ABSTRACT
The monitoring of airline passengers comprises an intrinsic part of the practical procedures involved in a border crossing. The process starts with the purchase of the airline ticket; the credit card payment involves monitoring, as does the check-in control of travel documents, passing through the detectors at the security control, the closed-circuit television surveillance in baggage handling areas, passport control, and walking through the customs zone. The traveller depends on having authorized access all the way. The screening process involves several state organizations, including the customs service and the police, as well as the data collection of private companies. The activities are linked to one another and form a ‘surveillant assemblage’, which ‘relies on machines to make and record discrete observations’ (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 612). The relevant information is managed automatically, or semi-automatically. Although omnipresent, the control is unobtrusive. Most airline passengers will have no direct personal experience of it, except for the manual security checks at the airport. In all these respects, the power exercised towards airline passengers conforms to the control society model suggested by Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze 1990). So far in this book, the theme has been the way power is exercised in the
disciplinary society: towards individuals enrolled within institutions, on the presumption of social exclusion. In this chapter, I will change focus and look at how power is exercised in the control society: outside institutions, on the presumption of social inclusion. The programmatic attempts to shape the behaviour of airline passengers do not find support in the mechanism of enrolment that characterize the disciplinary society. The travellers are customers or citizens with a temporary relation to the controlling organizations. It is a generalized control, without a particular target group in social terms. Unlike the activity of the prison service and the public employment service, the monitoring is not directed at the socially excluded. The power belongs to the spheres of social inclusion; it is exercised on the presumption that the behaviour of those who are targeted does not need to be closely regulated or fundamentally changed. However, although airline passengers are part of the inclusive control society, where power is automatic, generalized and
unobtrusive, the use of force is by no means excluded. On the contrary, the control of the control society may also be physical and repressive. At the border, the customs service has wide-ranging coercive powers.
Despite recurrent fears of an imminent loss of control over national borders, the Swedish border control agencies have in practice maintained their powers to monitor and control over the last decade. Upon joining the European Union in 1995, the sovereign nature of border control seemed to stand in opposition to the principle of the free movement of people and goods between member states. The border controls of one state could be seen as constituting a concealed restriction on the trade of other states. For this reason, a government inquiry proposed that there had to be some material circumstance that led the customs inspector to search the baggage or vehicle – the opinion or intuition of the inspector was not sufficient in itself (SOU 1994). Although the suggested degree of suspicion was the lowest possible in legal terms, the government rejected this regulation and established that ‘an object can be singled out for control without there being any suspicion of a particular smuggling offence’ (Proposition 1995/96: 57). As a consequence, basically no restrictions were introduced on the way the customs inspectors reach their decision to select an object for control. The law regulating the powers of the customs service to carry out controls states only that controls should not be conducted randomly (SFS 1996). The opposite of random controls are selective controls, which the customs service explains by enumerating all the possible ways in which a customs inspector may reach a decision. The controlled individual may have been identified through ‘intelligence information’, ‘the knowledge, experience [or] intuition of the customs inspector’, a ‘drug sniffer-dog’ or a ‘risk profile’ (TU 2003a: 79). It is hard to imagine a potentially questionable control selection that cannot be justified on one or more of these grounds, with reference to intelligence information, risk profiles, experience or intuition. Moreover, the customs inspectors do not have to mention any grounds for the decision to control. An inspector may ask a border-crosser to open up their baggage and then look inside for contraband such as drugs, weapons, alcohol, tobacco or child pornography, without having to specify the grounds for the decision. The power to search is not limited to baggage and means of transport.
A customs inspector also has wide-ranging discretion to examine the clothes, the body and certain body fluids of those crossing the border. Body searches require some degree of suspicion, since there must be ‘reasons to assume’ that the person is carrying contraband. Yet, in practice, this condition is easily fulfilled. Decisions as to which reasons qualify as ‘reasons to assume’ are left to the individual customs inspector. In a ruling from the Ombudsman of Justice dating from 1986, following a complaint made by a man and a woman who had been strip-searched in Lund, it was stated that the opinion of one customs inspector – that the couple seemed nervous – was to be considered as sufficient grounds for control (JO 1987). This interpretation
was confirmed in another ruling from the Ombudsman of Justice, following a complaint from a man in Gothenburg in 1995. According to this ruling, a customs inspector’s subjective judgement that a traveller ‘looks nervous’ may constitute sufficient grounds for a decision to search an individual’s clothing or to carry out a strip-search (JO 1995: 3). Since defining the precise meaning of ‘selective control’ is left to the
individual inspector, anyone may be controlled on a wide variety of grounds. Based on no more than a hunch on the part of the customs inspector, a border-crosser may be subjected to controls ranging from a baggage search to a strip-search and urine testing. The requirement of ‘reasons to assume’ does not restrict the use of force in practice. Just as Sophie Hydén and Anna Lundberg said about the practice of the police to stop and control an individual’s identity and residence permit inside the country: ‘anything, alternatively nothing at all’ can be vindicated as a reason for conducting a control (Hydén and Lundberg 2004: 94). Yet the use of coercion is restricted, since only a small proportion of all border-crossers are subjected to physical control. In the year 2003, of a total of approximately 59 million border-crossers, only 125,000 individuals were singled out for customs control (TU 2004b: 17). Thus, on average only one of every 500 border-crossers is singled out. Considerations of risk determine who will be subject to control. Every inspector determines whether to control this passenger or that passenger, based on an assessment of the likelihood that the passenger is carrying contraband. This assessment is a risk assessment. Hence, some notion of risk will inevitably guide the individual customs inspector at the gate when deciding to conduct, or refrain from conducting, a control. The question is that of what form this notion might take. Reducing illegal trade is a primary goal in the customs service. Yet the
control activities must be balanced against the principle of non-interference in the regular flow of goods and passengers across the border. In the section on target-setting, I will show that this conflict is resolved through the goal of fewer and more accurate controls. This is followed by an analysis of the control selection at the level of individuals, focusing on the range of possible indicators of risk, which is limited by poor information but, lately, has been extended through the use of set profiles in relation to the booking information compiled by private transportation companies. As a consequence, the controlled individual is reduced to an impersonal bundle of risk indicators. To ensure that the customs service stays on target, the documented input and output of the control activity is evaluated by other state organizations in terms of efficiency. All aspects of the organization are made responsive to the same considerations of risk as those that guide the selection of objects. In drawing conclusions, I will discuss the legal paradigm of repressive power from the point of view of the marginal role played by conscious decisions (R2), both on the part of those who exercise power and on the part of those over whom power is exercised. I will also once more pick up the theme of
risk governance, this time not simply to claim that risk directs the activity throughout the customs service. Risk, moreover, works as a common language through which different and contradictory expectations are brokered within the organization.
