Migration

The Russo-Ukrainian war is coming down to a race between the weakening political will of western democracies and the deteriorating military means of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. But this race will be a marathon, not a sprint. Sustaining that political will requires the kind of farsighted leadership which most democracies are missing. It calls for a recognition that our own countries are also, in some important sense, at war – and a corresponding politics of the long haul.

Is this what you hear when you turn on your television in the United States (where I am now), Germany, Italy, Britain or France? Is this a leading topic in the Conservative party contest to decide Britain’s next prime minister, or the run-up to the Italian election on 25 September, or the campaign for the US midterm elections on 8 November? No, no and no.

“We are at war,” I heard someone say recently on the radio; but he was an energy analyst, not a politician.

Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), observed recently that Russia might be “about to run out of steam” in Ukraine because of shortages of material and adequately trained troops. So Ukraine has a good chance of winning an important battle this autumn; but it’s still a long way from winning the war.

High energy prices as a result of the war continue to turbocharge inflation in the west while keeping Putin’s own war chest filled with the billions of euros Germany and others are still paying for Russian gas and oil. Although a few grain ships are now leaving Odesa, his blockade of Ukrainian ports has caused a food price crisis across parts of the Middle East and Africa, resulting in much human misery and potentially in refugee flows and political chaos. Those, too, are Putin’s friends. Better still: the global south seems to blame this at least as much on the west as on Russia.

Putin’s cultural and political analysis of the west leads him to believe that time is on his side. In his view, the west is decadent, weakened by multiculturalism, immigration, the post-nationalism of the EU, LGBTQ+ rights, atheism, pacifism and democracy. No match, therefore, for carnivorous, martial great powers which still cleave to the old trinity of God, family and nation.

There are people in the west who agree with him, subverting western and European unity from within. Just read Viktor Orbán’s scandalous recent speech to an ethnic Hungarian audience in Romania, with its insistence that Hungarians should not become “mixed race”, its sweeping critique of the west’s policy on Ukraine and its conclusion that “Hungary needs to make a new agreement with the Russians”.

In Germany, a plurality of those asked in a recent opinion poll (47%) saidUkraine should give up its eastern territories in return for “peace”

If Donald Trump announces his presidential candidacy off the back of midterm election successes for his partisans, this could spell big trouble for what has so far been rare bipartisan consensus in the US on large-scale economic and military support for Ukraine.

According to a former deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, the country needs a further $5bn a month in macroeconomic support just to ensure that its economy does not collapse – close to double what it is currently getting.

Putin’s stocks of his most modern weapons and best trained troops have already been depleted.

Could he compensate for the loss of skilled troops by a general mobilisation? Will China come to his aid with modern weapons supplies? Can he escalate?

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.”

The main objective of ROBORDER is to develop a fully-functional autonomous border surveillance system with unmanned mobile robots including aerial, water surface, underwater and ground vehicles (UAV1, USV, UUV and UGV), capable of functioning both as standalone and in swarms, and incorporate multimodal sensors as part of an interoperable network

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.”

But all too often, discussions about these technologies are sanitized and depoliticized. People on the move are viewed as a security problem, and policymakers, consultancies, and the private sector focus on the “opportunities” presented by technologies in securitizing borders and “preventing migration.” The human stories of those who are subjected to these new technological tools and the discriminatory and deadly realities of “digital borders” are ignored within these technocratic discussions. Some EU policy documents describe the “European Border Surveillance System” without mentioning people at all.

Relying on big data, modern surveillance becomes increasingly influential in determining societal power relations. Lyon argues that modern surveillance always categorises people entailing social effects, what he conceptualises as social sorting. This paper assesses if patterns of social sorting can be found in the EU surveillance systems for migration Schengen Information System (SIS), Visa Information System (VIS) and EUROpean DACtylographic comparison system (EURODAC), which are planned to be merged in order to ensure maximum efficiency in surveillance. To do so, the paper analyses relevant documents referring to SIS, VIS and EURODAC. These systems have assumed the traditional border function of deciding on societal inclusion and exclusion. I argue that, to some extent, socio-digital borders are drawn along the categories established through social sorting. The paper exemplifies how social sorting relying on big data may be a disempowering surveillance practice.

The smartphones and other devices all of us rely on every day sit right at the center of the perfect storm of border problems. Bad guys rely on connected devices and cloud data for everything related to breaching our borders, from smuggling narcotics and wildlife to trafficking children and fake COVID-19 vaccines.

Even those with more innocent motives, whose only reason to cross a border illegally may be to escape famine, joblessness, or persecution, are inextricably tied to their mobile devices, whether it’s to communicate with family members left behind or to contact those ahead who they pray will ferry them to a better life.

in the US alone, “Border agents inspected 30,200 phones and other devices last year [2018]— an increase of nearly 60 percent from 2016.”

Data is the most valuable asset border agencies have. To take full advantage of the information (and valuable evidence) that lies buried under the mountains of data agencies are accumulating, they must move away from gathering physical evidence and concentrate on collecting digital

Border management, migration management, and internal security are rapidly converging. Modern border agencies must have systems and processes in place to not only collect, manage, and analyze data to gain actionable intelligence, they must also have the means to collaborate and share that information both internally and externally with other departments and agencies

In effect, none of this stops people from crossing; having drones or helicopters doesn’t stop people from crossing, you just see people taking more risky ways,” says Jack Sapoch, formerly with Border Violence Monitoring Network. “This is a history that’s so long, as security increases on one section of the border, movement continues in another section.”

German MEP Özlem Demirel is campaigning against the EU’s use of drones and links to arms companies, which she says has turned migration into a security issue. “The arms industries are saying: ‘This is a security problem, so buy my weapons, buy my drones, buy my surveillance system,’” says Demirel. “The EU is always talking about values like human rights, [speaking out] against violations but … week-by-week we see more people dying and we have to question if the EU is breaking its values,” she says.

EU air assets are accompanied on the ground by sensors and specialised cameras that border authorities throughout Europe use to spot movement and find people in hiding. They include mobile radars and thermal cameras mounted on vehicles, as well as heartbeat detectors and CO2 monitors used to detect signs of people concealed inside vehicles. Greece deploys thermal cameras and sensors along its land border with Turkey, monitoring the feeds from operations centres, such as in Nea Vyssa, near the meeting of the Greek, Turkish and Bulgarian borders. Along the same stretch, in June, Greece deployed a vehicle-mounted sound cannon that blasts “deafening” bursts of up to 162 decibels to force people to turn back. Poland is hoping to emulate Greece in response to the crisis on its border with Belarus. In October, its parliament approved a €350m wall that will stretch along half the border and reach up to 5.5 metres (18 feet), equipped with motion detectors and thermal cameras.

In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.

“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.