The EU is increasingly experimenting with “high-risk technologies for migration management” in the surveillance of the Schengen external borders. This is what the researcher Petra Molnar, who works at Mozilla, laments with her team in a report published on Monday about “technological test beds” in the border area for the civil rights organization European Digital Rights (EDRi).

“Your computers hate us too” Much of the developments in this sector take place without adequate democratic control and do not take into account the very real ones The consequences of techniques for human rights and lives, writes Molnar. The study is based on over 40 conversations with refugees. A young man from Eritrea, who finds his way through Brussels without a residence permit, sums up the situation as follows: “We are black and the border police hates us. Their computers hate us too.”

According to the analysis, many countries in Europe see national borders as a laboratory in which they research techniques for general monitoring of population groups, for algorithmic decision-making and for data mining. The spectrum ranges from drones that patrol over the Mediterranean, to big data projects that are supposed to predict human flows, to automated detection through immigration applications.

However, these high-risk technological experiments intensified Molnar complains that systematic racism as well as discrimination could lead to considerable damage within an already arbitrary system. There are currently very few legal requirements for the use of frontier technologies. Because of this laissez-faire approach and the increasing dependence of state institutions on the private sector, the humanitarian consequences “on the sharp edges of this technological development” fell by the wayside.

Dramatic Effects The violent use of control techniques pushes borders ever further into the foreground and contributes to a policy of their “externalization and militarization”. This leads to dramatic effects such as “drowning in the Mediterranean” and illegal pushbacks, for example by the EU agency Frontex to Libya or Turkey. In any case, an independent humanitarian impact assessment, the recognition of power imbalances between the two sides and more transparency are necessary.

According to the study, the EU is not alone with such practices. On the border between the USA and Mexico, for example, people are being “brutally” imprisoned and children are being separated from their families, which makes big data service providers like Palantir easier. However, the EU has “clear national and international obligations to respect human rights”, which are threatened by migration control technologies.

Regrettably, the perspectives of communities with lived migration experience from the debate about the use of such If applications are excluded, the authors complain. People on the run who were already on the brink of society ended up being guinea pigs for such high-risk technological experiments. According to EDRi, the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Discrimination and Xenophobia comes to a similar conclusion in a separate report that will be presented on Tuesday.

Criticism of Germany The Schengen evaluation group of the EU Council of Ministers is now criticizing Germany, which sees itself as a kind of model boy at border controls, for its inability to cooperate. Germany should accelerate the introduction of mobile devices such as smartphones in order to facilitate access to relevant national and international databases for police officers, according to the confidential document heise online from mid-October.

The interface between The inspectors demanded that the various systems for case management and criminal case processing used by the federal and state police authorities and the joint network files accessible across the country must be improved. This is the only way for local investigators to better comply with international requests for police cooperation and better correlate inquiries received through various channels. Relevant bilateral mutual legal assistance agreements with, for example, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands should be continued or adapted.

The EU experts recommend that the establishment of a police information and analysis network should also be stepped up. This could strengthen the “forward-looking joint national risk analysis capacity”, “which is conducive to an efficient response to cross-border crime with the full involvement of all relevant law enforcement authorities”. The advice goes to the Federal Criminal Police Office to rely more on “paperless solutions” and thus to simplify data processing. Germany should also raise awareness among the national security authorities of EU databases such as the Visa Information System or the biometric asylum seekers file Eurodac and also highlight the potential added value of the Interpol search file.

With the recommendations of the Schengen Left member of the Bundestag Andrej Hunko argues that a joint search portal for federal and state police forces should be expanded to include other databases. At the same time 2000 other German authorities would be connected to the Schengen information system. Instead of constantly expanding the monitoring options, misuse of the databases must be prevented through a proactive procedure with logging and purpose specifications.

(mho)