‘We were taken by surprise’: body scanners, technology adjustment, and the eradication of failure

This paper analyzes how body scanners were implemented at German airports in 2014 after failing a preliminary trial run in 2010–2011. The paper retraces how this initial failure became possible. It highlights the different ways of framing failure at both the political level and by experts and stakeholders from aviation security and the security industry. In both cases, although with reference to different claims (numbers and operational capacity on the one hand; surprise and privacy issues on the other hand), failure was conceived of as a dynamic and contingent process that did not necessarily demarcate the end of the line for body scanners. The diagnosis of failure as a non-terminal and preliminary state speaks to wider findings in critical security studies that highlight the role of technology as a self-referential driver within security politics, and the vested (economic) interests in the development and marketization of security technologies.