When Will Security Go Back to Normal? | Philosophy Tube

I hope you can hear me we're here in Gatwick Airport it's it's just shy of noon on the 29th of July and I'm flying to the United States via Iceland but I get a connecting flight in Reykjavik I'm just trying to find a place where I can blog that isn't totally busted and adverts behind me so I hope I'm not inadvertently like standing for KFC or anything for those of you who've never seen a British passport before this is what it says on the first page her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary and without let or hindrance it seems to be increasingly optimistic these days in order to prepare to do this video I've been reading a little bit about the history of air force and it's quite interesting some of the oldest airports in the world were constructed around 1920 I think Sydney and Amsterdam's Schiphol are some of the longest running continuously operating airports in the world so they're almost 100 years old and it's interesting to reflect on the fact that airports had to be invented I mean I wanted like of course they had to be invented they're not like naturally occurring features of the landscape and I'm so used to thinking of airports as brute facts just a feature of traveling that it has to be this way once you learn the history of something you realize that it's contingent and it doesn't actually have to be there at all never mind be there in the way that it is I think they're about to announce my gate and I want to get some lunch and I don't want to be caught vlogging in one spot and got my cable for too long so we'll pick this up later on in right was 8 years old when 9/11 happened and I don't really remember having a clear understanding of it at the time in fairness nobody understood at the time what it would come to mean for us all and we're still finding out but I have a much clearer memory of August the 10th 2006 when a plan to bomb several planes flying from the UK to the US was foiled and the rules about taking liquids on planes were changed for those of you who too young to remember you know how you have to put all your liquids inside the little transparent bag when you go through security and you're only allowed to take a certain amount on didn't used to be like that used to just be able to get on the plane in fact in some countries you still can get on planes with liquids and in 2006 we were told that the restrictions on liquids were a temporary measure that was 12 years ago so when are we going back to normal of course there isn't really a normal to go back to security in 2006 was already stricter than it was before then but airports have a very interesting relationship with time first of all there's the relation of time to memory I remember that there was a time where you could get on a plane with liquids I remember what it's like to travel with greater ease and less anxiety somebody who's younger might not have known any other way but as long as people like me are still around remembering the way things used to be we carry within us the promise that the world can be different as we follow my journey to the United States we're gonna be focusing mainly on the philosophy behind American security because through various means the United States cajoles other nations into adopting similar ideas like if you've been on a train anywhere in the UK in at least the last year you will definitely have heard that automated message the one that goes if you see something and it doesn't look right contact British Transport Police on and we'll sort it see it say it sorted the bloody message that asked listen see like 10 times a day on the tube well the Americans were playing things like that in Walmart as early as 2010 and we've imported it from them and American security culture is very much influenced by Israeli security culture so America and Israel are very much the tail that wags the dog on this issue in the United States airport security is controlled by the TSA a Transport Security Administration and although the TSA is an omnipresent feature of American airports today it was only actually established in 2001 in direct response to 9/11 the TSA is now a branch of the Department of Homeland Security which was also created in direct response to 9/11 although to my american viewers the Department of Homeland Security might seem like a permanent fixture in the political landscape it didn't exist until 2002 I lived the first nine years of my life I think I even went to America in that time before any such entity existed and of course the vast majority of flights went off without a hitch as well and there's the interesting relationship between airports and time the fact that it didn't used to exist is proof that it doesn't always have to exist but of course security is nothing without the threat that it's supposed to be defending us against which is why how we think about airports and security is so tied up with how we think about terrorism and borders as an illustration of just how intertwined these issues are the Department of Homeland Security currently oversees both the TSA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ice now internationally infamous as the people who put children in cages so the second interesting dimension of airports and time is threat scholar Sara Ahmed points out that the threat against which security is supposedly defending us is always located in the future the possible future to be exact it's not like when you're accused of a crime and you're innocent until proven guilty or if the police want to search your house they have to get a warrant by showing evidence that they need to search you in that you might be involved in something dodgy in an airport everybody is searched that's just the way we do it you're guilty until proven innocent until you're cleared for take the threat against which security is meant to defend us is always located in the realm of maybe in the realm of possibility in the realm of well nothing's been proven and we don't have any evidence to suggest anything specific but the present tense becomes preserved by defending the community against the imagined others who may take form in ways that cannot be anticipated not yet nurse which means the work of defense is never over which would seem to suggest that security may never go back to the way it was it can't the surveillance and the paranoia and the invasive measures can only ever expand because it's not actually grounded in any presently knowable facts about threat or safety the whole game is about risk managing the possible future and since what might happen in the future is infinitely imaginable the justification for more security becomes infinite - a while ago I got into an argument with an armed police officer on the on the train platform of Newcastle Central Station and he was there with his like a machine gun and he was swaggering around and he was showing off to these two other cops and I asked him what are you doing here like why are you here and he said well you know it's just for your protection and I said yeah but the people of Newcastle were asked if we wanted more armed cops on the streets you just like sent here so it's not really protection on our terms and if we don't have a say in whether or not you're here then it's not really protection it's like more it's more like an occupation isn't it really and he said well if there was a terrorist in here right now what would you do and what I should have said was I disagree with the premise of the question which is that a possible future threat is always justification for every actual present concrete form of coercive security but what I actually said truthfully was [ __ ] I'm about to miss my train it's also worth noting that this security logic mindset kind of treats terrorism as if it's inevitable or the very least that more security is definitely the own the best way of preventing it but that might stop us from becoming curious about why do people commit horrible acts of terror what are their rationalizations for it and what might we do to stop people being pushed towards those rationalizations in the first place the security mindset treats terrorists is just like a blank force of nature like a natural disaster but as uncomfortable as it might be to face this fact they are people they have perspectives that can be understood by us though not condoned obviously it's interesting to how some risks are seen as absolutely the end of the question while others are seen as good taking a few more small risks by dialing back the surveillance state isn't even being floated as an option by any of the major political parties in my country anyway but living under an economic system where things like the 2008 financial crash can happen taking a big risk there that scene is good even though the chances of neoliberal capitalism ruining your life are much greater than the chances of being caught in a terrorist attack it's not just airports where the infinite maybe logic of guilty until proven innocent holds sway restrictions on immigration law go hand in hand with these kinds of coercive security measures because both are reacting not to actual proven crimes but to possible future crimes who might be hiding amongst the people crossing the border who could be hatching a nefarious plan the only way to approach these questions as long as they're framed like that is with more security more guards more screenings more camps a camp scholar Shireen Ra'zac explains is a zone where normal rules do not apply rules like innocent until proven guilty sometimes they can be literal camps like Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib sometimes they can be more subtle than that by studying the history of racism we can see that the skin of people of color can sometimes operate a bit like a camp sometimes camps are designated officially sometimes it's done with an unwritten rule and they are built gradually and some scholars have noted that there's a pretty interesting parallel between camps and Airport's writer gillian fuller says both airport and camp constitute zones of exception each off reigned by rhetoric of emergency one facilitates movement and the other denies it yet both are zones of Perpetual transit and futuristic promise any zone where normal order is suspended is a camp a camp is a space where anything is possible including death new camps thus emerge daily dogs sniff commuters on trains detention centers are a growth industry and the category of refugee is constantly being redefined although there are similar logics at play in both airports and camps there are some big differences too for one thing concentration camps like y'all's would here in the UK or the camps for children in the United States have a lot more direct and brutal violence in them than an airport does also regular air travel is still a mark of relative privilege and crucially travelers in an airport are presumed capable of demonstrating that they are safe whereas people in camps are de-facto assumed unable or unwilling to do that which is why their that no one is presumed innocent some enjoy the privilege of being presumed capable of demonstrating the absence of the threat of terrorism others are presumed incapable unwilling or non-compliant welcome to Iceland it's four o'clock here five o'clock England and midday where I'm going so I'm a little bit lost in time and a little bit lost in space as well because although I say welcome to Iceland I haven't actually entered it I'm not crossing the border if this was 500 years ago and I was standing on the spot nobody would doubt that I'm in Iceland but strangely today this is Schrodinger's country which means actually that when this airport was built Iceland shrunk slightly they took a little piece of it away poor all my sudden they were in a very big country to begin with and the sea was almost ashamed to exercise a piece of it just so they can sell sandwiches to tourists for 20 quid each when I get to the United States they will have to go through a border control and I always get a little bit nervous when I cross the border even though I know the answers to all of the questions they're gonna be asking me I know what the true answers are nobody knows more about where I'm going and what I'm doing that I do and yet I still get anxious I guess some part of me feels that like the true answer isn't necessarily the best answer I can give in some sense I feel like it's not necessarily about finding the truth there's a weird religious confessional element to airport security not only am I expected to volunteer information but also to be suitably penitent towards the great power that's asking me and only then do I get to go to a better place or in this case America anyway flight takes off in about 25 minutes maybe I've got time to stick out a small mortgage and a fort in New York since I'm an actor and I live in London I go to the theatre a lot and in the last year or so and most of the major theatres in London I've started searching your back when you go in and some people say that when it comes to increased security measures like that the good have nothing to hide it's not that much of an inconvenience so what's the problem and I have two curiosities about this perspective the first is that I just don't think it's true the good do have something to fear from increased security because who gets seen as criminal is impacted in large part by who security officials pay attention to like my anxiety acrossing the United States border I know the truthful answers but I also know that when you talk to a border guard talking short sentences don't make jokes don't say anything that could be misconstrued because the longer that conversation goes on the more likely that something you say will be taken in the wrong way and could land you in big big trouble it's not really about performing safety it's about performing belonging so if people already think that you don't belong in his book the Muslims are coming communications professor Aaron Kanani describes a vicious cycle of authorities paying attention to people an agent provocateur operation is when law enforcement agencies send an undercover operative into a group that they think is suspicious in order to try and bait them into committing a crime for which they can then be arrested and Konami points out that if law enforcement agencies already consider a certain group of people say Muslims to be suspicious they will send more undercover operatives into that group of people relative to other groups there by inciting more crimes from that group resulting in more trials of people from that group meaning that the public and juries will come to view that group as more dangerous and suspicious meaning that law enforcement agencies will send more people in to investigate them and the whole cycle goes around again and he gives several examples of this practice being used in the United States now you might have heard the term in Mundt before that's the legal word for when the police cause you to commit a crime and then arrest you for it and a lot of countries have laws against the Trotman because it is kind of unfair to make somebody commit a crime and then arrest them for it although entrapment is officially illegal in some forms in the US and UK the devil is that in order to prove entrapment in court you have to establish that the defendant wouldn't have committed the crime without the cops being involved and that can be difficult because again we're talking about the realm of maybe what somebody might have done is infinitely imaginable and if somebody has been charged with a crime a lot of people are naturally going to assume that they're a little bit dodge especially if they're also part of a group of people that is widely considered and portrayed as a little bit Dodge so although agent provocateur operations can look a lot like entrapment it can be nigh impossible to convince a jury of that and you're probably better off taking a plea bargain so in this way we can see that when it comes to security in surveillance it's not just about the good having nothing to fear because crime is in part constructed and one of the major ingredients is attention the second problem I have with this the good have nothing to fear response is that it makes some assumptions about the nature of privacy which we might get curious about we might put forward an alternative understanding of what privacy is and to illustrate it there's this brilliant line in Julius Caesar where Decius goes to Caesar's house and asks him to come to the Senate and Caesar says no I'm not going with you I'm gonna stay here I'm gonna stay home today and Decius says maybe you do let me know some cars let thy beloved dead when I tell them so the carnage in my will I will not come and that line I think captures something really fundamental about civil liberties so I have freedom of movement within my country right if I want to go to Bristol I can go to Bristol I don't need to tell anyone why I'm going I don't need anyone's permission to go I don't even have to know why I want to go to Bristol the fact that I want to go is enough and I'm curious about when in society we're allowed to give that kind of an answer that kind of Julius Caesar because I want to answer I don't have a particular reason why I don't to search my bag when I enter the theater but why isn't the fact that I want that enough it's not so much that I need a reason not to have my privacy invaded it's that somebody else should have a reason to do it that's kind of the point that's surely what it means for something to be none of your business and yet to refuse the search is to immediately mark oneself out as suspicious as concealing something that is in fact somebody else's business because of the security logic presumption that everyone is guilty until proven innocent another great example of this it's been in the recent news is anti-fascists wearing masks when they do that anti-fascist work a lot of people get very angry and say why are you wearing masks if you're not doing something criminal and in fact there can be very good health and safety reasons for wearing masks while doing antivirus work it protects against teargas and it stops you being identified and then attacked later on after the protests or whatever but even if those things didn't apply wearing a mask in public is perfectly legal that's your right if you want to do that it doesn't necessarily imply criminality every time they try and search my bag when I go into the theater I always ask them how long is this gonna be going on how long are you gonna be searching people's bags I know he's a slightly confused which is a little bit worrying but that way of looking at privacy puts the people who are doing the security measures on the back foot it puts them in the position where they need to justify to themselves and to us why this is happening and of course if they can't justify it if it doesn't provably make anyone safer or if it does have serious drawbacks for people's privacy and their liberty then why are we doing it but I don't want to make this discussion too much about the privacy rights of relatively privileged airline travelers or theater goers the separation of children from parents at the border and the imprisonment of people who haven't been convicted of any crime is not some sudden mutation of national policy it's a continuation of the philosophical ideas we've been seeing at work now for decades the policing of possible criminals the assumption that privacy must be concealing something nefarious and above all the assumption that steps taken in the name of security are necessary irreversible and unquestionable and you don't have to go somewhere like Guantanamo Bay or yours would to see those kinds of philosophical ideas in operation you just got to try getting on a plane as scholar Falcone chef recently put it we have to think about whether we really want a Department of Homeland Security in my country we have to think about do we want a home office and all of its various tributary organizations that does the job that it does and if the answer is you don't have a choice those institutions have to be there then how free are we if you're in a position where new security measures are being discussed maybe you work in a theater already University I'd invite you to get curious about asking when is this gonna stop when is the new policy going to end what is the definite end date when it will no longer be contracted for when it's not gonna be budgeted anymore not when it's gonna be reviewed because then it becomes very easy to just let it roll over and not do anything about it but when is it definitely gonna end unless we act to stop it and actually review the reasons why we are doing it the question that I began this investigation with was his security ever gonna go back to the way it was and the answer I think I'm flying towards is no it isn't unless you demand it I'm supposed to act like they aren't here assuming those are they at all it may just be my imagination whatever it is that's watching it's not human it doesn't ever blink what does a scanner see into the head down into the heart does it see into me into us clearly or darkly I hope it sees clearly because I can't any longer see into myself i AC only merc i hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do that I'm cursed and cursed again and will only wind up dead this way knowing very little getting that little fragment wrong too [Music] well I've been transported through time and space but here we are journey's end the United States of America it's funny usually when I fly I don't stop to think about the journey my heart is so busy dreaming about the destination that my mind just doesn't consider where I am or oh I guess where we are together as a society and that's been especially true on this trip my heart's been dreaming fondly about the destination I've had every reason to just accept airport travel and security and all the logic behind it as unquestionable but if you and I believed in unquestionable things I don't think we'd be interested in philosophy [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 525,498

Rating: 4.9016509 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, security, 9/11, world trade centre, airports, travel, airplane, George W Bush

Id: yyzd_a6vLWY

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 14 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/pokeking10]

This is one of my favorite's from PT.

Very good application of some abstract philosophy and it highlights the premise of "Temporary Restrictions" which are never temporary.

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I'm not a fan of incrementalism but it certainly is effective for creeping governmental authoritarianism.

[u/NHecrotic]

I was a junior in highschool when 9/11 happened. I remember coming home from school and struggling to come to terms with the "old world" being dead. We weren't the impregnable fortress of a country that I was taught about from childhood. Not everyone saw us as the good guys. I watched the people who I trusted to administer the country crawl over each other to show whose more patriotic. I watched pampered media figures pretend they were tough-as-nails warhawks. I watched people who I once respected lie through their fucking teeth so they could sack a country with zero connection to what happened.

And the consequences of this is still resonating 18 years later. It will never go back to "normal".

[u/magatard23]

Never, this is the new normal.

[u/LimeWarrior]

Military and TSA are the only jobs program our government is okay with. If people were given social, creative, enriching, and meaningful work, they would be too popular compared to Military/TSA and recruitment would suffer.

[u/wonder-maker]

This is the new normal. If we want to go back to the old normal, we're going to have to create another new normal.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/MakeItDontBreakIt]

When we stop electing Republicans and centrist Dems

[u/CapitalistLemming]

Fuck no. 9/11 has just been replaced with the Paris attacks. People will never stop looking for an excuse for to be scared and angry. Hell even before 9/11 we were scared of the Middle East and obsessed with security. Anybody remember the Three Strikes and You’re Out bill? Or Reagan’s War on Drugs? OR Nixon’s War on Crime? OR THE VIETNAM WAR? The war that was so pointless for the US to be involved in that we might as well call it Pre-Iraq?

[u/Maksie99]

Um guys it's 9/9