Trending #Pre-crime: Airline Security as Purification Ritual

Stories surprise the undressed mind.

They slip in the back door, past reason and judgment.

Years ago, cultural anthropology taught me that our experiences, our habits and rituals, shape the stories about who we are. I realized how we run our political economic processes were based on the stories that we tell each other. That was when I began to study art and literature seriously. The more I noticed these stories we tell each other and ourselves, the more I realized how often we don't recognize our own experiences as stories at all.

1. Imagining The Ritual Experience

I was flying overseas a couple of years ago when I looked out the window at the huge expanse of the clouds below and I had an idea: 

‘What if flying was a sacred experience in Western culture? ‘

Flying is a paradigm shift, something I imagine earlier humans had greeted with wonder and associated with godliness. Everyday on the backs of giant jet-fueled grasshoppers, groups of souls and bodies leap up into the air in hopes of landing safely in some far-off land. What if the rituals we practice before, during, and after take and landing were different? What if Western culture had produced a different sort of airline culture? I imagine being blessed with scented oil or holy water, taking a sacrament as we enter the plane, maybe a sacrifice or group prayer. What if we changed our practices regarding our mortality, our security, our flying experience?

One time the ritual of airline security proved to me how fragile it really was and theatrical our Western airline security rituals really were. I was traveling from California to Wisconsin in February when an announcement on the intercom informed us that it appeared that our landing gear wasn’t coming down and that we were preparing for a crash landing. At this moment the security provided by the airline corporation seemed utterly irrelevant. The passengers began to process the spiritual implications of our situation. Some cried or held their breath, some prayed. At 17, I felt unprepared for death.

We circled around the airport until all of our landing fuel had burned off. Passengers seemed to make a sort of peace with their maker as we stared death in the eye and prepared to crash. Lower we descended until we reached the moment of impact with the Earth.

We didn’t crash.

The problem turned out to be the electronic signal on the control panel not functioning properly. We took it seriously however, and when we reached the landing strip we saw the dozen or so fire trucks and ambulances that welcomed us. My idea of air travel security was forever changed, and I realized that I would need better rituals to prepare me to face head on the reality of my mortality as I entered into the risk negotiation of travel.  

2. The Purification Ritual

Merriam Webster Dictionary defines ‘ritual’ as:

rit·u·al
adjective \ˈri-chə-wəl, -chəl; ˈrich-wəl\
: done as part of a ceremony or ritual
: always done in a particular situation and in the same way each time 

The rituals we perform in our daily lives trace the patterns for our thought habits. Our thought habits create our stories about who we are. One of these thought habits revolves around the story of 'Security', a word that contains a multitude of complex ideas. But security is more than just a word- it is a practice. What we think of as ‘security’ is also set of rituals we perform to protect ourselves against perceived threats. They are rituals we perform to solidify our identities to gain confidence- like a cat bristling to appear larger when threatened.

A particular ideology emerges from Western airline security rituals. Through our practices, particular stories are established about who we are and how respond to threats. Threats are indeed sometimes real, people do sometimes carry bombs and hijack airplanes, and this does need to be taken seriously. However, Western cultures need to keep thinking about what these threats mean from a variety of angles. As we negotiate the space between the nebulous category of 'the other' (hijacker) and ourselves, we must stay aware of what we are projecting onto this unidentified enemy. It's not only another person that we are constructing in this way; we are also simultaneously constructing ourselves. In fact, it is precisely how we imagine the identity of our shadow that informs who we become.

In airports in the United States, passengers hold our breath through security, during takeoff and when landing; they shrink as they get x-rayed, poked, questioned, undressed, groped, and monitored; they are trained to not question the process and that their bodies and voices are subject to a ugly mix of corporation and government authority. American germ culture insists that we need to be careful to cleanse ourselves of dirty ideas. Passengers must not get to close to those already infected. Once passengers pass through the airline security purification ritual, they are once again assured of their purity. They no longer have to feel guilty. Any malicious thoughts toward capitalism, imperialism, or neo-liberal policies are purged. Passengers are then free to go about their lives as usual, free of having to think about why anyone would have such a problem with their country.  We cleanse ourselves of evil, and deftly apply it to the unknown.

Our fear of death is consoled because we know that we are 'good', and all those who will enter the sacred chamber are also free from contagious thoughts, ideology germs, and other possible weapons. But what if all these security practices don't really serve the purpose we imagine them to? In “Smoke Screening”, an article from 2011 in the popular American magazine Vanity Fair, journalist Charles C. Mann quotes security analyst and frequent flier Bruce Schneier,

“The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”[i]

In an opinion article written in 2012 for The New York Times titled “A Waste of Money and Time”, Schneier is quoted again calling most airline security practices "[...] a stupid game," and recommends, "we should stop playing it."[ii]

The mystique of airline security procedures fades when viewed as a purification ritual designed to rid the participants of their contagions. The airport security acts as a kind of secular priest, acting in the space not between God and Man, but between Corporation and State. They agents act as midwifes as they deliver of forth, free of sin, toward the vehicle that will place us between Heaven and Earth.

3. The History of Security at Airports

When airplane technology developed the capacity to carry passengers 1916, the first airline company primarily catered to the wealthy upper class in England as a way of traveling across the English Channel. Afterward Western governments took interest in air travel and began using planes to deliver mail and as the preferred way to travel to distant colonies.

Western airlines rituals haven't always been the way are today, not nearly as invasive. There was a time when airport security in the United States was a man with a metal detector wand who would limit himself to checking people who looked suspicious. Even though there were plane hijackings nearly every week for years in the 1960's in the United States, changes only began to occur in the 1970's when the United States deregulated the airline industry.

Photo via Wired Magazine Off With your Shoes: A Brief History of Airline Security

The deregulation of all U.S. airlines resulted in an influx of new air travel companies. Heavy competition ensued. All airlines were forced to lower their prices substantially. This resulted in many more people being able to afford air travel who had never before been able to quickly travel such long distances. The competition proved to be too much for the industry and the resulting financial collapse of many airlines required a bailed out by the federal government over and over again in cycles since the 1970's. With the airline industry secured by the federal government, and with the federal government again taking an interest in global transportation, a change in security culture began to develop.
 

Before deregulation, airlines were more interested in getting customers to fly with them and therefore downplayed the hijackings. Airlines feared that if people were wary of flying because of this threat, they would lose business. With so many people being able to fly after the price reduction in the 1970's however, airlines decided upon a change in priorities and security measures were advanced. At this same time, the world experienced a huge influx of hijackings, and the nature of the hijackings turned markedly more violent. When before hijackings were mostly to draw attention to a cause or to escape a country for (usually) political reasons, this new wave of hijackings was wildly unpredictable. Security rituals that then emerged included passing through metal detectors, bags being scanned using x-ray machines, and sometimes hand-checking bags for international flights.

Today in the United States the Transportation and Security Administration regulates itself.[iii] The TSA has a high employee turnover rate and workers hired with few qualifications and little training. The TSA are known to grope travelers, scan bodies through clothing, and threaten or detain people who speak out against how they are treated. One NYT article[iv] commenter noted that 9/11 seemed to bring about a secret desire in Americans to “treat anymore who isn’t normal as dirt.” Another commenter mused that they should remove the bathroom doors aboard the plane in true Foucauldian panopticon[v] style if they really want to control passengers through surveillance. But perhaps the new developments in security culture are best summed up by social control scholar and MIT sociology professor Gary Marx in 1988, “Control is now better symbolized by manipulation than coercion, by computer chips than prison bars, and by remote and invisible filters than by handcuffs and a straightjacket.”[vi]

4. Facial Recognition and Pre-crime

An ongoing project being developed by the United States Department of Homeland Security that promises to take this thought screening a step further. The U.S. DHS website asks the question,

With 400 million people entering the country every year, authorities are always on the lookout for individuals who may harbor hostile intent toward the United States and its citizens. But while measures such as biometrics—including fingerprints, iris, and facial scans—are in place to detect known terrorists, how do we detect those without a past? What about those with no known ties to terrorist organizations? Or those who do not appear in any government database?[vii]

Photo via Wikipedia Project Hostile Intent

The photo above shows a kind of technology that the United States is developing in a program called Project Hostile Intent. The technology uses facial recognition data in an algorithm based on "micro-expressions" (tiny, fraction of a second twitches in faces that are recognized as revealing concealed emotions). In the years since the September 11, 2001 airline hijackings in the United States, there has been a trend in Western airline security culture toward preventing crime from happening, rather than prosecuting criminals after a crime has been committed. This trend is witnessed by millions everyday as they pass through security terminals in airports.

One might ask however, if we are shaping the technology, or is the technology shaping us? Pre-crime scholars Van Brakel and De Hart in 2011 conclude, “the distinctive technologies seem to be one of the defining characteristics of modern policing.” They then ask, “But is it really that daring to go one step further and suggest that modern policing is partly shaped by the technologies at hand, as partly ‘enabling’ factors, rather than passive desired tools?”[viii] (172) When looking at the specific history of how new technologies are emerging, it’s important to recognize that these are also the histories of the stories we tell each other about ourselves as Westerners. We must remember the rituals we create are shaping the way we think about ourselves and conversely define our enemies.

It is within this space between the private ventures of commercial airlines and national interests of airline security where new technologies and methods are tested in the field of security culture. Through the use of ritual, specifically a purification ritual in the form of passing through airline security checkpoints, we reinforce our own identities as 'safe' as also give form to our conceptual opposite. The nebulous idea of 'the other' is solidified through our own understanding of our collective selves, and thereby gives an identity to 'terrorists'. We feel more secure as we solidify our own identities through the negation of what we are not. This process takes on additional layers of meaning as we continue to build upon this framework, as we identify ourselves we simultaneously describe our enemies.

Despite concerns over human rights violations, western countries especially have began to implement indefinite detention policies in the last couple of decades. Australia has had laws in place since 1994 that allow for the indefinite detention of potential sex offenders. Great Britain has laws against indefinite detention, but passed contradictory laws that allow for the detention of immigrants.[ix] Most recently, in December 2013 the United States signed into law the National Defense Authorization act- a law that allows for military detention of anyone, even U.S. citizens, indefinitely and without trial.[x] Even Switzerland has a recent history of locking up an Egyptian professor and refugee for his "dangerosité", his ‘dangerousness’, rather than because he committed any crime. People concerned with protecting their human rights need to be wary as we form ideas about what 'terrorists' are, and what measures we should take to prevent terrorism because we are concurrently enacting policies toward a global trend toward indefinite detention based on suspicions of what we may unconsciously recognize as 'other' than ourselves.

5. Toward Conscious Rituals

We usually recognize our stories as fixed, but they are as mobile as our voices allow them to be. Meanings change when stories change. Stories change when we notice them as such. The stories we tell about the future are just as important as the stories we tell about our past. When we further investigate the symbols and rituals around us, we help shape the stories we want to live. We can recognize the history of our thoughts, we can look to our rituals to act as a mirror for who we are. Westerners concerned with human rights need to take special consideration of how the rituals we create shape our legal policies, lest we slide further toward pre-crime notions of "dangerosité".
 

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[i] Charles C. Mann, ‘Smoke Screening’, Vanity Fair, 20 December 2011 <http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/tsa-insanity-201112> [accessed 29 March 2014].

[ii] ‘Do Body Scanners Make Us Safer?’, The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/11/22/do-body-scanners-make-us-safer/a-waste-of-money-and-time> [accessed 6 April 2014].

[iii] ‘Do Body Scanners Make Us Safer?’.

[iv] ‘Do Body Scanners Make Us Safer?’.

[v] Michel Foucault, ‘“ Panopticism” from Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison’, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 2 (2008), 1–12.

[vi] Gary T Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Univ of California Press, 1989).

[vii] ‘Deception Detection’ <http://www.dhs.gov/deception-detection> [accessed 6 April 2014].

[viii] Rosamunde Van Brakel and Paul De Hert, ‘Policing, Surveillance and Law in a Pre-Crime Society: Understanding the Consequences of Technology Based Strategies.’, Technology-led policing, 20 (2011), 165.

[ix] Ellie Mae O’Hagan, ‘Britain Shames Itself by Detaining Immigrants Indefinitely’, The Guardian, 18 December 2012, section Comment is free <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/18/britain-detaining-immigrants-indefinitely> [accessed 6 April 2014].

[x] Natasha Lennard, ‘Obama Signs NDAA 2014, Indefinite Detention Remains’ <http://www.salon.com/2013/12/27/obama_signs_ndaa_2014_indefinite_detention_remains/> [accessed 6 April 2014].