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In this article, we explore the security politics of EU database interoperability, inquiring how knowledge infrastructures underpin European security integration. Sitting at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and critical approaches to European security, we unpack the co-constitutive relation between database anxieties and interoperability mechanisms. By database anxieties, we refer to what European institutions identify as the main epistemic and operational concerns that emerge from the current use of databases by security authorities across Europe. These anxieties are expected to be resolved by mechanisms that foster interoperability. We argue that the relation between database anxieties and interoperability mechanisms shapes the novel conditions of possibility for European security integration in a datafied world. While far-reaching in technological terms, interoperability is not about introducing a new overarching system, but about the management, re-organisation and re-purposing of datasets. Such formatting matters politically because it eventually informs sovereign acts of policing and mobility control.

The notion of digital sovereignty, also often referred to as technological sovereignty, has been gaining momentum in the European Union’s (EU) political and policy discourses over recent years. Digital sovereignty has come to supplement an already substantial engagement of the EU with the digital across various security policy domains. The goal of this article and of the overall Special Issue is to explore how the discourse and practices of digital sovereignty redefine European security integration. Our core argument is that digital sovereignty has both direct and indirect implications for European security as the EU attempts to develop and control digital infrastructures (sovereignty over the digital), as well as the use of digital tools for European security governance (sovereignty through the digital). It is thus essential to further explore digital sovereignty both in terms of European policies and of a re-articulation of sovereign power and digital technologies – what we suggest calling digital/sovereignty.

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Questions about how algorithms contribute to (in)security are under discussion across international political sociology. Building upon and adding to these debates, our collective discussion foregrounds questions about algorithmic violence. We argue that it is important to examine how algorithmic systems feed (into) specific forms of violence, and how they justify violent actions or redefine what forms of violence are deemed legitimate. Bringing together different disciplinary and conceptual vantage points, this collective discussion opens a conversation about algorithmic violence focusing both on its specific instances and on the challenges that arise in conceptualizing and studying it. Overall, the discussion converges on three areas of concern—the violence undergirding the creation and feeding of data infrastructures; the translation processes at play in the use of computer/machine vision across diverse security practices; and the institutional governing of algorithmic violence, especially its organization, limitation, and legitimation. Our two-fold aim is to show the potential of a cross-disciplinary conversation and to move toward an interactional research agenda. While our approaches diverge, they also enrich each other. Ultimately, we highlight the critical purchase of studying the role of algorithmic violence in the fabric of the international through a situated analysis of algorithmic systems as part of complex, and often messy, practices.Les questions concernant la manière dont les algorithmes affectent l’(in)sécurité deviennent de plus en plus courantes en sociologie politique internationale. Notre discussion collective s'appuie sur ces débats et les enrichit en abordant les questions portant sur la violence algorithmique. Nous soutenons qu'il est important d'analyser et de discuter de la manière dont les systèmes algorithmiques alimentent (et entretiennent) des formes spécifiques de violence, ainsi que de la façon dont ils justifient des actes violents ou redéfinissent les formes de violence jugées légitimes. Cette discussion collective réunit différents points de vue disciplinaires et conceptuels pour ouvrir un débat sur la violence algorithmique en se concentrant à la fois sur des exemples spécifiques et sur les défis à relever pour la conceptualiser et l’étudier. Cette discussion se concentre sur trois sujets de préoccupation : la violence qui sous-tend la création et l'alimentation des infrastructures de données, les processus de conversion en jeu dans l'utilisation de la vision informatique/machine à travers diverses pratiques de sécurité, et la gouvernance institutionnelle de la violence algorithmique, en particulier son organisation, sa limitation et sa légitimation. Notre double objectif est de montrer le potentiel d'une discussion interdisciplinaire et d'avancer vers un programme de recherche interactionnel. Bien que nos approches divergent, elles s'enrichissent mutuellement. Notre but est de mettre en évidence les possibilités analytiques ouvertes par l'étude de la violence algorithmique et de son role dans la fabrique des relations internationales, par le biais d'une étude des systèmes algorithmiques dans le cadre de pratiques complexes et désordonnées.Las preguntas acerca de cómo afectan los algoritmos a la (in)seguridad son cada vez más comunes en la Sociología Política Internacional. A fin de construir y sumar a estos debates, nuestro Debate Colectivo pone en primer plano las preguntas sobre la violencia algorítmica. Sostenemos que es importante abrir el debate acerca de cómo los sistemas algorítmicos alimentan (en) formas específicas de violencia, cómo justifican las acciones violentas o redefinen qué formas de violencia se consideran legítimas. A partir de la reunión de diferentes puntos de vista disciplinarios y conceptuales, este Debate Colectivo abre una conversación sobre la violencia algorítmica centrándose tanto en sus instancias específicas como en los desafíos de su conceptualización y estudio. En general, el debate converge en tres áreas de interés: la violencia que sustenta la creación y alimentación de las infraestructuras de datos, los procesos de traducción en juego en la utilización de la visión de la computadora/máquina a través de diversas prácticas de seguridad y el gobierno institucional de la violencia algorítmica, especialmente su organización, limitación y legitimación. Nuestro doble objetivo es mostrar el potencial de una conversación interdisciplinaria y avanzar hacia una agenda de investigación interactiva. Si bien nuestros abordajes divergen, se enriquecen mutuamente. Finalmente, destacamos la adquisición fundamental del estudio de las funciones de la violencia algorítmica en el tejido de lo internacional a través de un análisis situado de los sistemas algorítmicos como parte de prácticas complejas y, a menudo, desordenadas.

In Europe today, digital platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, provide essential means for millions of people to express themselves, engage in public debate, and organise politically (Poell & van Dijck, 2018). Crucially, governments are leveraging the power of platforms to impose new forms of restrictions on free expression, and engage in surveillance of individuals and online activism. This has profound implications for the rights to freedom of expression, privacy, and data protection. Further, platforms that once refused to cooperate with governments in identifying users responsible for disseminating allegedly illegal or harmful content are now expanding cooperation with authorities, including sharing data about users flagged by law enforcement and other authorities. As civil society organisations warn, this trend is contributing to ‘invasive and unlawful digital surveillance’ (Amnesty International, 2019, p. 24). This paper examines how European governments are leveraging the power of digital platforms to engage in government surveillance online, and assesses the compatibility of these measures with European human rights law. The paper applies a unique interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together law, political communication and surveillance studies. First, the paper examines how platforms’ algorithmic systems shape (and limit) information dissemination. The paper then critically analyses government-platform initiatives that exist to surveil citizens and gather information, including new measures under the EU’s proposed Digital Services Act. Third, it assesses how these measures comply with freedom of expression and the right to privacy, and concludes with recommendations on remedying problematic elements of the role platforms play in digitisation of government surveillance.

This article contributes to debates on algorithmic regulation by focusing on the domain of security. It develops an infrastructural perspective, by analyzing how algorithmic regulation is enacted through the custom-built transatlantic data infrastructures of the EU-U.S. Passenger Name Records and Terrorism Financing Tracking Program programs. Concerning regulation through algorithms, this approach analyzes how specific, commercial data are rendered transferable and meaningful in a security context. Concerning the regulation of algorithms, an infrastructural perspective examines how public values like privacy and accountability are built into international data infrastructures. The creation of data infrastructures affects existing modes of governance and fosters novel power relations among public and private actors. We highlight emergent modes of standard setting, thus enriching Yeung's (2018) taxonomy, and question the practical effects of operationalizing public values through infrastructural choices. Ultimately, the article offers a critical reading of algorithmic security, and how it materially, legally, and politically supports specific ways of doing security.

Many actors mobilize the cognitive, legal and technical tool-box of data protection when they discuss and address controversial issues such as digital mass surveillance. Yet, critical approaches to the digital only barely explore the politics of data protection in relation to data-driven governance. Building on governmentality studies and Actor-Network-Theory, this article analyses the potential and limits of using data protection to critique the ‘digital age’. Using the conceptual tool of dispositifs, it sketches an analytics of data protection and the emergence of its configuration as ‘data protection by design and by default’. This exploration reminds us that governing through data implies, first and foremost, governing digital data.

Making sense of digital security practice requires grasping how data are put to use to compose the governing of individuals. Data need to be understood in their becoming, and in their becomingsomethingacross diverse practices. To do this, we suggest embracing two conceptual tropes that jointly articulate the being together of, and in, data compositions:compostingandcomputing. With composting, we approach data as lively entities, and we explore the decaying and recycling processes inside Big Data security. With computing, we approach data as embodied and embodying elements, and we unpack the surveillance of ‘asylum speakers’. Together, composting and computing challenge recurrent images of data. Our conceptual composition takes sound as a necessary sensory counterpoint to popular data visions, notably in light of Ryoji Ikeda's artworks.

What does it mean to study security from a critical perspective? This question continues to haunt critical security studies. Conversations about normative stances, political engagement, and the role of critique are mainstays of the discipline. This article argues that these conversations tend to revolve around a too disembodied image of research, where the everyday practice of researchers is sidelined. But researchers do do research: they work materially, socially, and cognitively. They mediate between various feedback loops or fields of critique. In doing so, they actively build and exercise critique. Recognizing that fact, this article resists growing suggestions to abandon critique by, first, returning to the practice of critique through the notion of companionship. This permits us to reinvigorate our attention to the objects, persons, and phenomena through which critique gains inspiration and purpose, and that literally accompany our relationship to critique. Second, we explore what happens when our companions disagree, when critique faces controversies and (a) symmetries. Here, we support research designs of tracing credibility and establishing symmetries in order to move away from critique as denouncing positions we disagree with. Third, we discuss the relation between companionship, critique, reflexivity, and style. Here, the rhetorical practices of critical inquiry are laid out, and possibilities for its articulation in different and less silencing voices are proposed.

Chapter 1 introduces the approach taken by the authors in trying to understand the relationship between surveillance and democracy in contemporary society. It explains how a “participatory lens” is used to highlight how we as individuals in society participate in surveillance practices, and how these are shaped by vested interests, stakeholders and institutions. The participatory lens is used to analyse the consequences of harms and controversies caused by surveillance practices, and in particular those practices mediated by new technologies, to assess how participatory mechanisms shape surveillance and inform democratic practice. Chapter 1 sets out the structure of the book, its origins, related research and the three core surveillance-oriented case studies examined, namely: Automatic Number Plate Recognition, credit scoring and Neighbourhood Watch. The underlying question posed by this book is whether democracy, and the participatory practices it embodies, can enact the limits of surveillance.

This chapter outlines the experiences of attempting to exercise one’s right of access in Norway. Using rich, ethnographic examples, this chapter tests how easy or difficult it is for a data subject based in Norway to obtain their personal data, firstly by locating the required information about organisations and their data controllers and secondly by submitting subject access requests to these organisations. The chapter reflects on the differences (if any) between public and private sector organisations in the process of responding to access requests. It also considers the potential for having submitted complaints to the national Data Protection Authority in Norway about the conduct of organisations when researchers submitted access requests to them.

The EUROSUR system is supposed to further the surveillance of external borders of European Union Member States. From this point of view, it can be considered an important step in the construction of a controlled space. Drawing inspiration from the Foucauldian attention to programs and technologies, and mobilizing the Actor-Network-Theory concepts of setting and actant, the paper investigates EUROSUR main methodological operations. It highlights how the making of a controlled space is, first and foremost, a mise-en-discours going well beyond surveillance and prohibition: a continuous effort to make sense of a disparate multiplicity, encompassing both human and nonhuman elements, both controlled and controlling ones. From a theoretical perspective, the chapter contributes to on-going endeavors to reinvigorate the post-structuralist studies of International Relations with approaches inspired by Actor-Network-Theory.

Moving away from the traditional framing of surveillance in terms of in/visibility, this article proposes a conceptual journey that investigates the potential of the notions of dis-appearance and ob-scene as alternative theoretical tools. In particular, it explores how these different perspectives can help bringing politics back into the study and the critique of surveillance.Visibility is structurally linked to invisibility, and together they configure the different modes of in/visibility allowing for the very functioning of surveillance. However, the in/visibility dyad rather than merely describe surveillance contributes to its operations and stabilisation. In order to better understand and unpack surveillance it is thus necessary to tackle its practices not only in search of who watches whom, or what, but also by studying what is concealed through in/visibility, through both hiding and exposing, and what is left out of the scene (or being pushed away) in these processes.In a dialogue with surveillance and critical security studies, this contribution examines the disappearance of bodies in the deployment of security scanners and post-Snowden developments to illustrate the productivity of dis-appearance and the emergence of surveillance’s ob-scene. Against this background, the paper argues that through the lens of the ob-scene it is possible to grasp surveillance’s ripples, and open up their political discussion.

This report presents the policy implications of introducing a decision support tool to assist security forces in countering terrorist threats in urban environments in Europe.