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Content type: Examples
The UK's Home Office is expanding its contract with the Portuguese company Tekever, which has supplied live-streamed drone footage captured by a combination of radar, video, and infrafred imagery through a £1 billion contract since 2020; this contract is now being extended to monitor large stretches of the English Channel in new ways. The UK is just one of many countries that see drones as a "game-changer" in patrolling borders and trapping human smugglers. The global drone market is expected…
Content type: Report
Privacy International’s submissions for the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration inspection of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service Programme
The Home Office have introduced 24/7 electronic monitoring and collection of the location data of migrants via GPS ankle tags. This seismic change cannot be overstated. The use of GPS tags and intention to use location data, kept for six years after the tag is removed, in immigration decision-making goes far beyond the mere…
Content type: Examples
Sidestepping the need to obtain a search warrant, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been accessing smartphone location data by buying it from private marketing that typically embed tracker in apps. This data, which maps the movement of millions of cellphones in America, was collected from ordinary cellphone apps, to which users gave access to their location. In this particular instance, it was used by the DHS to search for undocumented immigrants according to the Wall Street…
Content type: Long Read
Tucked away in a discrete side street in Hungary’s capital, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training (CEPOL) has since 2006 operated as an official EU agency responsible for developing, implementing, and coordinating training for law enforcement officials from across EU and non-EU countries.
Providing training to some 29,000 officials in 2018 alone, it has seen its budget rocket from €5 million in 2006 to over €9.3 million in 2019, and offers courses in everything from…
Content type: Long Read
The European Union (EU) is the world’s largest donor of development aid, an instrumental supporter of democracies and peace around the world, and a powerful global force for reigning-in big tech and other exploitative industries.
But since the 2015 migration crisis and with populist anti-immigration parties in power across the Union, it has focused this immensely powerful influence abroad squarely on managing flows of migration: using its economic, diplomatic, and security might to…
Content type: Examples
Up to 30 charities and organisations have written to home secretary Priti Patel calling for a number of amendments on Tuesday - a year exactly until the scheme ends.
Under current arrangements, EU citizens have been told to apply by June if they wish to continue living and working in Britain.The letter said: “We are concerned that the government has not taken appropriate steps or made the adequate adjustments to the EUSS necessary to protect EU citizens and family members from Covid-19. We…
Content type: Examples
On March 14 a group of immigrant advocacy groups wrote to the government asking for the Home Office to release all 1,500 to 2,000 detainees in order to protect them from a coronavirus outbreak in the UK's seven removal centres and two short-term holding centres.. On March 21, the Home Office said it had released 300 of the detainees. The charity Detention Action launched a legal action to compel the Home Office to release the most vulnerable detainees and test all detainees. The Home Office…
Content type: Examples
Under a new protocol, international passengers arriving at Lime's Jorge Chavez International Airport or by ship at Callao Port, is referred to medical staff if they are arriving from places with confirmed cases, even if they are asymptomatic. Passengers who show symptoms in transit are transferred to isolation areas, where they receive care. The passengers are also required to supply personal information so they can be surveilled over the following days.
Source: https://andina.pe/ingles/…
Content type: Examples
A 17-year-old Palestinian resident of Lebanon, Ismail B. Ajjawi, was deported shortly after he arrived at Boston Airport, where he was due to start attending Harvard University the following week.
Immigration officers subjected him to hours of questioning — at one point leaving to search his phone and computer — according to a written statement by Ajjawi. According to the student, his visa was revoked because of content posted by some social media contacts.
The student alleges that…
Content type: Examples
In December 2018, Florida citizen Peter Sean Brown filed a federal lawsuit against the Monroe County Sheriff's offices for arresting and detaining him for three weeks claiming he was an illegal alien from Jamaica. Even though Brown offered to show the sheriff his birth certificate and explained he had been wrongfully detained 20 years before and the jail's own records listed his birthplace as Philadelphia, PA, the sheriff relied on a form sent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Brown…
Content type: Examples
In December 2018, in the wake of the Windrush scandal, the National Police Council, which represents police chiefs across England and Wales agreed to cease passing on to deportation authorities information about people suspected of being in the country illegally. The measures also ban officers from checking the police national computer solely to check on immigration status. Police said they believed that their too-close relationship with immigration authorities in aid of the government's "…
Content type: Examples
In a report released in December 2018, the UK's National Audit Office examined the management of information and immigrant casework at the Home Office that led to the refusal of services, detention, and removal of Commonwealth citizens who came to the UK and were granted indefinite leave to remain between 1948 and 1973, the so-called "Windrush generation" but never given documentation to prove their status. The NAO concludes that the Home Office failed to adequately consider its duty of care in…
Content type: Examples
In November 2018 reports emerged that immigrants heading north from Central America to the US border are more and more often ensuring they are accompanied by children because "family units" are known to be less likely to be deported, at least temporarily, and smugglers charge less than half as much when a minor is in the group because their risk is less. Some parents have given their children - sometimes for cash - to other adults such as a relative, godparent, or, sometimes, unrelated person.…
Content type: Examples
In November 2018, researchers at Sweden's University of Lund, the US's Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the UK's Oxford University announced that in August the US State Department had begun using a software program they had designed that uses AI to find the best match for a refugee's needs, including access to jobs, medical facilities, schools, and nearby migrants who speak the same language. Known as "Annie MOORE", refugees matched by the program were finding jobs within 90 days about a…
Content type: Examples
In 2017, US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that it would seek to use artificial intelligence to automatically evaluate the probability of a prospective immigrant “becoming a positively contributing member of society.” In a letter to acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke, a group of 54 concerned computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and researchers objected to ICE’s proposal and demanded that ICE abandon this approach because it would be…
Content type: Examples
US Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) used social media monitoring to track groups and people in New York City associated with public events opposing the Trump administration’s policies, including ones related to immigration and gun control. The investigative branch of ICE created and circulated a spreadsheet, entitled ‘Anti-Trump Protest Spreadsheet 07/31/2018,” that provided details of events planned between July 31, 2018, and August 17, 2018. The spreadsheet pulled data from…
Content type: Examples
The US government created a database of more than 50 journalists and immigrant rights advocates, many of whom were American citizens, associated with the journey of migrants travelling from Central America to the Mexico-US border in late 2018. Officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had access to this database. This list allowed the…
Content type: Examples
A private intelligence company, LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, used social media to monitor more than 600 “Family Separation Day Protests” held across the United States on June 30, 2018, to oppose the Trump administration’s policy family separation policy. The policy was part of a “zero tolerance” approach to deter asylum seekers from coming to the United States by separating children from their parents. After collecting information about these protests through Facebook, including the precise…
Content type: Long Read
Cellebrite, a surveillance firm marketing itself as the “global leader in digital intelligence”, is marketing its digital extraction devices at a new target: authorities interrogating people seeking asylum.
Israel-based Cellebrite, a subsidiary of Japan’s Sun Corporation, markets forensic tools which empower authorities to bypass passwords on digital devices, allowing them to download, analyse, and visualise data.
Its products are in wide use across the world: a 2019 marketing…
Content type: Long Read
As calls for a ‘secure southern border’ are amplified in the US by politicians and pundits, Silicon Valley techies are coming out in force to proffer swanky digital solutions in the place of 30-foot steel slats or concrete blocks.
One such company is Anduril Industries, named after a sword in Lord of the Rings, which represents a symbol of hidden power.
Over recent months, Anduril Industries frontman Palmer Luckey has been making the PR rounds to promote his company’s version of a border wall…
Content type: Examples
In September 2018 the UK's Information Commissioner found that it was likely that during 2017 a number of migrant rough sleepers were reported to the Home Office enforcement teams by the homelessness charity St. Mungo's. The finding followed a complaint from the Public Interest Law Unit. The charity claimed it passed on these details when people wanted to return home. The Home Office halted its policy of deporting migrant rough sleepers in December 2017 and the government was to pay hundreds of…
Content type: Long Read
Update 28 June 2018
Last week Privacy International wrote to Thomson Reuters Corporation asking the company to commit to ensuring the vast amounts of data they provide to US immigration agencies isn’t used to identify families for indefinite detention or separation, or for other human rights abuses.
Thomson Reuters has unfortunately ignored our specific questions and made no such commitment.
Instead, the CEO Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS) a subsidiary, makes clear that instead of…
Content type: Long Read
Image: Eric Jones
The UK government last week hosted hundreds of surveillance companies as it continues to try and identify “technology-based solutions” able to reconcile the need for controls at the Irish border with the need to avoid them.
The annual showcase conference of 'Security and Policing' brings together some of the most advanced security equipment with government agencies from around the world. It is off limits to the public and media.
This year’s event came as EU and UK…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, IBM began testing its i2 Enterprise Insight Analysis software to see if it could pick out terrorists, distinguish genuine refugees from imposters carrying fake passports, and perhaps predict bomb attacks. Using a scoring system based on several data sources and a hypothetical scenario, IBM tested the system on a fictional list of passport-carrying refugees. The score is meant to act as a single piece of data to flag individuals for further scrutiny using additional…
Content type: Report
The US does not have a general overarching privacy law like European Data Directive or the sweeping privacy protections contained in the European declarations of rights. The EU-US accord cites several laws, which it claims, give privacy rights to non-US persons. None of the cited laws offer any real substantive or procedural protections for Europeans. As explained below, the one law – the Privacy Act 5 U.S.C 552a – that could offer some modest protections is tellingly not even mentioned.
But…
Content type: Report
This is a memo prepared by Barry Steinhardt of Friends of Privacy USA for Members of the European Parliament regarding the proposed EU-US Agreement PNR.
The proposed agreement regarding Passenger Name Records (PNR) between the United States and the European Union is riddled with faulty assertions and assumptions about US law and the actual operations of the US government.
These faulty assertions and assumptions go to the heart of the agreement and undercut the claims of protections for…
Content type: Report
Race relations across European states are usually far from ideal. However in law, European countries appear to grant Europeans ideal protections against discrimination. There are mounting tensions with ethnic and minority communities in countless European countries, with particular suspicion and aggression pointed towards the Roma people, Travellers, Northern Africans, Turks, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people of Islamic and other faiths. Increasingly these groups are finding safe havens behind…