Secured and sorted mobilities: examples from the airport

Surveillance is increasingly focused upon mobility. Be it in cities, shopping malls or outdoor ’public’ spaces, surveillance is now able to track and monitor peoples movements. In recent years the most diverse forms of surveillance have been found at airports, yet paradoxically these spaces remain largely invisible within surveillance studies literature. This paper discusses a taxonomy of surveillance at the airport where several scales of mobility intersect – the global movements of international travel to local scale terminal activity. These are put under surveillance by techniques such as the passport and modern CCTV technologies. This paper illustrates the surveillant sorting that is perhaps most illustrative of airport surveillance, where airports can be seen to act as filters (Lyon, 2003) to the mobilities that pass through them. Using an Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach, trends to monitor the ’means of terrorism’ are discussed in regard to the monitoring of objects and actors. The paper continues to critique the way by which we tend to focus chiefly upon the human subject of surveillance, often disregarding the surveillance of non-human actors.