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How to engage with the politics of privacy in the age of preemptive security? My suggestion is to start with data protection. Which, following De Hert and Gutwirth (2006), is not exactly the same of privacy. Extrapolating from their analysis of the two as different “legal tools”, I would say that privacy and data protection are two slightly different rationales of power relations: the one of privacy based on the “opacity of the individual”, and the one of data protection on the “transparency and accountability of the powerful” (Gutwirth and De Hert 2008: 275, emphasis in original). These rationales (attempt to) orientate two different loose dispositifs, each formed by a composite ensemble of elements. Some of these elements are peculiar to each dispositif, while others are shared or encompassed by both.

In 2008, debates over the deployment of body scanners in EU airports gave rise to imbroglios of technologies, bodies, law, and policies. Even- tually, 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 hetero- geneous 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.