Accessibility statement

Decisions at the data border

Project overview

The ‘smart’ data analysis techniques that have become increasingly important to international border controls are altering the way in which border decisions are made. Passenger data from airline tickets and travel documents is automatically run against watchlists of known terrorists and criminals. Increasingly, data is also used to flag up as-yet-unknown passengers via algorithmic matches with data profiles or patterns of suspicious activity.

Public discussion about the use of passenger data at borders has consistently framed the problem as one of surveillance. Yet the turn to data makes possible future-oriented, preemptive security calculations which exceed conventional understandings of surveillance and which challenge trdaitional ideas about the border. Decisions at the Data Border investigates how border security decisions work in practice – how data and discretion interact within decisions about risk.

The project examines the daily procedures of the data border, with a critical focus on the use of discretion by security practitioners. Data might give the illusion that authoritative distinctions between safe and threatening passengers are already present in the data, but this hides the suspension of ‘the decision’ (with its ethical difficulties) within automated practices of algorithmic sorting. This project proceeds on the understanding that we cannot grasp how contemporary security practice is changing at the border without examining the way in which data intelligence and embodied discretionary practices intersect in decisions to target threat.

Decisions at the Data Border is funded by the British Academy and is run by Dr Alex Hall‎