished with the plasticity and disconnect of digital technology and physical form). That is to say, whether AIT does or does not secure should not be decided by exploring those ways it act as security theater; such a deductive indictment of its shallowness is no better than simply assuming it is panoptic because it includes sight. Instead, I propose, a duality of security that allows for disjunction and divergence between layers.

The following takes this definition of security theater and expounds upon the affectations of AIT with regards to culturally defined tropes about knowledge-making.

Representing mechanical objectivity and repressing officials

The core function of AIT is the rapid visualization of the human body: in its simplest description, AIT is a tool for seeing. Even though AIT does not see in a traditional manner (more accurately it senses the body), it produces a visual record of what is within its field. Hence, to speak of AIT means to speak of a particular type of vision that unveils some reality—a “right depiction” (Daston & Galison 2007: 371)—about the human body. In other words, the genesis of the aesthetics of AIT as security theater is the notion of objectivity.

Objectivity is not a static or even singular idea however. Objectivity is, in fact, “epistemologically saturated” (Daston & Galison 2007: 368) and has changed over time. In a similar way to the shifting relationships between Nature and Society (Latour 1993: 49-90), objectivity (the concept) and objective vision (the practice) co-determine each other by and through philosophic underpinnings and materially embodied realities. As much as scientists and philosophers attest otherwise, humanity cannot untangle how we see from how we think we see.

Mechanical objectivity is one of these models Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison identify in their survey of objectivity in the sciences. Coinciding with the creation of mechanical means of representation, viz. photography, mechanical objectivity historically rebelled against the presiding notion (truth-to-nature) that scientists ordered nature by discovering “types” (Daston & Galison 2007: 370). Until this point, scientists had to rely on hand-drawn representations that naturally relies on subjective interpretations in creation (Daston & Galison 2007: 369). In response, proponents of mechanical objectivity sought to remove the human impulse to create “symmetry” (Daston & Galison 2007: 161) and instead relay the “unimproved, unidealized” instances of a thing (Daston & Galison 2007: 160). The result is a form of vision that suppresses the knower “at the expense of readmitting the variability of nature: this [thing], formed at this place, at this time, in all its accidental uniqueness.” (Daston & Galison 2007: 370; original emphasis) This is not without a systemic caveat of considerable self-restraint: “[t]he observer had to hold back, rather than yield to the temptation to excise defects, shadows, or distortion—even when the scientist or artist knew these intrusions to be artifacts [of the instrument or environment].” (Daston & Galison 2007: 161). That is, the scientist of mechanical objectivity must be isolated from intervention.

In the context of two other notions—namely truth-to-nature and trained judgment—mechanical objectivity stands in stark contrast in how a representation is created viz-a-viz the observer. Truth-to-nature, as was previously mentioned, requires scientists to actively interpret-through-representing what they are seeing, as is exemplified by Ernst Haeckel’s self-admission of his “subjective views” in creating images for Kunstformen der Natur (Daston & Galison 2007: 189). Trained judgment, a more contemporary notion that arose as a response mechanical objective, demands a process of pattern recognition to uncover “Wittgensteinian family resemblances” (Daston & Galison 2007: 370). Unlike the typing of objects or particulars of things, trained judgment requires the scientist to interpret mechanically-produced images through expert knowledge (Daston & Galison 2007: 370-371). Where these other objectivities position the scientist as fundamental to uncovering reality, mechanical objectivity does not. Instead the observer in mechanical objectivity is a response to “the excesses of a dynamic, will-centered self that threatened to remake the world in its own reflection” (Daston & Galison 2007: 375). Hence, more overwhelmingly than any other model, mechanical subjectivity removes all possible delegate power from the observer who is transformed into a “worker” (Daston & Galison 2007: 371) that is trained in operating a machine. Accordingly, observational and judgmental power are redistributed onto the observational machine—either the machine sees something and it is obvious or it does not. One can clearly place these tropes of mechanical objectivity in how AIT is designed and its images represent.

As has been touched on previously, the images produced by AIT revel in the machine process of capture. As can be seen in those released by the TSA (see appendix), the images are riddled with the artifacts of production: amorphous masses, shadows, and contour lines; even the machine itself can be made out at times as a blocky, faint mass. As these images are compiled and displayed via a computer, the artifacts could simply and algorithmically be dampened or removed. Instead, they remain. In this, the images and the visualized body are left naked—laid bear with all of the imperfections of things and beings in-the-world. The result is an uninterpretation, a representation that, more than anything else, exposes in its own exposure.

One could certainly rebut that the process is closer to trained judgment as the reviewer locked away must sift through contours and fuzzy masses to find patterns that are threats. If we revisit the arrangement of the AIT system, we see even more indicators of the aesthetics of mechanical objectivity in how people are stripped of agency. Even though the image is inevitably sent to a TSA official for review, the future generations of AIT seek to eliminate this person altogether. This trajectory speaks volumes about the current role of people with regards to the machine. As much as the reviewer must parse through visual information for threat patterns, the reviewer is never in the position to act as expert, a fundamental principle of trained judgment. When an anomaly is found, the reviewer can only divert a person to secondary screening procedures such as thorough pat downs and additional baggage searches. In trained judgment, the observer’s vision is the final say on what is and is not in the image; TSA officials are not granted this much power (maybe for obvious reasons). Instead veracity comes from another source, that is, material discovery and adherence to protocol. The same as the scientist-as-worker, TSA officials are no more expert interpreter than the precipitated ions of backscatter imaging actually understands a shape is something threatening. In abstract terms, the underlying visual episteme of AIT is flat while its ontology is not; knowledge is made by privileging certain constituent parts of image-making and not privileging any resultant information without outside means of verification. This plays out concretely: the machine has the ability to expose truth (i.e. make expert discoveries), while TSA officials simply act upon it (i.e. fact check).

The consequence is that travelers are send the message that automation is the solution to security. While such a rhetoric of “technological determinism is misleading and unhelpful [as] it deflects attention from the real world of material bodies and active selves” (Lyon 2001: 24), AIT is purposefully doing so for two reasons. First, it is simple. Security theater is all about a solitary message: “You are secure.” Embodying the message in a single object streamlines where people locate their feeling of security (this is no different than a child’s blanket). Having said this, AIT produces an undesired message because of its systemic formula; that is, it secures at the cost of privacy. This is nothing new—many security systems, such as those collected in dataveillance, depend on a notion of privacy, and without it these systems breakdown. The true novelty, and thus the massive negative response, is one-to-one correspondence of the site of invasion and subject of invasion, namely the body. Without further investigation, one can only speculate on what it is about the images and the body that is so unsettling for so many. In part, I would hypothesize, much of the American public response stems from particularly American notions of how the body and the images of the body are taboo objects; this should be researched and developed elsewhere. Certainly, and without speculation, the visualized bodies in their perceived fidelity evoke something that visualizations from the body, but not of the body, would not so strongly evoke (CNN 2010b).

The second reason for employing a technological determinist rhetoric is to dehistoricize vulnerabilities.

Ahistorical vulnerabilities

Before explaining why this is important in terms of security theater, we should begin by understanding the term. In discussing the difference between artifacts and facts, Bruno Latour comments: “For [a material] technology, objects never escape the conditions if their productions. [...] Thus it always remains tied to a circumstanced and well-defined spatiotemporal envelope.” (Latour 2000: 250) By this, Latour means that we as people refer to technological artifacts as having a lifespan and ancestry—an object comes into being because of a set of various conditions, exists and impacts a particular time and place, and then is followed by objects because of a new set of conditions. For example, the computer mouse came out of a necessity to select items on a screen and was followed by other types of selection devices, such as trackpads. These objects have a history.

On the other hand, “[u]nlike technological artifacts, scientific facts seem, once we wander away from the local conditions of production in the past as well as in the future, to free themselves of their spatiotemporal envelope.” (Latour 2000: 250) Latour explains further by examining what was at stake during the debate between Louis Pasteur and Félix-Archimède Pouchet about spontaneous generation:

[If he was wrong and he was,] Pouchet’s spontaneous generation will have never been there anywhere in the world; it was an illusion all along; it is not allowed to have been part of the population of entities making up space and time. Pasteur’s ferments carried by the air, however, have always been there, all along, everywhere. (Latour 2000: 252)

By this, Latour points out that (scientific) facts are treated as being either true or false outside of their context, and therefore applicable to all time and all space. Even though Latour advocates a “generalization of historicity” (Latour 2000: 253), most people do not think along these lines. As a result, popular opinion about facts is that they can rewrite history in the way Latour cautions. Appealing to this popular notion of facts is precisely the aim of AIT.

AIT demonstrates a massive power to reveal that which has previously been unseen. In doing just that, coupled with a technological determinist viewpoint, AIT presents a world that is now better off; but “now better off” can be deceiving. The revelation is that now seeable areas—technologically grounded and so fleeting—are part of those sites have always been the threats. In other words, while the technology of AIT will be replaced, its mannerisms embed it within an ahistorical logic of vulnerability; viz. logic that appeals to statement like If we had then what we have now and simultaneously deny the how context produced those things. TSA chief administrator John Pistole even substantiates this appeal in an open letter by repeated referring to failures of previous technology and recently avoided threats because of technology. Pistole writes, these procedures and protocols “help us find possible explosives, chemical weapons, and other dangerous items that otherwise go undetected [because] [o]ur enemies are creative and constantly evolving.” (Pistole 2010) In the use of the phrases “that otherwise go undetected” and “constantly evolving”, Pistole appeals to some popular notion of justifiably right paranoia and fear that only now do we realize has always been there in substance. In this last contribution, AIT is not claiming that security is tantamount to surveillance, but security strives for omniscience and omnipotence—an omniscience that is more than seeing, but knowing everything inside and out; an omnipotence that can ignore space and time in critique.

Conclusion: what is left to be desired?

[D]uring the busiest travel time of the year, 99% of travelers are opting to go through these full-body scanning machines. And in recent public opinion surveys, four out of five people approve of the machines and seven in 10 frequent fliers support the use of these machines and pat-downs. (Pistole 2010)

No matter its actual ability to secure, AIT functions as a feeling of security. By appropriating an aesthetic form of a scientific episteme, AIT is self-legitimating through a semiotic “game” (Lyotard 1979: 31-37). Paradoxically, and appropriately so, AIT also functions through a feeling of insecurity by being decontextualized within the history of attacks through the ahistorical logic of terrorism. In these ways, AIT has served as the focus of this paper. Tangentially, AIT raises a more general issue about media studies, and how they get appropriated by popular culture.

AIT exemplifies a larger current that increasingly abstracts the notion of vision to encompass sensing and visualizations. In this vein, more precision needs to be devoted in theory to properly analyze and accurately classify such distinctions. Maybe trivial in terms of the critique of visual information, the conflation of representational and presentational modes is critical to how reasoning subjects and scripted subjectivities reify and constitute power structures. Moreover, the backlash against AIT demonstrates this confusion in a legal sense—in particular, the invocation of the 4th amendment and Video Voyeurism Prevent Act to an issue of representation rather than process or sight (Kravets 2010). Unless theorists knowledgeable in the area speak up, the largely confusing world of digital media, where such conflations are easy, will be overtaken by popular rather than critical theories.

Appendix: images produced by AIT

TSA-released backscatter imaging sample (TSA 2010b)

TSA-released millimeter wave imaging sample (TSA 2010b)

Screen capture from news report on next generation AIT and automatic threat detection (CNN 2010b)

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1. Advanced Image Technology is currently composed of two specific technologies: millimeter wave and backscatter. According to the TSA website, “[m]illimeter wave technology bounces harmless electromagnetic waves off the body to create a black and white three-dimensional image” and “[b]ackscatter technology projects low level X-ray beams over the body to create a reflection of the body displayed on the monitor.” (TSA 2010a) As should be clear, these imaging techniques produce very different representations at a material level: the former is a three-dimensional object projected (flattened) into two-dimensional space; the latter is a negative representation produced through particulate absorption and reflection. Despite these differences, these technologies produce strikingly similar high-fidelity images as can be found in the appendix. [↩]
2. Stafford explains: “Since sensation involves a subject reaching out beyond the body’s surface, with an evaluative response, the responses or judgments we make today have evolved from more ancient responses. Embedded in individual bodies, sensation also allows us to establish relations with other selves, things, surroundings. This repertoire of repeated inner and outer motions thus constitutes a compressed archive of perceptual primes betraying how the body became associated with emotion-laden forms. We do not simply perceive design: we also feel the order of the world.” (318 [↩]
3. Tangential to the main argument is a clear issue of hermeneutics and machine perception. As I have argued elsewhere, systems like AIT that mediate perception through a computational system, no matter how bear, are actually “second-order” observational systems (Katti 2002: 55); that is, systems where there is a subject who is seen by an observer, who is observed in that observation. The second-order observer does not observe the subject, but instead the process of the subject being observed (observing observation) or the subject as already observed (observing through the eyes of another). This is accentuated in future generations of AIT where the reviewer no longer even looking at an image of the body—only the abstracted interpretation of the body is observed (see appendix for images of this). [↩]
4. To compare, panopticism looks upon the unspectacular and the quotidian, i.e. “the few watch the many”, and synopticism inverts this order through mass media, i.e. “the many watch the few”. (Lyon 2007: 140) These function interdependently (Lyon 2007: 140) where the power of panoptic control comes from uniting spectacles, such as the televised events of 9/11. While the resistors to AIT can cite the release of AIT’s images as a source of the backlash, one must remember that if these ideas are interdependent then as much as AIT is not panoptic is also not synoptic (here, the typical source of support—i.e. a spectacular display of indirect vulnerability—became self-effacing). [↩]