The Re(d)active Force of the Transportation Security Administration

It has been a decade since the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), originally part of the Department of Transportation and now part of the Department of Homeland Security, was created as a direct response to the 11 September 2001 attack against the United States. TSA has grown to a workforce of more than fifty thousand “security officers, aviation and surface inspectors, air marshals, intelligence analysts, multimodal transportation experts, and other dedicated professionals who protect the nation’s transportation systems so you and your family can travel safely.”¹ TSA is a large organization that conducts searches of every passenger and their belongings. These searches are part of a collective performance, which Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall argue, requires “focus on the intertwining of the sequential and the contingent, the mundane and the extraordinary within its workings and effects.”² From checked bags and carry-on luggage to human bodies crossing the limen into secured areas of airports, TSA guards our border crossings.

This Sisyphean task of perpetual (in)security has become a controversial project; TSA deploys increasingly invasive techniques. TSA has become the target of angry criticism focusing on its poor proficiency at detecting dangerous items³ and its record of passenger complaints regarding botched screenings, such as the accidental exposure of the breasts of an underage niece of a member of Congress.⁴ Yet, formal complaints are relatively rare, given the number of people traveling. In 2011, 0.001% of passengers complained about TSA techniques.⁵ However, the notoriety of individual incidents overshadows the small number of total complaints. For example, Scott MacFarlane’s aforementioned reporting about the niece of Rep. Ralph Hall sparked controversy despite being an isolated event.⁶

The discourse of and around airport (in)security highlights the simultaneously secretive and invasive nature of TSA. This essay is a critical reading of an improperly redacted, publicly released TSA document, “Screening Management Standard Operating Procedures” (hereafter, “Screening Management”), dated 28 May 2008.⁷ A heavily redacted version of this document was released, but the redacted material was easily recovered by using computer software. Five TSA employees were disciplined, and a public controversy erupted over the competency of the agency.⁸ This artifact affords a rare opportunity to look into the way TSA documents its security procedures, and the artifact serves as an important archival TSA text.

Paired with this analysis is a critical reading of images released by TSA that have been produced by its whole-body imagers. This analysis looks at both the photorealistic images and the current use of more cartoonlike images as a way of tracking TSA’s responsiveness to criticisms over the original lifelike quality of body images. The thread that ties the images and manual as artifacts together is their use of redaction to attempt to increase public transparency while simultaneously feeding a paranoiac discourse of (in)security. Redacted manuals and images provide an appearance of public oversight while simultaneously refusing to engage the public directly on open ground. The discourse of secrecy pervades even basic attempts at responding to controversy and public outcry. I use the concept of re(d)active force in this essay to map the simultaneous desire for secrecy and demands for transparency. For me, re(d)active force has a double meaning. Re(d)active force is a play on Nietzsche’s reactive forces in that TSA takes a reactionary posture to the abundance of insecurity post 9/11, and it recognizes TSA’s reactive posture to calls to release some information in the name of transparency while still redacting sensitive information—and failing.

This essay unfolds in six remaining sections. First, I address the theoretical apparatus built into this essay, structured around the Deleuzian–Nietzschean concepts of active and reactive forces. Second, I address relevant literature on the ideological nature of airports. Third, I analyze an improperly redacted TSA training manual. Forth, I analyze images produced by TSA whole-body imagers. Fifth, I look at the role of resistance towards TSA based on its use of redaction in airport security checkpoints. Last, I draw implications and conclusions based on...