ABSTRACT
This chapter is about seeing like an airport. In the critical social sciences, airports are understood as disjoined spaces where multiple assemblages and visual regimes operate, from border control to customer experience. But the airport is experiencing a visual revolution. Today, efforts are ongoing to resolve the problem of fragmentation in airports under the sign of “interoperability”. This chapter discusses interoperability in two spheres, counterterror policing, and data-led border control. The chapter is based on para-ethnographic research with expert communities. We track the desire to build multi-level bioinformation corridors and describe the challenges of this project. The chapter looks at the consequences for surveillance and control of interoperable visual security.
