A/HRC/48/Add.xx corporation: IBM.19 Other genocides also relied on systematic tracking of groups, such as the Tutsi registries based on ethnicity identity cards, which facilitated the magnitude of the Rwandan genocide.20 Post 9-11, the US experimented with various modes of data collection on marginalized populations, which collected photographs, biometrics, and even first-person interview data from over 84,000 flagged individuals coming from mostly Arab States. 21 In all of these cases, different actors, including governments, exploited ideas about the neutrality or non-prejudicial necessity of data collection to target marginalized groups on a discriminatory basis. 14. Autonomous technologies are also increasingly used in monitoring and securing border spaces. For example, FRONTEX, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, has been testing unpiloted military-grade drones in the Mediterranean and Aegean for the surveillance and interdiction of vessels containing migrants and refugees hoping to reach European shores.22 An investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, TV Asahi and Report Mainz produced credible evidence in October 2020 that FRONTEX has been complicit in pushbacks,23 or the forced returns of refugees and migrants over a border without consideration of individual circumstances and without possibility to apply for asylum or appeal. Such pushbacks likely violate non-refoulement obligations under international law, and are aided by surveillance technologies. Legal developments in Greece have permitted the police to use drone surveillance to monitor irregular migration in border regions, but allow doing so without ensuring the requisite legal protections for the human rights of those subject to this surveillance. 24 15. The usage of military, or quasi-military, autonomous technology bolsters the nexus between immigration, national security, and the increasing criminalization of migration and use of risk-based taxonomies to demarcate and flag cases.25 States, particularly those experiencing large numbers of refugee and migrant arrivals, have been using various methods to pre-empt and deter those seeking to legally apply for asylum. This normative shift towards criminalization of asylum and migration works to justify increasingly hard-line and intrusive technologies such as drones and various border enforcement mechanisms like remote sensors and integrated fixed-towers with infra-red cameras (so-called autonomous surveillance towers) to mitigate the ‘threat environment’ at the border.26 These technologies can have drastic results. While so-called “smart-border” technologies have been called a more humane alternative to other border enforcement regimes, studies have documented that such technologies along the US-Mexico border have actually increased migrant deaths and pushed migration routes towards more dangerous terrains.27 Chambers et al. have found that migrant deaths have more than doubled since these new technologies have been introduced,28 creating a “land of open graves.”29 16. The use of these technologies by border enforcement is only likely to increase in the ‘militarised technological regime’ 30 of border spaces, without appropriate public consultation, accountability frameworks, and oversight mechanisms. In the Korean peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone (“DMZ”), “South Korea (Republic of Korea) has deployed 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 6 Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (2012). https://www.theengineroom.org/dangerous-data-the-role-of-data-collection-in-genocides/. http://www.aaiusa.org/nseers. Petra Molnar, “Technological Testing Grounds: Migration Management Experiments and Reflections from the Ground Up” (2020). https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/10/23/frontex-at-fault-european-border-force-complicit-inillegal-pushbacks; https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/eu-border-agency-frontex-complicitin-greek-refugee-pushback-campaign-a-4b6cba29-35a3-4d8c-a49f-a12daad450d7. Homo Digitalis, Submission. See Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, Submission. Raluca Csernatoni, “Constructing the EU’s High-Tech Borders: FRONTEX and Dual-Use Drones for Border Management” (2018). Samuel Norton Chambers et al., “Mortality, Surveillance and the Tertiary ‘Funnel Effect’ on the U.S.Mexico Border: A Geospatial Modeling of the Geography of Deterrence” (2019). Ibid. Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015). Csernatoni, “Constructing the EU’s High-Tech Borders”.