The United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) broadcasts the following warning in airports around the country: 'Making jokes or statements regarding bombs and/or threats during the screening process may be grounds for both civil and criminal penalties and could cause you to miss your flight.' Despite the warning, people continue to be arrested for making jokes about bombs, anthrax, and security policy. This paper examines the persistence of these disciplinary mechanisms in the context of the deterritorialized risk analysis, biometric identity banking, and 'network thinking' that characterize state security regimes. The article first describes how TSA has incorporated theories of complex adaptive systems, networks, and emergence into its strategy. Second, I trace how air travelers move through a series of risk analysis and inspection practices. By combining passenger pre-screening, check-in, visual inspection and 'behavior observation,' TSA seeks to surveil different spatiotemporal slices of passengers' identities, belongings, and future plans. Third, the article situates the banning of the bomb joke in the context of information-driven inspection practices and unpacks the interpretive practices of TSA staff. Finally, I argue that spatial orders are produced in and through the embodied performance of speech, and further, that disciplining speech points to enduring anxieties about the 'securitized subject' in post-9/11 security regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]