Analogue Digital Mirror Room

During my flight to London I was thinking of how terror prevention was working and actually how severe it could already be back in analogues times. When I arrived I didn’t think to find myself queuing for almost 45 minutes until we entered the customs and border police area where it took another hour to snake ourselves through the passport control. The amount of people being caught in this propaganda jam was so vast that I couldn’t avoid taking a photo.

Immediately a guy with a massive machine gun notified unmistakably that photographing is forbidden. I was so joyful when I arrived but these guys literally know how to bring you down to earth. The same sort of machine gun men were positioned behind each second passport counter. Often, at least in Berlin, if you find them there at all, they would look a bit bored. The way they look into the crowd and also their body language tells you easily, that they haven’t been briefed that a sudden or permanent terror threat at any given time, and potentially by each and every passenger standing in the queue, is about to occur. However, this is exactly how the guys look at the UK border, and this again makes you then think about all possible scenarios that could happen in this transit area between airplane exit and border entry: a single person or a group of people pull out knives, pistols or machine guns or even bombs, shoot everyone who is locked in this in-between-area or just blow it up. But seriously where would these weapons or bombs come from if everyone just got out of the plane?

So, what is this all about? May be I’m among of the last and naïve ones to think this but it seems very much like a show, a propaganda to back up all that PRISM and NSA thing going on. The situation in this in-between-area actually pictures the analogue-digital mirror quite well: everyone in this area is a potential threat like everyone in the net, and the guys with the machine guns make sure everyone understands that. But hey, if you don’t have anything to hide, if you’re no threat to society you have nothing to fear, right?

London Gatwick forbidden photo with no machine gun men