Abstract
The deployment of advanced ICTs and biometry in mass-surveillance and border control is part of the securitization agenda that emerged in the early 2000s. This agenda has been particularly instrumental in cultivating migration anxieties and framing the problem of threat as an imperative to identify those who are dangerous to public safety. As well founded as that may be, it masks the pivotal role ICTs have in the supervision and administration of industries and markets. ICTs, including biometrics, are essential to supervise all four freedoms of movement in European market integration, i.e., of goods, services, capital and persons. They are essential to the EU-US trade and investment relationship which is increasingly underpinned by cross-border data flows, and the most significant such relationship globally. Drawing on mobilities research, this chapter explores how the mobilities of materials, commodities, markets and labour are simultaneously constrained and facilitated in transnational development, including the obligation in Europe to protect the fifth freedom of movement, that of data. While a recent European regulation aims to better protect personal data in these flows, the narratives of threat and emergency call for immediate action, whereby any data that can be intercepted can also be gathered for investigative purposes on the basis of exceptional circumstance. The securitization agenda finds its practical utility in the hands of executive powers who are largely avoiding the legislature and the judiciary. There is no evidence that authorities catch terrorists and criminals because of advanced ICTs and biometry in border control and data intercept. The practical utility lies in the ability to target and investigate any individual and a whole range of political opposition and activism which has very little if anything to do with threat and emergency. Publics have no meaningful defence apart from self-censorship. They have no meaningful way of objecting to exceptional circumstances in which illiberal practices are legitimized, and neither does the legislature and the judiciary unless the checks on executive powers are adequately reined in.
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Notes
- 1.
The Schengen agreement designates a border-less geographical area within Europe with border controls for travelers crossing the Schengen frontier borders but, ideally, not the internal borders.
- 2.
US President Obama speaking to both houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom, 25 May 2011.
- 3.
Crossing patrolled borders between Norway and Denmark soon after the conflict with the Islamic State began, also illustrates some of the complications faced within Schengen when EEA citizens get involved in conflicts.
- 4.
The title of the GDPR also states that it is a regulation “on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data” (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679&from=EN).
- 5.
It can be argued that data clustering by types anonymizes data, i.e., the data controller is not interested any one person’s official identity, only that such and such a person is of such and such a type. This is debatable however, since the goal is typically to be able to intercept types of persons via email, web browsing, phone messaging or old fashioned mail, all of which is ultimately traceable back to actual individuals.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (The United Nations 1948) states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. However, widespread self-censorship is a well-known phenomenon, notably in recent US history during the McCarthy era and in recent European history east of the Iron Curtain.
- 9.
An issue repeatedly foregrounded during the ICTethics expert workshop on “Human Security in the context of Ambient Intelligence”, Nov 2010, Leeds, UK (http://neicts.lancs.ac.uk/workshops.htm#workshop3).
- 10.
As this is written, the GDPR has just entered into force after years of preparations and thousands of amendments, of which many were intended to better safeguard business models, economic and innovation competitiveness. Provisions will apply in all EU member states from 25 May 2018.
- 11.
Debates that really shake the core assumptions on which the economy rests, first-world leadership, innovation, security, etc., are held in small ways, involving whistleblowers, critics and disillusioned members of established institutions who find voice on minor media outlets, typically referred to as left wing or ‘too’ radical to be on par with mainstream communication, e.g., Democracynow! (http://democracynow.org), Counterpunch.(http://www.counterpunch.org/) and New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/).
- 12.
There are many attempts over the past decade to back-track on executive powers, e.g., in summer 2015, a disquiet in the UK parliament over the lack of transparency regarding the reach of executive powers, including the GCHQ, without the checks and balances of a three-tiered government. The US Patriot Acts have also been revisited, the US surveillance law, the legality of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and much more.
- 13.
In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the big industry players in ICTs are publishing on this, e.g., IBM on regulatory affairs and Microsoft on public policy agendas, and there has been a gradual shift in recent years toward seeing privacy sensitivity as a resource for profitable innovation, e.g., in selling to prospective customers privacy-by-design and protection-by-design products and services.
- 14.
Arrangements like that between government agencies and private enterprise are indicated in the Snowden revelations. Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Skype were implicated in the PRISM programme (NSA) and the UK GCHQ accessing data on persons through that programme, thereby circumventing legal procedures.
- 15.
See also interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (9 June 2013), in which Snowden elaborates one of his key arguments that publics need to be consulted and somehow involved in decisions on the extent to which personal data handling is publicly acceptable, in particular, in light of the self-censoring going on. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video (visited Aug 2016).
- 16.
It is of some curiosity that US citizens have a constitutional right to armed defence of their person and property but no such right to defence of their informational person and property.
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Gunnarsdóttir, K. (2016). The Fifth Freedom and the Burden of Executive Power. In: Delgado, A. (eds) Technoscience and Citizenship: Ethics and Governance in the Digital Society. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32414-2_6
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