Based on ethnographic fieldwork among border control agents at a Schengen border point, the paper explores the linkages and dissociations between human and computer intelligence work in the daily operation of border control where voyagers are profiled, their IDs verified and their intentions scrutinized. In accordance with the critique of a trend in research on surveillance systems that sees ”big data”, data base networks and the production and storing of ”data doubles” (Lyon 2007, 2014) as impenetrable ”black boxes” operating in far-away centres of computerized algorithmic intelligence (Andrejevic & Gates 2014; Tsianos & Kuster 2016), my analysis takes an ethnographic approach to the practical work of border control agents. And on the floor where borders are erected and maintained on a daily basis, surveillance, control and data base consulting are indeed very practical and mundane matters, constantly articulated and made apparent to the anthropologist through direct sensory, verbal and affective encounters, negotiations and construction of narratives. The filtering at the border is thus to a large extent produced through direct human interaction, intelligence and profiling, and concerns imagined pasts and projected futures of voyagers, scenarios for which data doubles and “IDentity” constitute only the crude starting points.