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Content type: News & Analysis
A new industry is offering border agencies around the world access to advanced space-based surveillance capabilities once reserved for the most advanced intelligence agencies. Using satellites able to track signals from satellite phones and other emitters, these companies are then selling access to the data obtained to anyone willing to pay, including UK and EU border agencies.
While such surveillance can and is being used to save lives, it can also be used for illegal ‘pull backs’ in…
Content type: Explainer
An array of digital technologies are being deployed in the context of border enforcement. Satellite and aerial surveillance are part of the surveillance toolkit and yet, they are also used by organisations seeking to hold government actions to account and improve efficacy of their own work. To effectively critique state use and delve into potential benefits of satellite and aerial surveillance, we must first understand it.
In this explainer we dig into a technology which many are aware of for…
Content type: Examples
Health officials in Lebanon had indicated that all residents in Lebanon there would be equal access to the Covid-19 vaccine programme, regardless of nationality. However data is indicating a higher number of Syrian and Palestinian refugees either not registering or receiving the vaccine, and so a low percentage of these groups are being vaccinated compared to rates of Lebanese nationals.
Human Rights Watch reported that this low numbers signalled “a lack of awareness around the process and a…
Content type: Explainer
The UK Home Office provides basic subsistence support to people who are in the process of applying for asylum, as well as to those whose applications have been refused and are appealing their cases, in the form of an ‘Aspen Card’ - basically it’s a debit payment card, which can be used in any shop that accepts VISA debit payments. At the time of writing the programme is managed by corporate giant corporate giant Sodexo, but the administration of the payment system is soon going to go to a new…
Content type: Report
Privacy International has released a report summarising the result of its research into the databases and surveillance tools used by authorities across the UK’s borders, immigration, and citizenship system.
The report uses procurement, contractual, and other open-source data and aims to inform the work of civil society organisations and increase understanding of a vast yet highly opaque system upon which millions of people rely.
It also describes and maps…