Europe digital fortress

“This camp more closely resembles a prison than a place to house people seeking safety. This is a gross misuse of EU money, and a gross abuse of the residents’ rights,”

The new EU-funded “closed-controlled centre” (KEDN) of Samos has been constructed in an isolated spot 6 km from the main city, Vathi. It can house up to 3000 people and is equipped with a rigid system of containment and surveillance, including double barbed wire metal fencing, CCTV throughout, and the 24/7 presence of patrolling police officers and privately contracted security officers.   Residents’ movements in and out of the camp, which are only allowed between 8 am and 8 pm, are subject to security checks, and take place via magnetic gates.

notes: “They have been treating us like prisoners…You really go insane in this place. You can’t go back. You can’t go forward…I cannot really sleep…All the time we are living life with no purpose, with a lot of anxiety.” For the past five days, only his children have been allowed out of the camp to go to school.

Amnesty International repeatedly expressed concerns about Greece’s replacement of open camps with “closed controlled centres”, questioning how the policy could be reconciled with human rights standards on the deprivation of liberty. Under international and EU law, asylum-seekers should only be detained as a matter of last resort, after a detailed examination of their individual circumstances, for the shortest time possible and under a procedure prescribed by law which allows them to challenge the decision.

Overhead, lights suddenly flash red. A potential threat has been detected in one of the camps. This “threat” has been flagged by Centaur, a high-tech security system the Greek Migration Ministry is piloting and rolling out at all of the nearly 40 refugee camps in the country. Centaur includes cameras and motion sensors. It uses algorithms to automatically predict and flag threats such as the presence of guns, unauthorised vehicles, or unusual visits into restricted areas. The system subsequently alerts the appropriate authorities, such as the police, fire brigade, and private security working in the camps. From the control room, operators deploy camera-equipped drones and instruct officers stationed at the camp to rush to the location of the reported threat.

Nearly 40 cameras are being installed in each camp, which can be operated from the control room. There will also be thermal cameras, drones, and other technology – including augmented reality glasses, which will be distributed to police and private security personnel.

“This fits a broader trend of the EU pouring public money into dystopian and experimental surveillance projects, which treat human beings as lab rats,” Ella Jakubowska, policy and campaigns officer at European Digital Rights (EDRi), told Al Jazeera. “Money which could be used to help people is instead used to punish them, all while the surveillance industry makes vast profits selling false promises of magical technology that claims to fix complex structural issues.”

They call it the Silent Talker. It is a virtual policeman designed to strengthen Europe’s borders, subjecting travelers to a lie detector test before they are allowed to pass through customs.

The virtual policeman is the product of a project called iBorderCtrl, which involves security agencies in Hungary, Latvia, and Greece. Currently, the lie detector test is voluntary, and the pilot scheme is due to end in August. If it is a success, however, it may be rolled out in other European Union countries, a potential development that has attracted controversy and media coverage across the continent. IBorderCtrl’s lie detection system was developed in England by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University, who say that the technology can pick up on “micro gestures” a person makes while answering questions on their computer, analyzing their facial expressions, gaze, and posture. An EU research program has pumped some 4.5 million euros into the project, which is being managed by a consortium of 13 partners, including Greece’s Center for Security Studies, Germany’s Leibniz University Hannover, and technology and security companies like Hungary’s BioSec, Spain’s Everis, and Poland’s JAS.

The researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University believe that the system could represent the future of border security. In an academic paper published in June 2018, they stated that avatars like their virtual policeman “will be suitable for detecting deception in border crossing interviews, as they are effective extractors of information from humans.” However, some academics are questioning the value of the system, which they say relies on pseudoscience to make its decisions about travelers’ honesty. Ray Bull, professor of criminal investigation at the University of Derby, has assisted British police with interview techniques and specializes in methods of detecting deception. He told The Intercept that the iBorderCtrl project was “not credible” because there is no evidence that monitoring microgestures on people’s faces is an accurate way to measure lying.

They are deceiving themselves into thinking it will ever be substantially effective and they are wasting a lot of money,” said Bull. “The technology is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what humans do when being truthful and deceptive.”

An automated hi-tech surveillance network being built on the Greek-Turkish border aiming at detecting migrants early and deterring them from crossing, with river and land patrols using searchlights and long-range acoustic devices.

Greek border police are firing bursts of deafening noise from an armored truck over the frontier into Turkey. Mounted on the vehicle, the long-range acoustic device, or “sound cannon,” is the size of a small TV set but can match the volume of a jet engine. It’s part of a vast array of physical and experimental new digital barriers being installed and tested during the quiet months of the coronavirus pandemic at the 200-kilometer (125-mile) Greek border with Turkey to stop people entering the European Union illegally.

Nearby observation towers are being fitted with long-range cameras, night vision, and multiple sensors. The data will be sent to control centers to flag suspicious movement using artificial intelligence analysis. “We will have a clear ‘pre-border’ picture of what’s happening,” Police Maj. Dimonsthenis Kamargios, head of the region’s border guard authority, told the Associated Press.

AI-powered lie detectors and virtual border-guard interview bots have been piloted, as well as efforts to integrate satellite data with footage from drones on land, air, sea and underwater. Palm scanners record the unique vein pattern in a person’s hand to use as a biometric identifier, and the makers of live camera reconstruction technology promise to erase foliage virtually, exposing people hiding near border areas.