Matthias Leese

The new profiling: Algorithms, black boxes, and the failure of anti-discriminatory safeguards in the European Union

This article argues that with increasingly large databases and computational power, profiling as a key part of security governance is experiencing major changes. Targeting mobile populations in order to enact security via controlling and sifting the good from the bad, profiling techniques accumulate and process personal data. However, as advanced algorithmic analytics enable authorities to make sense of unprecedented amounts of information and derive patterns in a data-driven fashion, the procedures that bring risk into being increasingly differ from those of traditional profiling. While several scholars have dealt with the consequences of black-boxed and invisible algorithmic analytics in terms of privacy and data protection, this article engages the effects of knowledge-generating algorithms on anti-discriminatory safeguards. Using the European-level efforts for the establishment of a Passenger Name Record (PNR) system as an example, and on the theoretical level connecting distinct modes of profiling with Foucauldian thought on governing, the article finds that with pattern-based categorizations in data-driven profiling, safeguards such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union or the EU data-protection framework essentially lose their applicability, leading to a diminishing role of the tools of the anti-discrimination framework.

Exploring the Security/Facilitation Nexus: Foucault at the ‘Smart’ Border

This article critically engages the ongoing efforts of establishing a Registered Traveller Programme (RTP), as part of the Smart Borders Package, at the EU level. As the RTP seeks to flexibilise border management through the notions of risk and trustworthiness, the article suggests that a Foucauldian account of biopolitics can serve as a capable analytical tool. A biopolitical approach conceptualises the RTPs aims of business facilitation and border protection not as contradictory concepts, but rather as mutually constitutive and reinforcing elements. Thus, it helps to understand the current efforts to render the border “smart” in an attempt to govern security and the economy under a common framework—a framework, however, that commands critical investigation when it comes to the applied sorting mechanisms at the border.

‘We were taken by surprise’: body scanners, technology adjustment, and the eradication of failure

This paper analyzes how body scanners were implemented at German airports in 2014 after failing a preliminary trial run in 2010–2011. The paper retraces how this initial failure became possible. It highlights the different ways of framing failure at both the political level and by experts and stakeholders from aviation security and the security industry. In both cases, although with reference to different claims (numbers and operational capacity on the one hand; surprise and privacy issues on the other hand), failure was conceived of as a dynamic and contingent process that did not necessarily demarcate the end of the line for body scanners. The diagnosis of failure as a non-terminal and preliminary state speaks to wider findings in critical security studies that highlight the role of technology as a self-referential driver within security politics, and the vested (economic) interests in the development and marketization of security technologies.

Governing airport security between the market and the public good

Airport security is increasingly governed in liberal ways, allowing for flexibilized and marketized ways of outsourcing and contracting service provisions to the private sector. This article draws on expert interviews from the aviation sector, finding that liberal security governance at German airports enables public bodies not only to cut costs through competitive tendering practices, but also to re-locate accountability for security provision to private companies. The role of the public sector subsequently becomes one of managerialism and audits. However, there is a considerable downside to the promises of market regulation, putting severe hardships on the private security workforce and potentially undermining the quality of service provision. Thus, this article ultimately claims that public bodies should choose not to marketize security, as the value of security itself could be substantially undermined by neoliberal logics.

Privacy and Security – On the Evolution of a European Conflict

Privacy and security have long been framed as incommensurable concepts that had to be traded off against each other. While such a notion is rather under-complex, it has been quite persistent. In recent years, however, the relation has undergone a transformation and is now apparently conceived of as a technological issue that is set to be resolved through privacy by design. This paper retraces, through an analysis of EU security research funding, how this shift has come about, and critically assesses its potential to eventually resolve the conflict between privacy and security in a world of data-driven security measures.

Standardizing security: the business case politics of borders

Abstract This paper discusses the role of standards and standardization in the regulation of security and mobility through the EU’s Mandate M/487 and biometric Automated Border Control (ABC) systems. It argues that the choice for facial recognition as the standard biometric modality was largely pre-configured through the inertia of sedimented infrastructures, and that the restructuring of the EU external borders in the case of ABC therefore to a certain extent lacks political agency. Instead, standardization here follows an approach of business case politics that forecloses alternative solutions, and notably becomes productive of specific types of accelerated mobilities.

Holding the Project Accountable: Research Governance, Ethics, and Democracy

This paper seeks to address research governance by highlighting the notion of public accountability as a complementary tool for the establishment of an ethical resonance space for emerging technologies. Public accountability can render development and design process of emerging technologies transparent through practices of holding those in charge of research accountable for their actions, thereby fostering ethical engagement with their potential negative consequences or side-effects. Through practices such as parliamentary questions, audits, and open letters emerging technologies could be effectively rendered transparent and opened up to broader levels of scrutiny and debate, thereby contributing to a greater adherence of emerging technologies to ethics and moral consensus. Fundamental democratic practices could thus not only lead to better informed choices in design and development processes, but also contribute to more morally substantive outcomes.

The new mobilities paradigm and critical security studies: exploring common ground

The rapid expansion of academic research on mobilities is evident in disciplines such as geography, sociology, performance studies, media studies, history, and literary studies, but how inter- or m...

Prevention, knowledge, justice: Robert Nozick and counterterrorism

ABSTRACT This article explores questions of justice and moral permissibility of state action in counterterrorism through Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Using the case of the Berlin attack in December of 2016 and the ensuing political debate over whether potential terrorists could be put into preventive custody as an illustrative example, it engages Nozick’s argument on prevention, knowledge and justice. In Nozick’s fierce defence of individual rights, the state comes into being as an aggregate of individuals and their inviolable rights, and thus possesses no moral legitimacy of its own. Individual rights must therefore not be violated for the sake of common goods. In conjunction with his emphasis on free will and the ensuing unpredictability of human decision-making, the article highlights the Nozickian position as a powerful account against the justification of preventive custody, thereby providing a moral “fail-safe” in counterterrorism discourses that build on just war theory and utilitarianism.