Biometric Technologies, Data and the Sensory Work of Border Control

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among border police agents at Copenhagen Airport and Gibraltar International Airport, the article explores the convergences and divergences between human and technological sensory work and decision-making in the daily operation of border and security control. Presenting two situations in which travellers and their luggage are scrutinised and their intentions and potential future actions are imagined, the analysis focuses on the interface between biometric technologies and human agents, the different technological and human capacities to identify and assess threats, their different capacities for hindsight and foresight, and the constant shifts in modes of seeing, unseeing and reasoning that the interface installs. The analysis concludes by showing that the actual object of assessment in border control is neither an ID nor an identity, but a synthetic and ephemeral figure created in the instant of control as a composite of data inputs and multiple sensory cues.