Getting Through Security

Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern

Mark Maguire, David A. Westbrook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367613037
• eBook ISBN: 9781000217575
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Social Sciences

Getting Through Security offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of global security structures. The authors unveil the "secret colleges" of counterterrorism, a world haunted by the knowledge that intelligence will fail, and Leviathan will not arrive quickly enough to save everyone. Based on extensive interviews with both special forces and other security operators who seek to protect the public, and survivors of terrorist attacks, Getting Through Security ranges from targeted European airports to African malls and hotels to explore counterterrorism today. Maguire and Westbrook reflect on what these practices mean for the bureaucratic state and its violence, and offer suggestions for the perennial challenge to secure not just modern life, but humane politics.

Mark Maguire has long had extraordinary access to a series of counterterrorism programs. He trained with covert behavior detection units and attended secret meetings of international special forces. He found that security professionals, for all the force at their command, are haunted by ultimately intractable problems. Intelligence is inadequate, killers unexpectedly announce themselves, combat teams don't arrive quickly enough, and for a time an amorphous public is on its own. Such problems both challenge and occasion the institutions of contemporary order. David Westbrook accompanied Maguire, pushing for reflection on what the dangerous enterprise of securing modern life means for key concepts such as bureaucracy, violence, and the state. Introducing us to the "secret colleges" of soldiers and police, where security is produced as an infinite horizon of possibility, and where tactics shape politics covertly, the authors relate moments of experimentation by police trying to secure critical infrastructure and conversations with special forces operators in Nairobi bars, a world of shifting architecture, technical responses, and the ever-present threat of violence. Secrecy is poison. Government agencies compete in the dark. The uninformed public is infantilized. Getting Through Security exposes deep flaws in the foundations of bureaucratic modernity, and suggests possibilities that may yet ameliorate our situation.

Part I

Security Between the Profession and the Public

Chapter 1

Introduction

A Sense of the Modern

Air travel is a by now traditional symbol and expression of whatever it is that “modern” means. Early in the last century, Gertrude Stein (1938: 76) elegantly conflated her first flight, Cubism, and the sense that there had been a rupture in history itself:

… yes I saw and once more I knew that a creator is contemporary, he understands what is contemporary when the contemporaries do not yet know it, but he is contemporary and as the twentieth century is a century which sees the earth as no-one has ever seen it, the earth has a splendor that it never has had, and as everything destroys itself in the twentieth century and nothing continues, so then the twentieth century has a splendor which is its own.

Like much else considered modern, air travel is a mass-produced phenomenon. Millions upon millions of individuals fly every year, many of them repeatedly. Commercial travel has been made available to an astonishing degree. One may speak of the traveling public, and what “public” means – the ways in which it makes sense to think about security in democratic terms, or does not – is one of the central concerns of this book. To flip from public to private, airports also are places where the law-abiding bourgeoisie routinely submit to restrictions on their movements, searches of their belongings and more or less intrusive screens of their bodies, i.e., relatively invasive security, generally backed by visible weaponry. In airports, members of the public are objects (one recalls prisons, camps, and other places where force organizes how people can move in space) as well as consuming subjects, buyers of flights. For now, we presume that anyone likely to read this book will be familiar with air travel, and to our purposes, will have “gone through security” many times.

Air travel is modern not least in its schizophrenia, itself a modern complaint. Air travel encapsulates many of the incommensurables and even contraries of life today, from the extraordinary engineering needed to transport people from London to Lagos at 38,000 feet; to the environmental price of a “cheap” flight; to the class structures of seating and staffing; to various worries about bad things happening, some prosaic (a heart attack), some dramatic (a marauding terrorist attack) – all somehow vaguely understood in terms of “security”; to the fine dining and luxury goods available in any terminal worth its lounges. The schizophrenic character of air travel is expressed in the nervous systems of aviation and visible in the design of airports. Moreover, as passenger numbers increase so too do the pressures on infrastructure, which must accommodate shopping and yet more staff and, and, and … Housing all this, especially the capricious gods of speed, retail sales and security, makes it hard to achieve tranquillity, which the institutions of air travel have traditionally sought for their patrons, perhaps like the spas late nineteenth century members of the European haute bourgeoisie sought for their nerves. No doubt there is something fundamentally unsettling even if no longer statistically dangerous about being miles above the ground, where failure equals death.

Such questions of (in)security have been technically/bureaucratically/legalistically addressed. In response to the dangers of flight, and through another notably modern process, a UN body emerged during the 1940s to govern the “general security” of aerial life: the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Year after year, through a process of regulatory accretion, the surface of the earth was divided into navigable regions, and once local practices were standardized. Social order, that Hobbes imagined as a monstrous Leviathan, is sometimes achieved through endless meetings, tedious negotiations among technocrats. This painstaking work played a key role in giving the world the now familiar experience of international commercial flight. Today, Nairobi learns from bombings at Brussels, and few people pause to ask how this huge achievement of global modernity is possible at all. So, for all of these reasons, what the novelist Walter Kirn (2009) called “airworld” is a plausible place to begin our inquiry into what it might mean to be modern under a regime of counterterrorism, and perhaps more broadly.

Important historical figures tend to draw their own dark shadows, and this same modernity has long been admired by terrorists of various sorts. During the late 1960s, the frequency of airline hijackings in the USA reached two per month. Since then, a deadly game of castles and cannons has been played, with airports displaying many of the traits of cities under siege, guarding against terrorists believed to be “out there.” And sometimes the terrorists do in fact emerge, and people die, occasionally in unprecedented ways. In response, the airports change their tactics. (“Has this bag been in your possession since you packed it?”). “And so it goes”, as novelist Kurt Vonnegut said of the Dresden firebombing in World War II, itself an aeronautic expression of the imbricated insanities and rationalities that constitute the contemporary.

For an example of this tactical evolution, airport security traditionally has erected static checkpoints in order to filter entrants to the “airside” zone, i.e., airport security sought to protect the planes and their passengers from hijacking. But recent terrorist attacks – Frankfurt, Brussels, Istanbul, Orly – have occurred “landside,” i.e., the terrorists ignored the heavily protected planes. Instead, for such attacks the planes and the airport were an occasion and a place when and where people gather, making themselves likely targets. Although those minding the castles have ways to respond, as noted in the Prologue with regard to measures taken at Nairobi, it has not been easy to close the security gap presented by landside attacks in airports designed to protect planes. Some airports are next to cities, some are in cities, while others are crowded cities in themselves. “Landside” thus names places where the high-tech airport of today meets not only the progressive ideals of the early twentieth century but also the polis of old, i.e., where concerns for security and willingness to cooperate engage fundamental political commitments, often expressed in the quotidian terms of local government. But who is the public here? And who is “the terrorist” that would shatter the public’s more or less fragile accommodations? Such questions, vast as they are, are familiar yet striking examples of a constellation of problems that may be summarized as the issue of what modernity, not least under a counterterrorism regime, means.

One way to make such questions tractable, which will be explored further on p. 00, is to consider an airport to be an artifact, that is, to understand security architecturally. To start simply, a building is inscribed by the concerns of its builders, concerns that in the case of airports inescapably include security. So, airports, from their very remote parking to their distanced baggage checking to their concrete potted plants to their trains to otherwise unreachable gates and so forth can be seen as artifacts, maps or traces of imaginaries of what might happen, and what might be hindered if security professionals do their jobs well. That is, the airport is a present expression of articulated, and in that sense past, anxieties about the future.

Ephemera, including the intentions, fears, and general views of the world that informed the construction of an airport, are by definition not fixed – they can shift very quickly. This instability of meanings is one of the significances of “landside.” Until the Brussels attack, airports, at least for security purposes, were generally considered in airside terms. No longer. Similarly, after the 9/11 attacks, airlines armored their cockpit doors, so that a terrorist would have difficulty getting to the pilot and taking over control of the plane. In 2015, a Lufthansa pilot locked the door, and flew a Airbus 320 carrying 144 passengers and six crew into a French mountainside. What was first intended to be a door was reimagined as a wall against terrorists, and then was reimagined again, as a barricade against would-be rescuers.

So how do we think about airports? Or trains? Or shopping malls? Or churches, mosques, synagogues? Note that this is not exclusively, or even primarily, a matter for expertise. The experts who designed, for example, airside security systems to keep explosives off planes were not wrong. The engineers and technicians who hardened the cockpit doors so that a terrorist could not seize control of the plane and use it as a giant bomb, as in the 9/11 attacks, were not stupid. But as any writer knows, creators have limited control. The designers of chemical detection systems or cockpit doors could not control the meanings that could be made of their creations by an adversary, especially not over time.

In the same vein, what might be said about the people and practices devoted to protecting such sites? Stated in the abstract, this would seem to be a preeminently anthropological question. Moreover, the experts upon whose shoulders the work of security falls see cultural challenges everywhere, especially where tacit knowledge meets the realm of explicit standardization or where near-future threats must be anticipated. Although the passenger experience has been tightly choreographed for decades now, efforts to understand public behavior in actual emergencies presently are inchoate and isolated from the traditional academy. What do people – members of the traveling public, especially under attack – do? In short, the airport offers an ethnographic site par excellence, which has been the subject of Mark’s work for years.

Ethnography has had difficulty getting through security, as it were. Oftentimes, “security” has been engaged derivatively, as the expression of a hegemonic state, i.e., the construction of the discipline has meant that security itself is rather under-studied. But suppose we take security seriously, as the Prologue was meant to suggest, and on its own terms? This book attempts to show that airports, and security generally, provide opportunities to ask more general questions about the nature of the contemporary, especially how we understand the bureaucratic state, and about what politics might be available at the present time. Might these shadowy spaces be made, if not democratic, at least more legible?

In Navigators of the Contemporary, David argued that a growing number of projects were exploring the experimental ethos found in the very structure of the contemporary, projects that foregrounded the role played by the expert as a “paraethnographic” counterpart. Scientists, central bankers, and even security experts are open to dialogue, especially if the conversation takes place under conditions of trust. (“I wouldn’t be talking to you at all, but M_______ said you were a friend of his.”) And what has emerged from such conversations? In key ways official power, i.e., power over modern life, is both quantitatively less and qualitatively different from what is often assumed in the social sciences. Security ethnography prompts us to reconsider central aspects of the social imaginary widely articulated through Max Weber’s phrasing, perhaps with some damage to Weber’s thought. To caricature: the Weberian imagination is of a powerful state composed by rational bureaucrats, who organize social life so that it becomes completely logical but also utterly without charm, disenchanted. In the security context, however, we find bureaucrats – often with considerable human anguish – struggling with their consciousness of their own uncertainty, despite all their data. Their jurisdictions are confused; their resources limited; their agency constrained. They have to deal with people, with all the messiness, pathos, hope, and so forth that entails. Adrift in seas of data, the future is terrifyingly uncertain. But the past is not clear, either, which matters, because understandings of the past inform policy and so the direction of agencies, not least their budgets. Where Weber posited an overweening state, we see great vulnerability. Where he focused on the inexorable victory of bureaucratic logic, we see the considerable constraints, widespread failure, and often very human emotions of official practice. The picture of “bureaucracy” that emerges is far less rigidly rational, and far more human, than social scientists in bleak moods often imagine – and there is hope in that.

Bureaucracy is presently receiving a fair amount of attention from anthropologists. For examples, consider Matthew Hull’s Government of Paper (2012), Nayanika Mathur’s Paper Tiger (2016), and Bernardo Zacka’s When the State Meets the Street (2017). The emphasis in such books is on materiality, and the scale is the everyday. From a disciplinary perspective, this mode of writing is convenient because longstanding concerns – the nature of power and the (modern) state – may be addressed without substantially refunctioning ethnography. Everyday experience gives life to the cold monster of Nietzsche’s imagination, and thus the possibility of academic critique and proposals for reform.

Rather than decry a cold monster from afar, we have tried to talk to the people who do the work that we collectively call state action, and to consider their predicaments, virtues and failings, seriously. So, most dramatically, Weber famously defined the state in terms of the monopoly over legitimate force. Terrorism and counterterrorism, in both principle and practice, make a mockery of this elegant definition. Force is exercised in myriad ways during a terrorist event, and less obviously, at other times, too. By extension, actual states are complex and contested, more open textured than often thought, allowing more scope of action. There is hope here too. Consideration of “security” suggests that the modern condition, and in particular the bureaucracies of the modern state, can be more human than is often assumed, for good and ill. The very failures of bureaucracy, at least if “failure” means not realizing the ideal-typical terms we have from Weber, at least open the door to more democratic politics, and perhaps help to ameliorate our alienation – a mood not disconnected from terrorism, or from broader discontents. The bars on the iron cage are a little rusty; the lock can be picked sometimes.

Contrary to belief widespread in the critical social sciences, the key task does not seem to be speaking “truth” (understood as something to which the scholar has exclusive access) to “power” (understood as a morally immature yet immensely capable sovereign, an impetuous princeling). For much of political life, the better and harder questions concern what might be imagined, and how such things might get done, with what consequences? In particular, the relatively amateurish position of the ethnographer provides the opportunity for a public (as opposed to professional) view, and just maybe, a public understanding if perhaps not a democracy. Consequently, the ethnographer may be able and even obliged to move from Wissenschaft to praxis.

To recapitulate in the interest of clarity, this book aims to do three things. First, in traditional fashion, we tell many stories, make a host of observations, and perhaps irrepressibly suggest any number of questions about security. Taken together, these efforts should shed some light upon a world that is in some sense familiar to anyone in the global contemporary, yet obscure to most of us. More deeply, we hope to have provided a grammar for thinking about security, if not a full-throated philosophy.

Second, and again rather classically, we use our discussion of this world, the familiar yet mysterious securityscape through which all of us move, to make a broader argument. We wish to humanize the bureaucratic state by describing bureaucracies teleologically, as places with noble purposes, at least on good days. Bureaucracies are institutions through which society may work together to try and bring about a future better than would otherwise come for us. Moreover, work in bureaucracies is done by people, not machines, with the expected human all too human weaknesses, but also virtues. The dismal image of bureaucracy that we have inherited from literature – Melville’s Bartleby to Adams’ Dilbert, say – is not completely untrue, but it is hardly the whole truth. Without bureaucracies, modern society would not exist, and so it is a specifically modern task to engage bureaucratic life. Simply dismissing bureaucracy as soul-destroying, or, as Arendt (1958) has it, rule by noman, does not suffice for a serious engagement. Little better is “speaking truth to power,” which often amounts to little more than dismissing the truth of the people doing the work.

Third, we hope that this book makes a suggestion, perhaps to be more extensively developed elsewhere. Ethnography, whether or not conducted by academically titled anthropologists, can be especially useful to finding a more humane politics in contemporary present situations. Expert bureaucracies are intrinsic to our world, and therefore unavoidable, and have been since the birth (or a birth) of the modern in the Napoleonic era. If one aspect of “the modern” is the mass society embodied by the Grande Armée, its converse is the specialized expert with some degree of official power, embodied by the Prussian General Staff. As is familiar and discussed on p. 00, experts in the military and elsewhere are beset by the intellectual and organizational costs of substantive specialization and limited jurisdictions. In this context, the ethnographer can mediate, and indeed synthesize. What the ethnographer synthesizes, and represents both to the experts within a given situation, and ideally also back to the academy and/or society at large, is some notion of “the public” that official experts serve, but cannot see in the round, due to their specializations and often competitions. The ethnographer of the contemporary, we suggest, stands in relation to the public in a way not unlike the traditional anthropologist stood in relation to native culture.

But there is a vital difference. In situations of anticipation, such as security and indeed most “policy” enterprises, the understanding of the public moving forward into the future is emergent. The public is the intended beneficiary and often the object of official action. Most obviously, money is spent. The airport gets built; the weapons are purchased. So, ethnography engaged in the articulation of conceivable futures and the forging of an actionable vision has moved from the acquisition of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• PART I Security Between the Profession and the Public
• PART II A View From the Profession
• PART III A View From the Public
• Index