Hello, welcome everybody to this second evening it is. I'm happy to have Christo and Giovanna here. It's kind of a continuation. We have been doing that for now the fourth year is it in row looking into social justice issues and we have two speakers and in the end we will have then a discussion which we might not do the full one and a half hours but keep it probably at about 45 minutes to an hour that we also have enough time to go over to the night line at Stadtwegstadt because this one starts at 9.30. And I'm going to give you a quick introduction of our two speakers today. Oh, my notes disappeared. Let me see. So we have in brackets in, visibilities of aerial surveillance, looking into drone technologies used by Frontex, if that's kind of correct. This is also a brief announcement, we'll have a workshop, or actually we call it a walkshop, so we'll be hopefully walking in the heat of Malta next week. Whoever wants to come along, it's exactly in a week's time. At 2 p.m., isn't it? We start from MUSA, that's the Museum for Contemporary Art in Valletta, and we'll walk to the airport in Malta, where we actually have Frontex drones taking off, and I think you'll be talking about that in your presentation as well. And we will try to spot them. So if you want to come for some drone spotting, then be our guest. We have no limited food available, so please do email me if you want to come along. That's exactly in a week's time. That will be the topic of Giovanna. Giovanna is actually now part of the Board of Forensics, which is a newly established NGO, I can say so. Association. the Board of Forensics, which is a newly established NGO, I can say so, association, looking into basically issues around the borders of Europe, one may also want to say, so the fortress Europe. Then our second presentation goes into data journalism, which is running under the title Evolution of Data. And this will be looking a little bit also into the Chinese situation, if I'm correct, kind of with images, satellite images, and video clips, so to say. So we have a bit to look at. Christo Bushek is basically kind of termed a data journalist. Is that kind of correct? Okay, great. And we'll have those two presentations. And please do feel free then to ask any questions. I was actually thinking of breaking up the discussion, but I was told maybe we'll keep it first at this level, that we actually do ask questions here. But let's see how it goes. So we'll have 45 minutes of discussion time in the end. And with that, I kind of would like to hand over to Giovanna. Is that all right? Great. Thank you. Hi. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for the introduction Adnan. My name is Rana, as Adnan already mentioned, I'm a researcher at Port of Forensics, which is an association that I'm going to talk a bit about in the beginning before exemplifying what we do. It's a bit difficult for me to connect what we do to your topic and philosophies of debugging. But I would like to start with a quote by Ali Ben Saab, who is a university professor, and his research focuses on socio-spatial changes in the Arab world and how they correlate in conflicts. And the quote goes like this. The Mediterranean is a crack, also because it has become an abyss, one that swallows up lives every day. In that sense, above all, it is a crack. A crack where human lives sink on their passage between two worlds which it increasingly separates. A crack because it has been made one, because its waves are cleft by warship dispatched against civilian rafts in order to construct a new attribute antithetical to a sea, and particular to this one, impassibility. To materialize this illusory desire for an artificialized, insurmountable border, the Mediterranean is undergoing a process of militarization. So we're already at our overall theme that Adnan mentioned, which is the investigation that we're doing currently, which is on the topic of the Mediterranean. But I want to take one step back and talk a little bit about border forensics in general. So as the name already says, we have the name border and forensics in it. We're looking into migration policies and border policing and how they change migrants journey and transform it into dangerous undertakings. We look into structurally generated border violence and we look at border violence as practices that relate to the existence and management of borders and that inflict different forms of harm onto migrants, including the violations of their rights. I'll talk a bit more about structural violence later, but in general what Border Forensics does is document and expose violence linked to the existence and management of the borders all around the world. And we do that by developing techniques of geospatial, visual, and open source investigations. And we look a lot into human rights reports. And I don't know if you are familiar with human rights reports, but they're usually based on text and witness testimony. And we like to extend that by adding a visual layer like maps, video reconstructions and other visualizations that can support the claims for accountability that are done by civil society for the violations of migrants' rights. And Border Forensics is a new association that was built on the work of the co-creators that are Lorenzo Pizzani and Charles Heller and sits in the work that they've done over the past 10 years, which is a project called Forensic Oceanography. And I don't know, this is now add-on information that's emerging out of a wider forensic architecture research agency, which is based in London. And Forensic Oceanography has worked on this topic before and has used geographic and media technologies like satellite imagery and drift modelling and vessel tracking to reconstruct specific cases of human rights violations and demand that these are investigated, that these cases become visible. And to explain that a bit further or to visualize it in some sort of ways, I'm going to show you two cases, one that has been done by Forensic Oceanography and another one by Board of Forensics to illustrate a bit what I'm talking about. So the first case I would like to talk about is a case that has become known as the left-to-die vote. The left-to-die vote is a case that happened between the 27th of March and the 10th of April 2011 and on the morning of the 27th of March, 72 migrants were fleeing Tripoli by rubber boats and the boat was spotted by a French aircraft that transmitted its coordinates. You can see that at point A and then later they placed a distress call by satellite phone. They were sighted by a helicopter at point C, and that later returned. And at point D, you can see that was on the 28th of March, so a day after they left the shores of Tripoli, they entered the Maltese search and rescue zone. To contextualise that a little bit, a search and rescue zone is a geographic area where a state is responsible for search and rescue zone is a geographic area where a state is responsible for search and rescue and should provide a safe place to make sure that this place is found. And what happened when they entered the Maltese search and rescue zone is that the vessel ran out of fuel and it started to drift 14 days until it landed back on the shores of the Libyan coast. On the way back they also encountered a military ship that you can see at point E and no water or food was on board and of the 72 people who left Tripoli only nine survived. So, this constitutes several violations of legal obligations to provide assistance to any person that is in distress at sea, and what we did with that forensic oceanography at that time wrote a report that did a spatial analysis of data surrounding the case. This is employed in a wider range of digital mapping and modeling technologies like radar imagery, geospatial mapping, and drift modeling. In this example, you can see how this was done in collaboration with an oceanographer. We reconstructed the trajectory of the boat and the 40 days of its drift. It was analyzed by wind currents and drift models this was combined with a satellite image that shows the presence of ships that were close by and that could have intervened and but didn't another important part of human rights reports and obviously also for the forensics works, is interviews. So that is an important part and will always be. Survivors, in the case of the left-to-die boat, recounted the various points of contacts that they had with state assets, the aircraft that flew over them, the distress call they sent via satellite phone, and the visual sighting of the military helicopter, and so on. Okay, so I'm going to talk about another case now, which is the April shipwreck that happened last year between the 20th of April and the 22nd of April. April and the 22nd of April. It was a boat with 130 passengers that left El Khoms and contacted the Alarm Phone Hotline, which is a hotline that supports people in distress at sea, and they received a GPS position and passed it on to all authorities. Two hours later, the passengers say that water was entering the boat and the sea conditions deteriorate. And despite Alarm Phone repeatedly alerting the Italian and Libyan authorities and shipping companies operating nearby about the worsening situation on board, no one intervened. They contacted Alarm Phone several times and at one point a Mayday call was sent via VHF radio by a Frontex aircraft. Frontex is the European Border and Coast Guard agency that I'm going to talk more about. Alarm phone reached the passengers for last time and they said that the battery was low and shortly after the communication was cut. There was a second Mayday call sent out by VHF radio. This is a snapshot of the reconstruction that we did. So in the picture before, sorry, I'm gonna show that again. So in the picture before you could see the vessels and the aerial tracks of all the assets around the case. And in the snapshot, you can see how the Frontex aircraft first sighted the boat at 7pm and at that point the migrants were still navigating and no deaths have been reported. And a few hours earlier there was actually an interception by the Libyan Coast Guard that you can see down there. see down there. And at this, we don't know the position of the actual interception, but this was the last known position of the second boat, which at the time was close to the other boat. So the Libyan Coast Guard only intercepted one of these boats and refused to search for the other, which at the time was close by. And then there was the merchant vessel Bruna that you can see in the upper right corner and that also transited at a close distance of 23 nautical miles, but did not respond to alarm phone's demand to intervene. And ultimately, none of the vessels present in the area intervened, despite deteriorating sea conditions and alarm phone relay the migrant' boat position exactly knowing where they are and the calls for authorities to help. And during the night of that day several merchant vessels and an NGO vessel changed course to start searching for the boat. Throughout the night and the morning, alarm phone was unable to reach the passengers. For several hours, they continued to call for authorities' intervention. And at midday, the NGO ship Ocean Viking by SOS Mediterranean sighted the wreck of the boat and some bodies. And despite continuing to search for several hours, only dead bodies were found. The tangle of the ships that you can see here makes visible the search operation that was started by the three merchant vessels, but no state or Frontex naval asset participated in that search. The presence in the area of an Italian and Maltese military airplane has also been reported, but their flight tracking data are not publicly available. So the reason why I wanted to present these two cases is that they are nearly exactly 10 years apart from each other. And there are some similarities and there are some differences in these cases. The similarities are very striking, and I think you can see them with Border Forensics visualization very well, is that these shipwrecks do not happen in an empty or neglected space, but in a highly surveyed area where there's a constant state actor that is present and has various contacts with these boats. state actor that is present and has various contacts with these boats and in both cases there has been more than one sighting by an EU area assets so not only do they know the position but they keep controlling them without intervening. One of the major differences of course is that in the case of the April shipwreck, there were no survivors, so there are no witnesses of the event itself. We can try to reconstruct what happened by talking to activists from the alarm phone and also relatives who have been in contact, but also this is where data for reconstruction becomes very important because it tells a story of a violence that has been taking place and the people who suffered from it cannot tell. This brings me a bit to the methods that we use. So we're combining technologies to elucidate the chain of events and suggest new ways on how these emerging technologies can be applied to a field of international law, but also human rights advocacy. Therefore, sensing technologies are crucial, like optical and radar satellite imagery, aircraft and vessel tracking technologies, to turn certain physical conditions into digital data. Our current investigation is closer looking at automatic dependent surveillance broadcast, in short, ADS-B, which is a surveillance technology in which aircraft determine their position via satellite navigation and other sensors and periodically broadcast it, which allows us to locate an aircraft and the aircraft to be tracked. I will get back to that as well. So I want to talk a bit briefly about what happened in between the 10 years of these two cases. What else has changed that might not be immediately visible? In collaboration with Human Rights Watch, we are currently working on an investigation of aerial surveillance in the central Mediterranean. And the most important change that we see is the retreat of naval assets and the increase of aerial assets. This is what we call the shift from sea to sky. We have been writing a policy analysis with Dr. Kiri Sante, who is looking at the ocean and the airspace above as a central space of politics. The increase of area assets is significant for the Mediterranean because the most obvious thing is that an aircraft can't rescue any people and they can't bring them to Europe. And also the legal framework around them is quite questionable. So a lot of things are based in maritime law. For example, the duty to rescue people in distress at sea is applied to naval assets, but not to aerial assets. And what we can observe is that the EU assets that survey the Mediterranean pass on information to the Libyan Coast Guard, who then intercepts the boat and bring them back to Libya, where human rights organizations have reported that they are held in inhumane camps where they face abuse and exploitation. And so the increase of European control sits in a larger trend as well, about the Libyan authority being able to conduct these interceptions and pullbacks to Libya. And this is obviously not a linear process and not something that the time, I'm going to very quickly summarize the main operations that were leading to that shift and that are part of the policy analysis. Okay. So we start with Operation Marinostrum, which was the first Italian search and rescue program. Marinostrum claimed by advocacy groups to have saved thousands of lives, but the operation was very unpopular and extremely costly, and Italy requested funds from the European Union, but the European Union denied that. Instead, they started Operation Triton, which is the first Frontex operation that replaced Marinostrum, and compared to Marinostrum, it had less financial means, and which is also important is that the operation area was much smaller. So you can see here that the blue part is where Frontex Operation Triton would operate. And it already showed Frontex intent of limiting rescue by reducing operational intervention area. And meanwhile, so in this years between 2015, 16, 17, 18 and like as a continuous trend, we can see that Frontex budget is constantly growing and their mandate is constantly extended. is constantly growing and their mandate is constantly extended. In 2016 there's also new regulation that authorized the agency to acquire its own equipment something that becomes important later because they purchased a drone. Afterwards Frontex operation TEMIS began and it replaced Operation Triton and it was also shifting away from surface assets and the operational area was even more reduced and did no longer cover the Maltese SAR zone. I'm not going to go too deep into UNAFORMED, which is the European Union naval force, but just to mention that they started intervening with operations in the Mediterranean after very deadly shipwrecks in April 2015, but then also later reduced their naval assets and they are now shifting the whole operation area eastwards. shifting the whole operation area eastwards. And while various other important political and legal decisions happened between 2011 and 2021, which are really hard to bring down here, but the most important part is also that there was a progressive empowerment of the Libyan Coast Guard by the European Union, and the implementation of the Libyan Search and Rescue Zone played an important role, and the technical and material support provided by the European Union and Italy. It was further enabling Libyan authorities to conduct interceptions. And, yeah, this constant decrease of naval assets that can actually rescue people was basically going hand in hand with the continuously increasing numbers of area assets that cannot. o ddysgu pobl, yn mynd ymlaen gyda'r cynyddol cynydd o arian ar gyfer ardalau ardal sydd yn gallu. Felly mae yna rhai rhanau o'r ymchwil lle mae ffactorau o ddim ymddangosol So there are various parts of the investigation where there are factors of invisibility that we encountered while doing the research. In general, Frontex is really difficult to research on, also difficult to FOIA, which is the Freedom of Information Act, so you can actually request information from European agencies, which is something that we constantly try. The factors that we encountered is that also that it's difficult to work with the visibility of surveillance as a form of violence, so that the European area assets are present for us constitutes a form of structural violence that is built into the hostile environment of the sea, making it even more hostile, and not like Frontex argues, is actually leading to the rescue of migrants, but their interception. And they also would argue that what they do is information gathering, not violence, but I'm going to speak a bit about that later. And there's also the invisibility of policies and decisions that have led to the increase and that often span over years. So the timeline that I showed earlier is basically a glimpse of what we have been doing with this policy analysis, but like really going into meeting minutes and like specific, like trying to trace back when this decision was made but this is really difficult to do that with open source material because obviously that there's not one document that says this is what we're going to do. Then there's also the question of the visibility of the objects of surveillance so the drone that Frontex has for example So the drone that Frontex has, for example, is less visible, but I'm going to talk about that later, also as an object, but also in its tracks, which brings me to the visibility of data. So first, what we're trying to investigate and what we're trying to show is that there's a link between area surveillance and increasing interceptions. yn ceisio ymchwilio ac yn ceisio dangos bod cyswllt rhwng ymchwil ardal a chynyddu cyfnodau, sydd ddim yn haws fel y mae'n swnio. Felly, trawsio ymchwil ardal Ewrop a'r cynydd i'r sgai sy'n dod â heriau o ysgolion, oherwydd sut rydych chi'n trawsio llwyth o ffordd boliwmedrig sy'n fwy anodd ac yn fwy llwyth i'w trawsio na'r môl ac sut y gallwn ni wneud ymchwil ardal a'r is how do you trace a volumetric shape that is even more difficult, even more fluid to trace than the sea, and how can we make area surveillance and the violence it leads to visible? The aim of the investigation is not only to trace what happened on a policy level, but also mapping the data that we've been looking at. A tool that we have been using a lot throughout the research is ADSB Exchange, which is a public source website of unfiltered flight data. It's really important to know that there's no filter of the data, so they also share data of military aircraft, which is important because other websites, when we compare, do not show Frontex aircraft because they're blocked. And with the help and collaboration of activists from the Alarm Phone and SeaWatch, we were able to compile a list where we can connect aerial tracks of European surveillance assets to cases of people in distress. And this might seem simple, but cross-referencing research is difficult for various reasons. So we need to combine different sources. We need to connect a case to a track that is not certain to be connected. So sometimes the aircraft doesn't stay on the scene, so the aircraft would spot a boat in distress and then leave the scene. So if we don't have a geolocation reference for the boat, it's basically impossible to say what Frontex has encountered that day at that moment. Also, the central Mediterranean is a really big area, and there are sometimes various cases happening on one day and various boats leaving on one day. So this also has to be checked if this is actually the boat that we're talking about that Frontex has seen and that, for example, contacted the alarm phone. I'm going to show some examples of tracks and cases that we have been looking at where we could verify with the activists that we've been working together with. So, for example, here we have the track of a Frontex aircraft, and this was an interception likely coordinated by Frontex because we know that Sea-Watch was watching this track as well, an NGO that is conducting search and rescue in the Mediterranean and also has an aircraft, and their aircraft, Moonbird, was flying to the exact spot, and they discovered an empty burning boat and witnessed the Libyan Coast Guard in vicinity with 18 people on board. In this case of the 18th of May, for example, we can see that Frontex was hovering, but we don't have any contact, for example, from the alarm phone or from Sea-Watch, but from a FOIA request by Matthias Monroy, we know that on this day Frontex actually contacted the Libyan Coast Guard via WhatsApp. So we could also verify this case. This track is an important one, and it might look different already to you than the other ones. There's a lot more to see here. This is also because the track is longer, because it's not an aircraft, it's the drone. Frontex is flying the Heron drone in the Mediterranean since April 2021. This track is from July. And the Heron drone is manufactured by IAI and operated by Airbus subsidiary ADAS. And as you can see, it's much more difficult to indicate if the drone has spotted a boat in distress. Because with the aircrafts we have a clear orbit that we can see for the drone we don't really know what it sees because it's only passing by but then sometimes it would fly back to the same path that it already crossed but further north so this is like kind of an indication. Yeah, and what you can also already see in this case is that the track is not a clear line, right? It breaks off. And this is something that currently happens a lot, like this happens in general a lot, that the signal is just lost and we can't get a lot of information out of the tracks that we are looking at. I'm going to take another. Okay. So this brings me to my last point with the visibility of violence and if area surveillance is only information gathering. We would argue that it is a structure violence because this is a built-in structure. Area surveillance as a structure violence that was built into over the Mediterranean in these past years. This also happened not with one single aircraft or with one drone, but is a network and an infrastructure of constant surveillance that remains largely invisible from the ground and the sea and is acquiring an almost atmospheric presence. So it's important to note that we are really dealing not with a single aircraft but like a massive amount of aircrafts, right? That Frontex has available and that they also share with, there's a lot of sharing information with EMSA who has drones in EFKA and Frontex has contracts with them. who has drones in AFCA and Frontex has contracts with them. And it also brings up the question of how to assign responsibility for this hidden violence. And there's a really nice quote by Yves Winter, who's a professor of political science and wrote a paper on violence and visibility, who said, to account for such violences raises the question on how one accounts for silences and for violences that are not visible because they cannot be, which paradoxically means not that they are hidden behind something, but that they are invisible and yet at the same time in full view. So this violence has no author and no voice. Its mark is a silence or a blank which leaves its traces in the texture. Or in our case, it leaves its traces in the data. And there's one last thing that I want to mention, is that there is an increasing opportunity to access technologies that often have been used and are still used for policing the routes that migrants take, and take them to create this form of counter-surveillance, are still used for policing the routes that migrants take, and take them to create this form of counter-surveillance, which is a useful tool. But the most important part is still activism and to support claims from the people that are suffering these conditions and demand accountability for the violation of migrants' rights. And that's it. Thank you.