Scanner
’Don’t walk through the scanner’
‘Just ask to get a pat down; it shouldn’t take too much longer.'
—
The pump company representative was walking me through the airport security rules over Zoom, letting me know that my new Cronenberg attachment couldn’t withstand some light radiation. Think of your health, I thought, put in the time to wait. When going through security in the past, I used to unhook my insulin pump from my body, wrap the tubing around it and dump it next to my shoes. Its small mechanical motor withstood the scans next to all the iPhones, just another electronic device in the X-ray bin.
This small black box had now been split into a two-piece organ made of the sensor on my arm and my insulin pump. Fragile Bluetooth signals are the only tether between my new sensor and my pump, forming a phenomenal artery. The sensor had embedded a thin strip of circuitry in my upper arm, transmitting a blood sugar number to my pump every 5 minutes. Walking through an airport body scanner might, hypothetically, sever this artery. If severed, I would be back to taking manual blood samples intermittently as I had done before.
Insulin is the synthetic hormone that all type-one diabetics rely on to stay alive. Without it, we start to feel the effects of increasingly acidic blood within a matter of minutes. From experience, I can say that acidic blood is better than any sleeping pill. At my most reckless, high blood sugar will sink me into a deep sleep at any point in the day. The blood sugar fluctuations can begin to function as secondary narcotics, highs enabling sleep for depressive episodes or dizziness of lows as rewards for not eating. The temporary escapism only goes so far though, as the hormone-starvation that induces this sleep always leads to muscle soreness instead of rest.
The inability to stay in the ’normal zone’ of blood sugar creates these alternative states of being, all with different moods and effects. In trainings about how to be diabetic, these alternative modes are not treated as modes but small detours from the beautiful goal of average, signified by the number 100 (mg/dL). When I go below 100 (mg/dL), I get warm like a greenhouse with the vents closed, everything around me becoming a humid blur as words stop making sense. After I eat something, the wait time until I hit average again is around 30 minutes.
—
Three days after the training I flew to see my parents and tested out the new protocol. When I arrived, I put my bags on the conveyer and told a security agent that I was opting for a pat-down. He told me to wait by the side for a trained agent, who I also guessed would be another woman. I watched my bags come out the other side, clogging up the belt for other people. People walked into the scanner once they were waved through, standing in the middle of the two-sided pod and lifting their hands above their heads. The posture of flatness is assumed in order for the machine to scan your front and back, outputting two elevational images of a body. A few seconds later you walk out and wait to see if the machine wants a human to get a closer look at your hand, or shoulder, or thigh. Shoes came off, shoes went on. Bags were opened, scanned, bags were gathered. I watched everyone shuffling in the line for the scanner, shoes off, phones binned, looking towards the scanner with their hands clasped or with crossed arms. The classic waiting stance.
If I were to describe the architecture of disability for myself, I would describe it as one about waiting. To able-bodied people, the image of disability seems to conjure sensations of pain and pity. ‘I am so sorry’ they will say, as if it has been their hands jabbing small needles into my body and not my own. I will reply something like ‘oh, it’s not so bad, it’s really about the waiting, about the paperwork.’ At this point we are naturally interrupted by other topics, topics not about the experience of bureaucracy. It is valid to have more difficulty accessing empathy in relation to waiting, taking up space and time in order to live. 'Painful' tableaus of surgeries or shots are easier to react to, they focus all the discomfort into a compressed time, moments of intensity where transfusions of medicine or body parts slip others back into an able-bodied state. But the state of being disabled is a long-game, pain is prolonged over years and decades through sustained sensation or in millions of tiny doses. There is the public waiting, for the pat-down at the airport, and there is the bodily waiting, sleeping off your blood sugar coma in bed, caring for your wounds in the bathroom, preparing for another day.
I don’t remember a lot about life before attachment. A handful of memories make it through the patchy signal of child memory, like running around my street when I was seven. This memory in 2001 was a few years before I was diagnosed. After that, I went through the transitions of taking injections to wearing an insulin pump. Without having to carry around needles and vials, the process was rendered invisible. Stashed in a bra strap the pump becomes a boxy fabric lump, the coils of a thin tube held flat by the cotton-spandex hybrid as they meet a small port in my side. This puncture point is held open for 3 days, at which point I remove it and make another one a few inches away, leaving a new tube behind.
The local news showed translucent white figures with small black shapes scattered across their surface. Body scans revealed objects just below the surface of their clothing, contraband rendered invisible under cotton and spandex I imagined my assumed guilt under the eye of the scan that revealed a black silhouette against my ribcage. The fuzzy resolution is just enough to make a bomb and an insulin pump indistinguishable. The object of the scan is to reveal objects with a few inches of surface area, a bomb is an Altoid tin is a gun is a knee replacement. The scan also shows the indent where tubing presses into my stomach and the shadows of old site scars. In the cursory check of a TSA agent these pixels could be misinterpreted as folds in my shirt or slight output glitches.
Shedding invisibility is shocking when it has been assumed for so long, and there is swift public backlash to scanners. Privacy and autonomy were chipped away at in the years following 9/11, especially in the racist and xenophobic presumed guilt of South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Muslim residents moving through space. Gathering data on residents of the U.S. used the goal of total knowledge as a metric for safety, as if knowing all of our data would protect us from violence. A list of who we call on the phone had now escalated to scans of our skin, an image of total safety.
Nearly a decade after the attacks, metal detectors were replaced with body scanners in airports. The transmission of an electromagnetic field by metal detectors detects metal through changes in frequency, so imagery was not part of the security screening process until the body scanners were implemented. The first body scanner developed in the '90s, the Secure 1000, which used a low-dose X-ray to scan a standing person and output an elevation of their body and clothing. It wasn’t until the 2010s that body scanners replaced metal detectors due to the concealed nature of a bomb threat in 2009. (1)
(Image 1) millimetre wave scanner - Image Source
According to a recent Airport Industry Review (1), two models were used at this turning point, the millimeter wave scanner and the backscatter X-ray screener. The backscatter X-ray screener was phased out within a few years due to privacy questions as well as concern over the level of radiation it emits. In example scans found online for the backscatter X-ray, the seams and elastic of someone's underwear meet the soft ripple of their hips near the black silhouette of a gun. One image has round shadows around someone’s eye sockets and a dark line at their mouth, likely the outline of their skull as the X-ray pierces their skin with no fabric or contraband to conceal it. I am not including this image because I am unsure of the scanned person’s consent, but it is one of the first search results for “backscatter X-ray”. The black and white high-definition images leave almost not a cell or thread to the imagination.
In contrast, the millimeter wave scanner (Image 1) has a tin-foil effect, the ripples of clothing and guns and skin rolling into a continuous silver surface. It uses non-ionizing radiation, which is assumed to not cause cancer. This is the scanner that is used today, though the images TSA are shown have been simplified with 'Automated Target Recognition' software to no longer show the intimate scans of each passenger (Image 2). Agents now only see a hypothetical cartoon person, yellow boxes popping up in areas on someone’s body where questionable objects may be.
(Image 2) millimeter wave scan with Automated Target Recognition - Image Source
In 2011 ProPublica discussed a study of the (then) new body scanners, conducted by the American Accountability Office, that found evidence that they were ineffective at finding the concealed explosives that spurred their implementation (2). In one study, it was found likely that "the $170,000 scanners would likely miss some explosives that could be found during a pat-down.” The government classifies the detection rates of the scanners, but at a congressional hearing Florida Rep. John Mica expressed that: "If we could reveal the failure rate, the American public would be outraged.” This new operative mode of using images to find weapons was causing all sorts of misreadings. In tests it was found that millimeter wave scanners were raising false alarms over folds in fabric and even beads of sweat. Two anonymous Homeland Security officials said there were obvious vulnerabilities where attackers could just adjust their methods to evade the images each scanner captures, including implanting explosives in their bodies. By 2011 the TSA had already spent $100 million on body scanners, and in 2021 they are in all airports not only in the U.S. but in major airports all over the world.
The millimeter wave scanners do not lower the threat of violence on board aircraft, but are tools of what Bruce Schneier calls “security theater” which refers to “security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.” (3) Though I am a fan of Improv Everywhere, this security theater creates a feeling of security not only at a massive financial cost but also jeopardizes the safety of marginalized groups. Sasha Costanza Chock talks about the experience of traveling while trans, and the forced explanation of one’s gender at the airport. The “sociotechnical configuration of gender normativity (cis-normativity)” integrated into the scanner process means that the assumed statistical norm of a ‘female’ or ‘male’ body is chosen by the TSA agent, and those whose bodies do not comply with the expected forms will have areas flagged with yellow. This will inevitably lead to a pat down and a terse interaction about the validity of what lies beneath ones clothes.(4)(5) In the eyes of the constructed data set, many of us blink with dangerous anomalies, fated to have our days bogged down with more waiting and exposure as a result of our inability to comply with the form of an expected average.
—
At the airport en route to my parents', I waited around 20 minutes for a woman to come and pat me down. It was not long, but long enough to feel the abyss of wondering when she would come. Perhaps 20 or 30 people went through the scanner next to me, passing me and my bags. The TSA agent ran the back of her hands along my body in fluid motions, and I imagined being highlighted to signify the areas deemed ’safe.’ I was feeling anxious about time, so I elected to stay in public view while she worked. I noticed two male TSA agents watching this process, and I wondered if she had to listen to lewd comments later. After being deemed a safe surface, she swabbed the palms of my hands with a cotton ball and put it in a testing machine. These test for particles of explosives, though I am not sure what types of particles that includes.
The third time I went through security at the airport, I waited 15 minutes and wondered how much longer it would be. Perhaps I was thinking about my health again, thinking about the ionized radiation the X-ray machines next to me were emitting. My urge for caffeine fueled my impatience as I broke protocol. I dumped my pump in a bin and stepped back in line.
In research for this piece, I had difficulty finding evidence that Bluetooth connections could be damaged by the non-ionizing radiation of body scanners. In the official guide on ‘Flying with your Tandem Insulin Pump’ (6) it instructs me to not put my pump through anything that uses X-rays, and I realized that whoever put this together didn’t do their research. Through this investigation I have realized that there is probably no risk at all, and I will likely keep breaking protocol. In my future travels I will hold my insulin pump above my head while I get scanned, disabled only long enough for a photo.
—
(1) BERTI, ADELE. TIMELINE: THE HISTORY OF AIRPORT BODY SCANNERS. 2020, https://airport.nridigital.com/air_mar20/timeline_the_history_of_airport_body_scanners.
(2) Grabell, Michael. “Just How Good Are the TSA’s Body Scanners?” ProPublica, 2011, https://www.propublica.org/article/just-how-good-are-the-tsas-body-scanners.
(3) Schneier, Bruce. "Beyond security theater." New Internationalist 427 (2009): 10-12.
(4) Costanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/96c8d426
(5) Costello, Cary Gabriel, 2016. “Traveling While Trans: The False Promise of Better Treatment,” in Trans Advocate. Available at http://transadvocate.com/the-tsa-a-binary-body-system-in-practice_n_15540.htm
(6) Tandem Diabetes Care. Flying with Your Tandem Insulin Pump. https://www.tandemdiabetes.com/docs/default-source/general-guides/ml-1000524_b-print-travel-info-card.pdf?sfvrsn=dce08d7_35.