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Content Type: Case Study
There are 29.4 million refugees and asylum seekers across the globe today. These are people who have fled their countries due to conflict, violence or persecution seeking protection in safer environments.
People have protected those in need fleeing from dire situations since antiquity. However, over recent years, European countries have become increasingly hostile towards refugees - treating them as criminals instead of people in need.
In 2017, German authorities passed a…
Content Type: Long Read
Commercial interests seem to often overshadow the EU’s stance as a global privacy leader. After looking at Europes's shady funds to border forces in the Sahel area, Niger's new biometric voting system, and attempts to dismantle smugglers networks powered by Europe's gifts of surveillance, freelance journalist Giacomo Zandonini looks at the battle for data protection and digital rights in the continent.
What do a teenage labourer on a marijuana farm in Lesotho, a…
Content Type: News & Analysis
On 24 October 2019, the Swedish government submitted a new draft proposal to give its law enforcement broad hacking powers. On 18 November 2019, the Legal Council (“Lagråd”), an advisory body assessing the constitutionality of laws, approved the draft proposal.
Privacy International believes that even where governments conduct hacking in connection with legitimate activities, such as gathering evidence in a criminal investigation, they may struggle to demonstrate that hacking as…
Content Type: Advocacy
As any data protection lawyer and privacy activist will attest, there’s nothing like a well-designed and enforced data protection law to keep the totalitarian tendencies of modern Big Brother in check.
While the EU’s data protection rules aren’t perfect, they at least provide some limits over how far EU bodies, governments and corporations can go when they decide to spy on people.
This is something the bloc’s border control agency, Frontex, learned recently after coming up with a plan to…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Photo: The European Union
“Border Externalisation”, the transfer of border controls to foreign countries, has in the last few years become the main instrument through which the European Union seeks to stop migratory flows to Europe. Similar to the strategy being implemented under Trump’s administration, it relies on utilising modern technology, training, and equipping authorities in third countries to export the border far beyond its shores.
It is enabled by the adoption…
Content Type: Examples
In February 2019, the UK Home Office told the Independent Chief of Borders and Immigration that it was planning to build a system that could check and confirm an individual's immigration status in real time to outside organisation such as employers, landlords, and health and benefits services. Lawyers and human rights campaigners expressed concerns that the project had received no scrutiny or public discussion, and that the Home Office's record suggested the result would be to unfairly lock…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, the UK Department of Education began collecting data for the schools census, a collection of children's data recorded in the national pupil database and including details such as age, address, and academic achievements. The DfE had collected data on 6 million English children when, in June 2018, opposition led the department to halt the project, which critics said was an attempt to turn schools into internal border checkpoints. In January 2019, however, in an answer to a Parliamentary…
Content Type: Examples
The US Department of Homeland Security awarded a $113 million contract to General Dynamics to carry out the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative (VLVI), a renamed version of the Extreme Vetting Initiative and part of a larger effort called the National Vetting Enterprise. In May 2018, public outrage led the DHS to back away from a machine learning system that would monitor immigrants continuously; however, the reason it gave was that the technology to automate vetting did not yet exist. These…
Content Type: Examples
In October 2018, the answers to a FOIA request filed by the Project on Government Oversight revealed that in June 2018 Amazon pitched its Rekognition facial recognition system to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials as a way to help them target or identify immigrants. Amazon has also marketed Rekognition to police departments, and it is used by officers in Oregon and Florida even though tests have raised questions about its accuracy. Hundreds of Amazon workers protested by writing a…
Content Type: Examples
In November 2018, tests began of the €4.5 million iBorderCtrl project, which saw AI-powered lie detectors installed at airports in Hungary, Latvia, and Greece to question passengers travelling from outside the EU. The AI questioner was set to ask each passenger to confirm their name, age, and date of birth, and then query them about the purpose of their trip and who is paying for it. If the AI believes the person is lying, it is designed to change its tone of voice to become "more skeptical"…
Content Type: Examples
In November 2018, 112 civil liberties, immigrant rights groups, child welfare advocates, and privacy activists wrote a letter to the heads of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security demanding an immediate halt to the HHS Office for Refugee Resettlement's practice of using information given them by detained migrant children to arrest and deport their US-based relatives and other sponsors. The policy began in April 2018, and the result has been that…
Content Type: Examples
In November 2018 the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that asylum seekers have been deterred from seeking medical help in Scotland and Wales since the UK government began forcing the English NHS to charge upfront in 2017 and by fears that medical personnel will comply with Home Office orders to forward their data. The commission, along with health charities and the Labour and LibDem political parties, called for the policy to be suspended. The Home Office policy of moving asylum…
Content Type: Examples
The Home Office Christmas 2018 announcement of the post-Brexit registration scheme for EU citizens resident in the UK included the note that the data applicants supplied might be shared with other public and private organisations "in the UK and overseas". Basing the refusal on Section 31 of the Freedom of Information Act, the Home Office refused to answer The3Million's FOI request for the identity of those organisations. A clause in the Data Protection Act 2018 exempts the Home Office from…
Content Type: Examples
In October 2018, British home secretary Sajid Javid apologised to more than 400 migrants, who included Gurkha soldiers and Afghans who had worked for the British armed forces, who were forced to provide DNA samples when applying to live and work in the UK. DNA samples are sometimes provided by applicants to prove their relationship to someone already in the UK, but are not supposed to be mandatory. An internal review indicated that more people than the initially estimated 449 had received DNA…
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: News & Analysis
Privacy International has joined over 30 organisations working with migrants and refugees to write to the newly appointed British Home Secretary to raise a number of pressing issues, which require action if the immigration and asylum system is to regain the trust of the public.
The letter below was sent to the Home Secretary on Wednesday, 30 July 2019.
Find out more about PI’s work to demand a more humane approach to immigration based on the principles of fairness, accessibility, and respect…
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
Whilst innovation in technology and data processing have provided individuals and communities with new opportunities to exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, this has not come without risks, and these opportunities have not been enjoyed by all equally and freely.
Our relationships and interactions with governments and industry have become increasingly dependent on us providing more and more data and information about ourselves. And, it’s not only the information we provide knowingly…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Increasingly every interaction migrants have within the immigration enforcement framework requires the processing of their personal data. The use of this data and new technologies are today driving a revolution in immigration enforcement which risks undermining people's rights and requires urgent attention.
This is why Privacy International, and several migrant and digital rights organisation, joined a formal complaint filed by the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented…
Content Type: News & Analysis
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency at the centre of carrying out President Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach to immigration enforcement and family separation, has for years been contracting a US surveillance company to intercept peoples’ communications across the United States.
The wide potential scope for the use of the powers raises concerns about their use for the real-time surveillance of people, families, and communities caught up in Trump’s immigration…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Protest movements throughout history have helped to shape the world we know today. From the suffragettes to the civil rights movement, and to contemporary movements such as those focusing on LGBTIQ+ rights, protests have become a vital way for many, who feel powerless otherwise, to have their voices heard.
But now, making the decision to attend a protest comes with consequences that you may very well be unaware of. This is because policing and security services, always hungry in their quest to…
Content Type: News & Analysis
According to the International Organization for Migration, an estimated 258 million people are international migrants – that is, someone who changes their country of usual residence, That’s one in every 30 people on earth.
These unprecedented movements levels show no sign of slowing down. It is predicted that by 2050, there will be 450 million migrants across the world.
Nowadays, it is politically acceptable to demonise migrants, and countless leaders have spewed divisive and xenophobic…
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…