Karolina Follis

Responsibility, Emergency, Blame: Reporting on Migrant Deaths on the Mediterranean in the Council of Europe

In 2011, at least 1500 migrants perished in the Mediterranean en route to Europe. In one notable case, 63 of 72 passengers on a refugee dinghy died in the course of a 2-week drift. Despite communicating distress, they were left to die by passing military vessels and maritime authorities. This article analyzes the inquiry into this case conducted within the Council of Europe as a revealing instance of international human rights supervision. Through a focus on the practice of human rights reporting in instances of multiple institutional and moral failures, it shows how the rapporteur arrived at a politically acceptable account of who was responsible for the boats tragedy. Distinguishing between the concepts of responsibility as duty and responsibility as guilt, the article considers the implications of privileging the former over the latter. It argues for a human rights practice that embraces a robust notion of responsibility that combines both.

Tracking and Targeting: Sociotechnologies of (In)security

This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical examination of contemporary developments in sociotechnical systems deployed in the name of security. Our focus is on technologies of tracking, with their claims to enable the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force. Taking these claims as deeply problematic, we join a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, infrastructures, and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. We examine the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of (in)security; their deadly and injurious effects; and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations.

Vision and transterritory : the borders of Europe

This essay is about the role of visual surveillance technologies in the policing of the external borders of the European Union (EU). Based on an analysis of documents published by EU institutions and independent organizations, I argue that these technological innovations fundamentally alter the nature of national borders. I discuss how new technologies of vision are deployed to transcend the physical limits of territories. In the last twenty years, EU member states and institutions have increasingly relied on various forms of remote tracking, including the use of drones for the purposes of monitoring frontier zones. In combination with other facets of the EU border management regime (such as transnational databases and biometrics), these technologies coalesce into a system of governance that has enabled intervention into neighboring territories and territorial waters of other states to track and target migrants for interception in the “prefrontier.” For jurisdictional reasons, this practice effectively precludes the enforcement of legal human rights obligations, which European states might otherwise have with regard to these persons. This article argues that this technologically mediated expansion of vision has become a key feature of post–cold war governance of borders in Europe. The concept of transterritory is proposed to capture its effects.

It Bends But Would It Break? Topological Analysis of BGP Infrastructures in Europe

The Internet is often thought to be a model of resilience, due to a decentralised, organically-grown architecture. This paper puts this perception into perspective through the results of a security analysis of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing infrastructure. BGP is a fundamental Internet protocol and its intrinsic fragilities have been highlighted extensively in the literature. A seldom studied aspect is how robust the BGP infrastructure actually is as a result of nearly three decades of perpetual growth. Although global black-outs seem unlikely, local security events raise growing concerns on the robustness of the backbone. In order to better protect this critical infrastructure, it is crucial to understand its topology in the context of the weaknesses of BGP and to identify possible security scenarios. Firstly, we establish a comprehensive threat model that classifies main attack vectors, including but non limited to BGP vulnerabilities. We then construct maps of the European BGP backbone based on publicly available routing data. We analyse the topology of the backbone and establish several disruption scenarios that highlight the possible consequences of different types of attacks, for different attack capabilities. We also discuss existing mitigation and recovery strategies, and we propose improvements to enhance the robustness and resilience of the backbone. To our knowledge, this study is the first to combine a comprehensive threat analysis of BGP infrastructures withadvanced network topology considerations. We find that the BGP infrastructure is at higher risk than already understood, due to topologies that remain vulnerable to certain targeted attacks as a result of organic deployment over the years. Significant parts of the system are still uncharted territory, which warrants further investigation in this direction.

On the role of latent design conditions in cyber-physical systems security

As cyber-physical systems (CPS) become prevalent in everyday life, it is critical to understand the factors that may impact the security of such systems. In this paper, we present insights from an initial study of historical security incidents to analyse such factors for a particular class of CPS: industrial control systems (ICS). Our study challenges the usual tendency to blame human fallibility or resort to simple explanations for what are often complex issues that lead to a security incident. We highlight that (i) perception errors are key in such incidents (ii) latent design conditions -- e.g., improper specifications of a systems borders and capabilities -- play a fundamental role in shaping perceptions, leading to security issues. Such design-time considerations are particularly critical for ICS, the life-cycle of which is usually measured in decades. Based on this analysis, we discuss how key characteristics of future smart CPS in such industrial settings can pose further challenges with regards to tackling latent design flaws.