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Content type: Examples
13th August 2019
In 2018, repossession services in the US were experiencing a boom in business as the number of Americans failing to keep up with their car payments reached its highest point since 2012. One of these, Ohio-based Relentless Recovery, was increasing its hit rate by equipping its agents' vehicles with cameras to help it build a database of every license plate in the state along with the locations where the vehicles may be easily found. Repo agents collect most of the billions of license plate scans…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
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
12th August 2019
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
26th August 2020
A new report by the UN Working Group on mercenaries analyses the impact of the use of private military and security services in immigration and border management on the rights of migrants, and highlights the responsibilities of private actors in human rights abuses as well as lack of oversight and, ultimately, of accountability of the system.
Governments worldwide have prioritised an approach to immigration that criminalises the act of migration and focuses on security.
Today, borders are not…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
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
12th August 2019
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
12th August 2019
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
12th August 2019
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
12th August 2019
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
12th August 2019
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
12th June 2020
Taking advantage of the pandemic to close US borders, the Trump administration is also spreading coronavirus infection by deporting detainees to receiving countries such as Guatemala, where 20% of infections are deportees. Guatemala has only two hospitals and a scattering of smaller regional medical facilities to serve its population of 18 million people. As of April 2020, 5,000 Guatemalans were being held in detention in the US, and every week the Department of Homeland Security was sending…
Content type: Explainer
12th August 2020
In the name of reinforcing migration control and increasing security, the EU is introducing a host of new surveillance measures aimed at short-term visitors to the Schengen area. New tools and technologies being introduced as part of the visa application process and the incoming “travel authorisation” requirement include automated profiling systems, a ‘pre-crime’ watchlist, and the automated cross-checking of numerous national, European and international databases. There are significant risks…
Content type: Explainer
24th May 2020
Social media platforms are a vast trove of information about individuals, including their personal preferences, political and religious views, physical and mental health and the identity of their friends and families.
Social media monitoring, or social media intelligence (also defined as SOCMINT), refers to the techniques and technologies that allow the monitoring and gathering of information on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter which provides valuable intelligence to others…
Content type: Long Read
28th January 2020
It was a quiet evening in Agadez, a bustling Saharan city in the centre of Niger. Thirty-five year old Agali Ahmed was sipping tea at a friend’s place, as he often did, when he received a message: police were at his uncle’s house. When he got there, Ahmed saw men in plainclothes, standing around the building’s gate. Inside, more men were searching the apartment. Three white men, who Ahmed guessed were Spanish, asked for his phone and started taking pictures of him. They told him to follow them…
Content type: News & Analysis
2nd April 2020
Amid calls from international organisations and civil society urging for measures to protect the migrant populations in Greece and elsewhere, last week, the European Commission submitted a draft proposal to amend the general budget 2020 in order to, among other measures, provide assistance to Greece in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Both at the Turkish-Greek border and in the camps on the Greek islands, there are severe concerns not only about the dire situation in which these people…
Content type: Advocacy
15th April 2020
To the Members of the European Parliament and to the Committee on Budgets of the European Parliament
The EU urgently needs to step up and provide assistance to protect the health and safety of people trapped in camps on the Greek islands - not just to protect their welfare, but to contain the virus itself as a matter of global public health.
However, as we detail in the briefing below, the current European Commission proposal for funds allocation is insufficient to ensure the safety of…
Content type: Long Read
18th September 2019
Photo: Francesco Bellina
Driven by the need to never again allow organised mass murder of the type inflicted during the Second World War, the European Union has brought its citizens unprecedented levels of peace underpinned by fundamental rights and freedoms.
It plays an instrumental role in protecting people’s privacy around the world; its data protection regulation sets the bar globally, while its courts have been at the forefront of challenges to unlawful government surveillance practices…
Content type: Explainer
23rd October 2017
What is SOCMINT?
Social media intelligence (SOCMINT) refers to the techniques and technologies that allow companies or governments to monitor social media networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook or Twitter.
SOCMINT includes monitoring of content, such as messages or images posted, and other data, which is generated when someone uses a social media networking site. This information involves person-to-person, person-to-group, group-to-group, and includes interactions that are private and…
Content type: Examples
14th September 2020
Human rights experts have accused the home secretary, Priti Patel, of ignoring legal guidance in an attempt to target child asylum seekers who cannot prove they are under 18.
A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Observer, reveals that the government is putting pressure on social workers to speed up the age assessment of unaccompanied minors, and offering to bankroll councils that face legal challenges as a result. The move comes as new evidence shows that hundreds of people were deported…
Content type: Advocacy
7th May 2020
Privacy International responded to the call for submissions of the Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the rights of peoples to self-determination on role of private military and security companies in immigration and border management and the impact on the protection of the rights of all migrants.
This submission builds on PI’s research and reporting highlighting examples of the involvement of private companies in…
Content type: Advocacy
17th June 2020
Privacy International (PI), Fundaciòn Datos Protegidos, Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D) and Statewatch responded to the call for submission of the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, xenophobia and related intolerance on how digital technologies deployed in the context of border enforcement and administration reproduce, reinforce, and compound racial discrimination.
This submission provides information on specific digital technologies in service of border…
Content type: News & Analysis
18th September 2019
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 of ad hoc funds, like…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
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: Long Read
20th January 2020
The European Union (EU) spends billions on research and development aimed at driving economic growth and jobs, as well as furthering the bloc’s broader agenda. Within the current budget, known as Horizon 2020 and covering the years 2014-2020, some €80 billion has been made available for research in a huge number of areas, ranging from finding cures for diseases to helping keep the earth viable for life.
From the same budget, it also funds a lot of projects aimed at developing surveillance…
Content type: Examples
24th July 2020
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement service announced in July that the State Department will not issue visas to students whose universities shift to online-only learning and they must leave the country or face deportation. More than 1 million higher education students in the US come from overseas, though enrollment has been declining since 2016, and the move is a blow to university budgets. Eight percent are planning to operate online-only, 60% are planning for in-person instruction, and…
Content type: News & Analysis
24th May 2019
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 crackdown,…
Content type: Examples
13th August 2019
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
27th August 2019
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
12th August 2019
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 had…
Content type: News & Analysis
17th August 2020
In the last few weeks, the UK government has announced various new measures to ensure that crossings across the Channel were “inviable” including by appointing a new role of “clandestine Channel threat commander" and further plans to deploy the navy to stop migrants from crossing to the UK from France across the Channel. Premature plans it seems, as not only would such measures be contrary to the UK’s international obligations to allow individuals to seek asylum in the UK, but also since such…