In 2008, debates over the deployment of body scanners in EU airports gave rise to imbroglios of technologies, bodies, law, and policies. Eventually, these entanglements appeared to be undone and resolved by the concealment of bodies from the screens of the machines—which had, meanwhile, been renamed security scanners. Using the concept of setting, this article describes the processes of disappearance operating among a vivid multiplicity of actants and connections and identifies three main paradoxical features characterizing them. Based on this analysis, the article advances the notion of the politics of disappearance, where heterogeneous elements—both material and immaterial, visible as well as invisible—actively contribute to the making of a security practice and, potentially, to the opening of political landscapes.

What does it mean to study security from a critical perspective? This question continues to haunt critical security studies. Conversations about normative stances, political engagement, and the role of critique are mainstays of the discipline. This article argues that these conversations tend to revolve around a too disembodied image of research, where the everyday practice of researchers is sidelined. But researchers do do research: they work materially, socially, and cognitively. They mediate between various feedback loops or fields of critique. In doing so, they actively build and exercise critique. Recognizing that fact, this article resists growing suggestions to abandon critique by, first, returning to the practice of critique through the notion of companionship. This permits us to reinvigorate our attention to the objects, persons, and phenomena through which critique gains inspiration and purpose, and that literally accompany our relationship to critique. Second, we explore what happens when our companions disagree, when critique faces controversies and (a) symmetries. Here, we support research designs of tracing credibility and establishing symmetries in order to move away from critique as denouncing positions we disagree with. Third, we discuss the relation between companionship, critique, reflexivity, and style. Here, the rhetorical practices of critical inquiry are laid out, and possibilities for its articulation in different and less silencing voices are proposed.

This article contributes to debates on algorithmic regulation by focusing on the domain of security. It develops an infrastructural perspective, by analyzing how algorithmic regulation is enacted through the custom‐built transatlantic data infrastructures of the EU‐U.S. Passenger Name Records and Terrorism Financing Tracking Program programs. Concerning regulation through algorithms, this approach analyzes how specific, commercial data are rendered transferable and meaningful in a security context. Concerning the regulation of algorithms, an infrastructural perspective examines how public values like privacy and accountability are built into international data infrastructures. The creation of data infrastructures affects existing modes of governance and fosters novel power relations among public and private actors. We highlight emergent modes of standard setting, thus enriching Yeung's (2018) taxonomy, and question the practical effects of operationalizing public values through infrastructural choices. Ultimately, the article offers a critical reading of algorithmic security, and how it materially, legally, and politically supports specific ways of doing security.

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