Invasive, automated surveillance systems to be introduced within refugee camps in Greece
Mostafa, 18, arrived in Greece a year and a half ago fleeing Iran, where his family had been living after their village in Afghanistan was attacked by the Taliban. Not being able to study or find a decent job, he first arrived at Moria camp with his family in the wake of a terrifying five-hour boat journey at night.
After fires broke out in the camp in September of last year, Mostafa said they were moved with the other 13,000 refugees to Kara Tepe camp. Life there is restricted, “boring, and being here for a long time causes us to lose our hope,” he said.
Refugees, such as Mostafa, must also deal with another issue that weighs on their mental health – surveillance.
Refugees inside and outside the camps in Greece report being heavily monitored – cameras, random checks, heavy police vigilance, drones and the collection and sharing of their data among governments. Greek authorities have recently announced a plan to introduce even more invasive and automated surveillance systems within the camps.
Mostafa says there are cameras everywhere and that “everything is under control of [the] police.” He is allowed to leave the camp only once a week, for three hours, to buy groceries.
Mina, a 22-year-old Afghan refugee, said police checked their phones and collected their data once she and other refugees arrived in Lesbos in October, 2019. However, she said, she wasn’t informed at any point about the purpose and destination of the data. Several European countries, including Greece, have expanded laws to allow for the extraction of refugee phone data in recent years – without people’s permission.
According to Petra Molnar, associate director at York University’s Refugee Law Lab, who visited refugee camps in Lesbos last year, the use of intense surveillance “strengthens that link between migrants as people who bring diseases and all of that, and bodies who must be managed, surveilled and kept under control.
“There’s this intersection that [the camps] are trying to make between using the pandemic as an excuse to roll out further surveillance.”
Marcus Michaelsen, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, who is researching digital surveillance and repression, agreed. “One possible effect of the pandemic is that governments across the world are ramping up their technological capacities to monitor and track COVID infections or enforce lockdown rules,” he said, adding that no one knows how all this data will be used afterward.
“The technical infrastructures put in place during the pandemic can easily be used for other purposes, to track dissidents, uncover civil-society networks, etc. Even in Europe, we have seen that police in different countries have accessed the data that restaurants and other businesses collected for contact tracing for completely different purposes,” Dr. Michaelsen said.
By next summer, Greek police will start using new “smart devices” that employ facial-recognition and fingerprint technology, sharing the data with national and European databases. This increases concern among human-rights organizations about personal information being shared between countries, without owners’ consent.
Dr. Molnar worries that contact-tracing mobile apps and other “biosurveillance” methods will soon be required for refugees crossing all EU borders, becoming what she calls “tools of oppression.”
Kian Vesteinsson, research analyst at Freedom House, explains that “enhanced surveillance over public and private speech could allow government officials to deny people entry to a country based on their political, social, or religious views, or that of their family.”
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