The profiler’s question and the treacherous traveler: Narratives of belonging in commercial aviation

Abstract

Although criticized as potentially invasive, profiling has recently been promoted as a means for finding potential terrorists, and particularly airplane hijackers. Based upon sophisticated data-mining technologies, new forms of profiling have seemed, whatever the privacy issues that they raise, to offer more objective alternatives to earlier airline profiling systems, which appear to have been based on nothing more than a sense that certain groups of people are not proper passengers, that they are out of place on an airplane. But in fact, the example of geodemographic systems suggests that an inevitable element of profiling is the appeal to sets of simple narratives. Indeed, far from being merely expository devices, such narratives are central to the profile’s analytical structure; as a consequence, while their promoters laud the profiling systems as neutral analytical devices, embedded within them is a sorting system that might more accurately be described as encoding an unstable world of Foucauldian similitudes.