https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-world-s-largest-camera-is-nearly-complete [ ] IEEE.orgIEEE Xplore Digital LibraryIEEE StandardsMore Sites Sign InJoin IEEE The October 2022 issue of IEEE Spectrum is here! Download PDF | Close bar The World's Largest Camera Is Nearly Complete Share FOR THE TECHNOLOGY INSIDER Search: [ ] Explore by topic AerospaceArtificial IntelligenceBiomedicalComputingConsumer ElectronicsEnergyHistory of TechnologyRoboticsSemiconductorsSensors TelecommunicationsTransportation IEEE Spectrum FOR THE TECHNOLOGY INSIDER Topics AerospaceArtificial IntelligenceBiomedicalComputingConsumer ElectronicsEnergyHistory of TechnologyRoboticsSemiconductorsSensors TelecommunicationsTransportation Sections FeaturesNewsOpinionCareersDIYThe Big PictureEngineering Resources More Special ReportsCollectionsExplainersPodcastsVideosNewslettersTop Programming LanguagesRobots Guide For IEEE Members Current IssueMagazine ArchiveThe InstituteTI Archive For IEEE Members Current IssueMagazine ArchiveThe InstituteTI Archive IEEE Spectrum About UsContact UsReprints & PermissionsAdvertising Follow IEEE Spectrum Support IEEE Spectrum IEEE Spectrum is the flagship publication of the IEEE -- the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences. Our articles, podcasts, and infographics inform our readers about developments in technology, engineering, and science. Join IEEE Subscribe About IEEEContact & SupportAccessibilityNondiscrimination PolicyTerms IEEE Privacy Policy (c) Copyright 2022 IEEE -- All rights reserved. A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE websites place cookies on your device to give you the best user experience. By using our websites, you agree to the placement of these cookies. To learn more, read our Privacy Policy. view privacy policy accept & close Enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account Saving articles to read later requires an IEEE Spectrum account The Institute content is only available for members Downloading full PDF issues is exclusive for IEEE Members Access to Spectrum's Digital Edition is exclusive for IEEE Members Following topics is a feature exclusive for IEEE Members Adding your response to an article requires an IEEE Spectrum account Create an account to access more content and features on IEEE Spectrum, including the ability to save articles to read later, download Spectrum Collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. For more exclusive content and features, consider Joining IEEE. Join the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of Spectrum's articles, archives, PDF downloads, and other benefits. Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders -- all free! For full access and benefits, join IEEE as a paying member. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN SensorsTopicTypeNews The World's Largest Camera Is Nearly Complete The future heart of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon make its way to Chile Rahul Rao 4h 3 min read A large black cylinder with a glass lens in front rests on a sturdy white structure in a bright room. The LSST camera, eventually bound for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, sits on its stand in a Bay Area clean room. Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory camerasCCDspaceastronomy The world's largest camera sits within a nondescript industrial building in the hills above San Francisco Bay. If all goes well, this camera will one day fit into the heart of the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. For the last seven years, engineers have been crafting the camera in a clean room at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. In May 2023, if all goes according to plan, the camera will finally fly to its destination, itself currently under construction in the desert highlands of northern Chile. Building a camera as complex as this requires a good deal of patience, testing, and careful engineering. The road to that flight has been long, and there's still some way to go before the end is in sight. --------------------------------------------------------------------- "We're at the stage where we've got all the camera's mechanisms fully assembled," says Hannah Pollek, a staff engineer at SLAC. Any typical camera needs a lens, and this camera is certainly no exception. At 1.57 meters (5 feet) across, this lens is the world's largest, as recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records. When it's installed, it will catch light reflected through a triplet of mirrors, built separately. In action, the telescope will point at a parcel of sky, 3.5 degrees across--in other words, seven times the width of the full moon. The camera will take two exposures, back-to-back, approximately 15 seconds each--bracketed by the sweeping of a colossal shutter. Then, the telescope will move along to the next parcel, and so forth, in a mission to survey the southern sky for years on end. Behind the lens sit the detectors, which are fashioned from charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors, common in astronomy. With the lens cap removed, the detectors are visible as a silver-and-blue grid, the different colors being a consequence of the camera having two different suppliers. Together, they can construct images that are as large as 3.2 gigapixels. A patchwork of blue squares at the back of a large, black cylinder in a bright, white room.The camera's detectors, the silver and blue squares, are seen through its uncapped 1.5-meter-wide lens.Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory To do that repeatedly, those detectors need to be chilled. That's why there's a large bundle of tubing behind the camera. Some of it is for data or power, but most is plumbing for the refrigeration. They help a cryostat cool the detectors to around -100 degC. Those temperatures eliminate much of the noise that the CCDs might otherwise pick up. The detectors aren't the only part of the camera that need to be kept on ice. The camera's back-end electronics generate some 1,100 watts of heat, and cold liquid is pumped through as a counter. This doesn't need a cryostat, but it has given the camera's engineers headaches. Recently, they've had to swap out the fluid they use, necessitating a complete rework of the plumbing. The engineers are still tinkering with the new system. There are a few components that remain to be installed. For astronomers, key to the camera's operation are the filters that will fit over the lens. There are six of them, each coated to only let through specific wavelengths of light (such as ultraviolet or near-infrared). Built in Massachusetts and Provence, France, and shipped to California, they now sit on the floor of the camera's clean room. When they're installed, five of them will sit in a carousel about the camera--the sixth resting in storage, waiting for its turn to be swapped in. In practice, the mechanism takes about 2 minutes to slot a filter in between the lens and the detectors. The filters are delicate glass, so engineers have been testing the system with dummy metal disks of the same weight. After the filters are installed, along with a few final body panels, engineers will swing the camera down to point it at the floor. They'll test its performance in a darkened environment by shuffling around light sources. If building and testing the camera is one saga, then actually getting it to its final destination is an entirely different ordeal. English-language technical instructions have to be rewritten in Spanish for the benefit of local Chilean technicians. The lenses and other glass parts will have to be removed. The camera will have to be mounted within a shipping container and clamped inside special frames, specifically designed to isolate vibrations and keep the camera stable in forces up to 2 gs. Even that system has been tested in a mockup of its special flight--a chartered Boeing 747 cargo plane from San Francisco to Santiago, a direct flight that typically doesn't exist. "We really want to avoid extra trucking in the .US.," says Margaux Lopez, a staff engineer at SLAC. "It just makes more sense to put our camera on a chartered plane with all of the rest of the stuff in the clean room. We have an incredible amount of support equipment that also needs to go down." If all goes well with the last phase of construction, this camera will soon depart California for Chile and catch its first glimpse of the night sky by 2024. From Your Site Articles * Nobel Goes to Boyle and Smith for CCD Camera Chip - IEEE ... > * DIY Exoplanet Detector - IEEE Spectrum > * Seeing Stars With Digital Eyes - IEEE Spectrum > Related Articles Around the Web * Rubin Observatory | Opening a digital window for discovery of the ... > * A 3.2 Billion Pixel Camera Takes A Picture Of Broccoli : NPR > camerasCCDspaceastronomy {"imageShortcodeIds":[]} Rahul Rao The Conversation (0) ai hand and human hand touching pointer fingers Artificial IntelligenceTopicTypeInterview Lab Revisits the Task of Putting Common Sense in AI 9h 5 min read A mounted and running showerhead that says oasense and has a blue light on it. Consumer ElectronicsTopicTypeSensorsCareersProfile This Idea Wasn't All Wet: The Sensing Water-Saving Showerhead Debuts 02 Oct 2022 4 min read illustration of hand holding megaphone with different bubbles of computer widgets Artificial IntelligenceTopicTypeNews Can AI's Recommendations Be Less Insidious? 02 Oct 2022 5 min read Related Stories AerospaceTopicNewsType MOXIE Shows How to Make Oxygen on Mars AerospaceTopicNewsType U.N. Kills Any Plans to Use Mercury as a Rocket Propellant Artificial IntelligenceTopicTypeComputingSensorsNews Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Video While Mining It for Data SensorsTopicTypeFeature Europe Expands Virtual Borders To Thwart Migrants Our investigation reveals that Europe is turning to remote sensing to detect seafaring migrants so African countries can pull them back Lucas Laursen 04 Feb 2022 14 min read A photo of a number of people sitting in a inflatable boat on the water with a patrol ship in the background. Migrants in a dinghy accompanied by a Frontex vessel at the village of Skala Sikaminias, on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey, on 28 February 2020. ASSOCIATED PRESS It was after midnight in the Maltese search-and-rescue zone of the Mediterranean when a rubber boat originating from Libya carrying dozens of migrants encountered a hulking cargo ship from Madeira and a European military aircraft. The ship's captain stopped the engines, and the aircraft flashed its lights at the rubber boat. But neither the ship nor the aircraft came to the rescue. Instead, Maltese authorities told the ship's captain to wait for vessels from Malta to pick up the migrants. By the time those boats arrived, three migrants had drowned trying to swim to the idle ship. The private, Malta-based vessels picked up the survivors, steamed about 237 kilometers south, and handed over the migrants to authorities in Libya, which was and is in the midst of a civil war, rather than return to Malta, 160 km away. Five more migrants died on the southward journey. By delivering the migrants there, the masters of the Maltese vessels, and perhaps the European rescue authorities involved, may have violated the international law of the sea, which requires ship masters to return people they rescue to a safe port. Instead, migrants returned to Libya over the last decade have reported enslavement, physical abuse, extortion, and murders while they try to cross the Mediterranean. If it were legal to deliver rescued migrants to Libya, it would be as cheap as sending rescue boats a few extra kilometers south instead of east. But over the last few years, Europe's maritime military patrols have conducted fewer and fewer sea rescue operations, while adding crewed and uncrewed aerial patrols and investing in remote-sensing technology to create expanded virtual borders to stop migrants before they get near a physical border. An illustration of a map of Africa with a magnified section showing the Mediterranean between Malta and Libya. "The main reason is because the E.U. wants to step away from having proactive naval operations," says international relations researcher Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, in Norway. Physical encounters with migrants involve at least two forms of legal jeopardy that European countries are trying to avoid: an obligation to rescue seafarers and, once they are on land, an obligation to evaluate any seafarers' claims of asylum. In the last five years, Europe has bestowed massive new regulatory and spending power on the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, known as Frontex, which has in turn issued contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros to major engineering firms for remote border-control hardware, software, and know-how. Europe's research initiatives, treaties, and contracts reveal an interest in peering across the Mediterranean into North African countries and dissuading or preventing migration at its point of origin. Meanwhile, legal scholars and civil-society groups are asking whether a hands-off border can really keep Europe's hands clean. Francesco Topputo, an aerospace engineering professor at Milan Polytechnic, Italy, who has worked on satellite-based surveillance research, says that the fate of migrants detected by his system isn't up to him: "I would say that it's not the decision of the technicians, of the engineers...it's our job to give the information to the authorities. It is a problem of the entire society." A trickle of migrants and a flood of money Mediterranean migration hit international headlines in 2015 when the Syrian civil war helped drive up numbers to around 1 million people. But that was an unusual year. The U.N.'s International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports 225,455 arrivals in 2014, and by 2019, numbers were below 125,000. Irregular immigrants, whose movement "takes place outside the regulatory norms of the sending, transit, and receiving country," according to the IOM, represent around 5 percent of the European Union's total annual immigration of 2.7 million people. In other words, it's a small fraction of legal migration, which in turn is an even smaller fraction of Europe's overall population of around 447 million people. Europe's 125,000 irregular immigrants in 2019 also number fewer per capita than irregular immigrants to the United States, which has just three quarters the population of the European Union yet reported more than 1 million irregular immigrants at its borders in 2019. Meanwhile, the European Union spends at least EUR2 billion (US $2.13 billion) a year internally on managing migration, not counting national-level spending. In 2015, under pressure to address migration from Syria's civil war, European leaders failed to build a working redistribution of asylum seekers, but they did set in motion a legal framework for a newly empowered European border agency. At that time Frontex had an annual budget of EUR142 million (US $156 million) and acted as a kind of liaison network between national border agencies. But the post-2015 rules ballooned its budget. By 2020, when Frontex had gained a more independent legal status as an agency of the European Union, its budget had more than tripled to EUR450 million and was scheduled to climb another 20.6 percent to EUR543 million in 2021. Now, Frontex is refocusing its resources from shipboard patrols to aerial and remote sensing, according to its requests for orientation on the latest technology. The cost of shifting from rescue operations to border enforcement may be harder journeys for migrants and the deaths of some. One migrant with no money In early 2017, in the forest highlands of eastern Guinea, a man I'll call Jacob began a journey that would take him across five Saharan countries and multiple failed sea crossings. He first set out from home after his father died, to look for work in Mali, he says. Mali was a conflict zone, so he moved on to Algeria, but he lacked a work permit, and employers would underpay him or fail to pay him altogether. The police hassled him and other migrant workers. The workers created informal networks and shared information about where they could get work and how to avoid the police. Following those tips, Jacob worked his way across the desert, sometimes accepting loans from employers or traffickers that turned him into a modern indentured servant. Meantime, the E.U. was slowly changing its hodgepodge of barriers to keep out Jacob and hundreds of thousands of other migrants. When the 2015 migration surge to Europe began, Spain employed one of the most technologically advanced border-control systems in Europe: the Integrated External Vigilance System, or SIVE (the Spanish acronym). Migrants in those years faced a multisensor gauntlet, involving radar and infrared cameras on towers, aboard ships, and on ground vehicles, that sought to centralize situational awareness by combining as much of that data as possible in a control center in Algeciras, in Spain. If a boat following a smuggler's route reflected a radar ping back to one of these sensors, and an officer of one of Spain's national police forces, the Guardia Civil, happened to be watching the screen, Spain could send a ship to intercept the boat. The Guardia Civil credits SIVE with nudging a larger share of Mediterranean migration to the central and eastern routes. The popularity of other routes, such as to Italy's Lampedusa Island, 140 km from Tunis, and to Greece, some of whose islands are within sight of Turkish beaches, grew. Disparities in border technology and the adaptability of migrants and their traffickers are among the reasons Europe decided to convert Frontex into a full agency and triple its budget and staff: "Frontex seeks to create cross-border collaboration in a situation which might otherwise result in a spending arms race on border control between E.U. Member States," says geographer Dan Fisher of the University of Glasgow, who has published on SIVE. Following Spain's SIVE experience, in 2011 Frontex invited industry partners to demonstrate tethered surveillance balloons and now uses them in at least two locations to detect migrants who manage to get past its aerial and space-borne sensors. The present model of balloons can remain several hundred meters up in the air for up to 40 days, providing a persistent visual, infrared, and radar sensing capability across an area of around 11,310 square kilometers. But that's a tool of last resort, capable of monitoring people who are already on or near European land. First, migrants must cross the Mediterranean, which is dangerous. Jacob, like many Mediterranean migrants, made multiple attempts from several African countries to reach different European countries. He had limited information about the best way to Europe, but the traffickers who had captured him adapt all the time to changing border security situations. They, in turn, take advantage to coerce people like Jacob into working for them. "When I got to Libya, I didn't have money," Jacob says. "The traffickers who got me said, 'Here you have to pay for your jail, then you pay for your journey.' I told them, 'I don't have money, I have a mother who doesn't work, I'm just a farmer, not a worker for a ministry or government.'" EU pushed migrants back until courts intervened While migrants and traffickers fight over the cost of their crossings, European entities have fought over how to stop migrant crossings. For more than a decade, European courts have documented and declared illegal routine European state border agency actions that include navy vessels pushing migrant boats back into international waters and abandoning them there. In response to those rulings, European governments shifted tactics but not their goal: They began funding Libya and other North African governments through migration control and security pacts. Then European governments and Frontex began investing in tools to detect migrant boats before they reached European waters and calling the Libyan coast guard to pull back migrant boats. After the 2015 border crisis and in the wake of court rulings against European countries' "pushback" policies, Frontex, its sister agency the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), and national border agencies invested in large, long-range drones to monitor slices of the Mediterranean, alongside crewed aircraft. The E.U., through its main research funding program, also began calling on academia to help it make sense of all the new border data. For example, researchers at the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) in Thessaloniki, Greece, won grants as part of a consortia to fuse video data from uncrewed aerial vehicles, ground robots, and sea drones and use machine-vision software to flag likely items of interest, as seen in this demo video: The systems send alerts to a dashboard accessible on a computer by border staff. The video system is similar to the security cameras that consumers install on their doorbells or in their homes to detect motion, but with a more sophisticated algorithm designed to detect migration and other illegal activity. "The previous state of the art was that users had one pilot per drone. Our longer-term goal is to move toward operators managing several UxVs [uncrewed vehicles]," says Athanasios Kapoutsis, an ITI engineering researcher. One of the ways they will do that is by simplifying information from each data feed to prevent overwhelming the user. Rather than display raw footage from a camera or radar, or a dashboard with pages and pages of information, consortia members built an augmented-reality display that might suggest, for example, an 80 percent probability of a particular object being a boat. The group conducted its first real-world tests of the system's ability to detect ships and humans in 2021. Border authorities are also experimenting with using migrants' electromagnetic signatures as tracking tools. It's feasible because traffickers often hand a satellite phone to migrants and tell them to call for help once they are in international or European waters. Satellite phones emit signals that are detectable from space: In 2019, Frontex issued a contract for satellite-phone-detection services. Hawkeye 360, which also markets its service to the shipping industry and security services in countries such as the United States, was the only bidder and won the contract. Photo of two people in masks sitting in front of screens on a dashboard aboard a patrol aircraft.Crew members of the Royal Danish Air Force inspecting computer screens on board a Frontex aircraft, during a press day in December 2021. Sipa USA via AP In 2021, Hawkeye 360's satellite network offered downloads of their detection data a few times a day, using two clusters of three satellites. Now Hawkeye 360 is on track to have 30 satellites in orbit by early 2023, the company says. Frontex officials must have considered the technology promising, because in 2020 they issued another public tender for a new satellite-radio-detection contract. If the technology matures as fast as Hawkeye 360 predicts, border agencies might soon be capable of detecting satellite-phone-carrying migrant boats on a near-hourly basis, long before the boats leave the search-and-rescue zones of North African countries, without needing to keep aloft a fleet of aircraft or drones or sifting through hours of video feeds. Social scientist Ozgun Topak of York University, in Toronto, Canada, calls the shift to remote detection of migrants and cooperation with origin countries an adaptation strategy by European authorities that helps them comply with court orders and laws but continues to shift responsibility to other countries. In other words, European agencies are treating their direct contact with migrants as the problem, instead of treating the migrants' precarious situations at sea or in North Africa as the problem. The tech is there to rescue Europe from the migrants, not the migrants from the sea. What the tech is up against Jacob says he spent somewhere between three and four years trying to migrate from Guinea to Spain. He eventually found work for someone Jacob describes as "connected to traffickers." "There are people who work for the traffickers for a year or so," he says, to pay their way across. One day, Jacob's contact told him it was his turn to try crossing. But getting in a boat isn't the same as getting across. The sea is hard, Jacob says, the boats insecure. The ones he used were made of a plastic that couldn't endure many hours of exposure to seawater or the gasoline splashed on it by the rickety motor. The weather would change. "People panic from one minute to the next, the boat can have a problem, and then the Moroccan police can catch you at sea and take you back," he recalls. On one of those failed journeys, Moroccan police accused Jacob of being a trafficker himself, perhaps because when they asked for someone to help drive the boat back to shore, he agreed. The judge jailed him and couple of the others, then the police dropped them off in a different inland town. Caught, cuffed Two men handcuffed together in a police vehicle. Two men caught by Moroccan police after a failed crossing to Spain. Migrants say the police drove them far inland to delay subsequent attempts. Courtesy "Jacob" Resting on a long journey A group of people dressed for the cold rest against a border wall. Migrants rest on the Algerian-Moroccan border. Courtesy "Jacob" First by land, then by sea A group of people ride in an open cargo area of a truck in a sandy desert. Migrants often travel great distances overland before they board a boat to cross the Mediterranean Sea, exposing themselves to dangerous human traffickers and extreme heat. Courtesy "Jacob" If his boat had managed to reach international waters and called for help, passing merchant vessels might have taken its passengers, as they have hundreds of other migrants, and then called authorities for guidance on where to deliver them. That is the goal of most migrant boats: Their owners do not equip the boats for success in a full crossing. Passengers are lucky if they can carry more than their ID and mobile phones. The boats often have just enough fuel to get away from the North African coast but not enough to reach Europe. Some people--not Jacob--also have reasonable grounds for requesting asylum in a safe country. International law protects those people, but if North African authorities capture them first, those people cannot ask European countries for asylum. Pushing the border toward your neighbors That may be why the E.U. funds a bevy of projects that aim to stop people from reaching international or European waters. The most cutting-edge involve looking past Europe's borders. The European Space Agency has pitched using satellite imagery to look for migrant activity before people cross borders, Frontex uses aircraft overflying international portions of the Mediterranean for "early-warning" of potential crossers into European waters, and a since-canceled Frontex tender mentioned a "Pre-warning Mechanism" and forecasting irregular migration using social media. In other words, the border agency wants to see the future on the other side of its borders. Just as the United States pressured Mexico to crack down on its border with Central American countries, Europe's real goal may be to predict, detect, and prevent irregular migration from North Africa long before would-be migrants ever leave the shores of Tripoli, Libya's capital. For example, one E.U.-funded research project published the results of using Google search data to predict international migration. Another set of E.U.-funded projects seek not only to understand perceptions of the E.U. by potential migrants, but also to reach across the border and change those perceptions. They might not need to. Migrants, including Jacob, give their compatriots back home a clear-eyed perspective: "I tell people who want to cross that it's very dangerous...it's not easy like people imagine it in Morocco," Jacob says. Civil-society groups have argued that the European practice of calling North African countries to pick up remotely detected migrant boats sidesteps the law of the sea and the right to request asylum ( here and here). The present E.U. strategy may satisfy the narrow orders resulting from pushback-related court rulings in the early 2010s, but a raft of new cases may reshape Europe's border policies all over again. In 2019, human rights lawyers took a case against the E.U. to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, in the Netherlands, which most often addresses war crimes. That case is a long shot, says international law scholar David Fernandez Rojo of the University of Deusto, in Bilbao, Spain, but it or similar cases could create a more open record of misbehavior and put moral pressure on the E.U. in response to its policies and actions. For example, in May 2021 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported multiple instances in which Frontex had shared surveillance information with Libyan authorities so that Libyan coast guards could pull migrant boats back to unsafe ports. While the office of the commissioner has limited power to act on its findings, it did recommend that the E.U. stop disembarking migrants in Libya and noted that Europe has an "obligation...to prevent mistreatment by third parties, including private actors or other States operating within their jurisdiction or effective control." Citizen sousveillance While the main players in Europe's border surveillance and enforcement are large companies and government agencies, it is easier than ever for armchair detectives to find and report on bad border behavior. One tool, called Alarm Phone, is an alliance between migrants and a civil-society group that invites embarked migrants to call or send messages requesting rescue during their sea crossings. The group then alerts maritime rescue authorities and the public, to hold the authorities responsible. Civil-society groups are also turning to public data to police Europe's border police. In late 2020 Bellingcat, an investigative group, used public ship and air tracking data together with videos from migrants to accuse Frontex of participating in illegal pushbacks led by the Greek coastguard. Another group, called Space-Eye, developed tools to detect migrant boats in publicly available satellite imagery. It claims to have corroborated at least one pushback using satellite data. "If it wasn't for civil society using technology you wouldn't be hearing about this," says David Hammond, founder and trustee of Human Rights at Sea, a civil-society organization in Havant, United Kingdom. Disparities in border technology and the adaptability of migrants and their traffickers are among the reasons Europe decided to convert Frontex into a full agency and triple its budget and staff. Academic researchers had been nibbling at satellite-powered migrant boat detection for years. Growing amounts of data and processing power mean that now even dilettante data scientists can write blog posts ( here and here) about coding your own boat-detection software. But ability isn't the same as responsibility: At least one of those data scientists was competing in a public contest funded by Airbus, a major border-technology provider. "When you deal with people and satellites, it's always a problem because it's a thin line between helping and surveillance," says remote sensing researcher Ursa Kanjir at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Ljubljana, Slovenia, who published an Acta Astronautica paper on the possibility of using Sentinel-2 satellite data for rescuing migrant boats. It's too early to tell whether sousveillance, or watching the authorities from below, will work in favor of migrants' human rights or against them. But civil-society accusations of pushbacks have provoked scrutiny from several European oversight organizations: Europe's antifraud office in January 2021 began investigating Frontex for its alleged participation in pushbacks, among other things. In June 2021 the European Ombudsman reported that Frontex had not implemented its recommendations on dealing with human rights complaints and recommended the agency provide more transparency in its interactions with civil-society groups. In July 2021 a European Parliament working group concluded that it lacked enough evidence to accuse Frontex of violating human rights, despite acknowledging the Bellingcat and other reports. It did say, however, that Frontex "did not prevent [European member state] violations, nor reduced the risk of future fundamental violations." The series of investigations may have contributed to the European Parliament's decision in October 2021 to withhold 12% of Frontex's 2022 budget. Tech postpones or relocates border confrontations The border technology arms race isn't a race to solve the causes of migration. Like any wall, it can only force potential migrants to think harder about how to get across and raise the stakes of failure. While European authorities have invested tens of millions of euros to make it harder for citizens to see how their border patrols push back against migration, whistle-blowing participants, disgruntled neighbors, errors, or mere contempt for international rule of law will reveal what even the most sophisticated technology might hide for a time. Even if the destination countries detect them along the way, those migrants have rights enshrined in laws set by the destination countries that entitle them to rescue at sea and to apply for asylum in a safe country. Outbursts of violence, economic precarity, and perhaps even climate change will motivate migrants despite the technological barriers. "The border policy is just a policy to bother migrants, but it will never stop them," Jacob says. He says he would have preferred to work in a North African country than migrate all the way to Spain, but those countries' unwillingness to offer legal residency to West Africans and their police brutality made it too dangerous to stay. One friend died after a fall--or being thrown--from a police station's upper floor in Algeria, he says. Now his lack of legal residency in Spain hobbles his earning power and prevents him from visiting home, but it is not as dangerous as it was in North Africa. Still, he is isolated from his family: His mother and brother have poor mobile connectivity, so he only has intermittent contact with them. "I don't know when I'll see my mother and brother. That's one of the hardest things now," Jacob says. Having migrated through six countries and survived more attempted sea crossings than he can remember, Jacob says migrating to yet another country probably won't improve his lot. "I don't want my whole life to be running. I've run what I can run, from my country, crossing the sea. The day I'm tired I'll return to my country." By then, thousands of other young people will have begun the same journey. Even if the destination countries detect them along the way, those migrants have rights enshrined in laws set by the destination countries that entitle them to rescue at sea and to apply for asylum in a safe country. Technology won't change that, says Hammond, the human rights worker. Instead, he says, finding the right balance between the safety of migrants and the safety of the countries to which they want to travel, "has got to be dealt with at a geopolitical level." Editor's note: Article was updated on 14 February 2022 to more precisely describe ITI's research project. From Your Site Articles * New AI Estimates the Size of Remote Refugee Camps Using ... > * US Virtual Fence Likely To Become A Virtual Project - IEEE Spectrum > Related Articles Around the Web * Border Security Doesn't Make Europe Safer. It Breeds Instability. > * Frontex | European Union Agency > Keep Reading |Show less {"imageShortcodeIds":["29177566"]}