“Nature is blamed for failings that are man’s
and well-run rivers have to change their plans”
Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, novelist (1890-1971)

“The flood has changed our lives. My children are scared every time it rains. My son had a panic attack when the bridges in Faenza were closed recently, because he thought the same thing would happen. And I can’t help but look at the river every time I drive by. I live from day to day now. Everything can change in an instant. You know, I lost everything in half an hour”. Francesca Placci, 42, a cook, lives in the Italian city of Faenza, in the province of Ravenna, in Emilia-Romagna. Faenza, located 50 kilometres south-east of Bologna, was flooded three times in 18 months during the 2023-2024 biennium.

As in Thessaly and Valencia, the inhabitants of this Italian city are still living with fear and anxiety about the future after this triple shock.  “Every time it rains, I am afraid. Our confidence is gone. We no longer know what we can rely on. This place is not safe. Nothing will ever be the same again. My husband is more tired now, more silent. In our community we continue to help each other, but the state has never been there for us. Instead, all we got was a mess of bureaucracy and crumbs of financial support. We have learned to rely only on ourselves and the people around us,” says Simona Bacchilega, 54.

Her voice echoes and joins those of the inhabitants of Palamas Karditsa, Mandra, Volos and Pelion, the neighbourhoods of Valencia in Spain, the Danube regions of Hungary and Slovakia, in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Saarland in Germany, in the provinces of Karlovac and Sisk-Moslavina in Croatia and in dozens of other affected areas.

Thessaly, September 2023, photo: Marios Lolos 

The deadliest natural disaster

Floods are the most common natural disaster. They account for 44% of all natural disasters worldwide and cause almost half of all deaths. Today, 1.81 billion people (23% of the world’s population) are considered to be directly exposed to the risk of severe flooding. Their frequency has more than doubled since 2004, scientists say, due to the acceleration of the hydrological cycle caused by anthropogenic climate change. 

Over the past 30 years, floods in Europe have affected 5.5 million people, caused more than 3,000 deaths and resulted in economic losses of more than €170 billion. But these are just journalistic estimates.

How many people have actually died in floods in each region of Europe over the last decade? How many and which specific areas in each country and region have been affected, and which infrastructure has been hit hardest, especially in the last two years? And how can we protect ourselves effectively? The publicly available scientific data on floods in Europe is fragmentary, incomplete and uninformative.

MIIR’s month-long cross-border journalistic data research – unique in Europe – as part of EDJNET, has managed to combine data from three different open databases to create the first comprehensive pan-European database on floods, recording the number of floods, flood victims and flood deaths in all European regions from 2014 to 2024. 

In addition, we have created a separate database based on satellite data for the last two years (2023-2024), which accurately records the extent of flooding and its impact on land and infrastructure in all European regions of 17 Member States.

The devastating impact in numbers

Between 2014 and 2024, data collected by Copernicus, the EM-DAT public database and the Hanze database show that at least 681,076 people were affected by floods in 24 European countries. However, the actual number of people affected is higher as data is not available for all floods. 

Based on the existing data we have analysed, at least 1,579 people have died directly as a result of floods in Europe over the last decade.

Together with Michalis Diakakis, a hydrogeologist and assistant professor at the University of Athens, they study flood fatalities in Europe, having contributed to the most reliable (because it includes all events with at least one fatality) large-scale database on flood fatalities in the Euro-Mediterranean region (Flood Fatalities from the Euro-Mediterranean region FFEM-DB). The number of deaths in 14 Euro-Mediterranean countries over the last 35 years exceeds 3000.

Excess mortality

The official death toll in Thessaly in 2023 was 17. However, a recent study by the Centre for Research and Training in Public Health, Health Policy and Primary Health Care, published by the Greek daily Efsyn. (“Plains mourns 335 dead, not 17 from Daniel”, 16.3.2025), shows that the actual total number of deaths was 20 times higher in the first quarter after the floods. In total, 335 people died within three months, mostly from cardiovascular and/or respiratory problems. 

As noted by meteo.gr (K. Papagiannaki, K. Lagovardos, G. Kyros, 18/10/2024), in the last 45 years Greece has experienced 70 deadly floods due to heavy rainfall, resulting in 190 deaths. There is an alarming trend: the number of deaths caused by floods is increasing over time. In the last decade, for example, half of all recorded deaths have occurred in the last 45 years. 

According to the Institute for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development of the National Observatory of Athens, in the Balkans as a whole, floods with more than 10 fatalities occur every 6.5 years, while floods with more than 22 fatalities occur every 12 years.

Our research shows that in the last two years, 17 European countries have experienced 32 floods, affecting a total of 427.336,2 hectares – an area 1.5 times the size of Luxembourg – according to satellite data from Copernicus Emergency Management Mapping. 

The area flooded in Europe over the past two years is almost twice the size of Greater London and larger than Rome, Paris and Berlin combined.

Analysis of the 61 affected areas shows that provincial areas suffered the most extensive flooding, with some 138.663 hectares flooded. Similarly, 98.447 hectares were affected in intermediate (semi-urban) areas and 88.468 hectares in urban areas.

Thessaly, September 2023, photo: Marios Lolos 

The largest flood in Europe in the last two years started on 5 September 2023 in the Thessaly region of Greece, affecting almost 1,223,750 hectares, of which 92% was agricultural land. The storm directly claimed the lives of 17 people, affected 44,000 inhabitants in Karditsa, Trikala, Magnesia and Larissa and resulted in the death of more than 200,000 animals.

The actual extent of the flood in Thessaly

Until now, the area flooded in Thessaly seemed to be less than 1 million hectares (72.000 hectares was the first official report from the Athens Observatory), but our analysis shows that the actual extent of the disaster is much greater than what has been reported in the press (up to 80.000 hectares).

It turns out that the total area affected in the whole of Thessaly was 122.374,7 hectares, which is more than 50% more than the initial estimates). This is because our measurement includes the ‘flood footprint’ recorded by the Copernicus satellites – areas where water was present but had receded by the time the satellite image was taken. As Copernicus told MIIR, “we assume with a very high probability that a flood has occurred where traces of it are detected in the satellite images”.

 Snapshot from the Copernicus website, showing the diagonal lines of the Thessaly flood track on 9 September 2023. Retrieved 25.3.2025.

Our data shows that Thessaly also experienced the most significant damage to the transport network in the whole of Europe over the last two years, with 1,590 km of roads and almost 149 km of rail infrastructure damaged. 

Germany has been the worst performer in Europe in this category over the last two years, with 209.8 km of long-distance power lines and cables and 117.7 km of local power lines and cables affected.

Flooding of the Saar River, Saarland Germany, 18.05.2024. Source: Berit Kessler / Shutterstock.com

Flooding in Valencia, Dana, October 2024. Source: Guillermo Gutiérrez Carrascal / El Confidencial.

These data show that inland floods at municipal and provincial level, often caused by heavy rainfall, overflowing rivers or poor drainage, have affected a larger area than coastal floods.

However, areas close to the water appear to be more vulnerable to flooding, with the majority of floods in a decade occurring in coastal areas, particularly in Spain, France and Italy.

As was shown for the floods in a parallel investigation by the Spanish El Confidencial, the areas most affected in Valencia have lower levels of income per capita and, at the same time, the houses built there, where land is cheaper, are less prepared to cope with this type of event. The five Spanish provinces with the highest number of buildings in flood-prone areas at risk of flooding are, in order, Murcia, Seville, Valencia, Alicante and Tarragona. 

Flooding in Valencia, Dana, October 2024. Source: Guillermo Gutiérrez Carrascal / El Confidencial.

The last three and a half decades have been among the most flood-rich periods in Europe in the last 500 years. Scientists have shown (Current European flood-rich period exceptional compared with past 500 years, Nature, 2000) that this period differs from other similar flood-rich periods in terms of magnitude, air and sea temperatures and seasonality. The summer of 2024 was the warmest ever recorded in Europe and worldwide. Note that for each additional degree Celsius of global average temperature, the intensity of precipitation increases by about 7%.

The biggest problem is that sea temperatures in the Mediterranean have risen. The critical limit is a water temperature of 26 degrees Celsius. “When this is exceeded, the meteorological system that passes over an area is enriched with enormous additional moisture, and all this acts as both an accelerator and a magnifier of the phenomenon,” explains Professor Nikitas Mylopoulos, a professor at the University of Thessaly. 

Such a condition leads to the famous Omega cyclones, as happened with Daniel in Thessaly. “In the same region, two phenomena that are supposed to occur every 500 and 1000 years have occurred in just three years. This automatically means that all the alarm bells have to go off, because the return periods change, all the statistical distributions change and, of course, the whole way of coping and planning changes”.

 “Governments insist on dealing only with the day after the disaster (post disaster), instead of taking preventive measures (risk-cost benefit). Between 2017-2021, Greece was given about €100 million in flood compensation alone. Only for Janus (a Mediterranean cyclone that hit the Mediterranean and mainly Greece in September 2020), 38 million euros were given, 7 million euros in state compensation and 31 million euros in insurance compensation,” notes Katerina Papagiannaki, a scientist at the National Observatory of Athens. 

The same is said by Nikitas Mylopoulos, professor at the University of Thessaly, director of the Laboratory of Hydrology and Analysis of Water Systems, making it clear that the only way to deal with the situation is to draw up a Holistic Flood Protection Plan with a series of projects that will “cooperate” with each other. 

Smart dams

“Flood management is very important,” says Mylopoulos. “It relates to how we with our projects will direct, guide the flood volumes as safely as possible to avoid major disasters. This is done first of all with the mountain hydrology projects: small earthen dams high up in the mountains, where the phenomenon starts, in the small streams. So that’s where you put the first stop. Second needed, smaller small and medium-sized dams and dikes downstream. And not the pharaonic big dams. Small dams, but set up smartly, in the areas that actually do the job. Thirdly, reforestation is needed throughout the region, and enhancing natural protection, vegetation cover is crucial in flood mitigation. And, of course, we must finally provide for flood zones, according to their risk, which are usually currently either built-up areas or fields of intensive farming. These zones must be returned with lighter land uses. The rivers must be given back their old meanderings, which play a role in reducing the risk. 

Θεσσαλία, Σεπτέμβριος 2023, κακοκαιρία Daniel, φωτό: Μάριος Λώλος 

Simona Bacchilega, a worker in the municipality of Faenza, on the evening of 16 May 2023 was receiving messages from friends to leave her home. 

“We lived in the centre of the city, ten metres above the surface of the river, and we weren’t worried. We didn’t think the sewers could overflow. Until the moment we heard a strange sound coming from the bathroom and there was a terrible stench. Suddenly we saw water coming from the yard, despite the sandbags my husband and neighbor had placed. The water was coming in non-stop. I quickly grabbed a backpack, put in clothes, a flashlight, water. We went out into the street. I realized that my water was reaching my waist.We spent the entire first night awake, sitting in the dark. The power had been out since 9 o’clock at night. Looking outside, I could see the water rising in my car. “Not the car,” I thought. “I just unloaded it!”

The river will take it all away’

“I was thinking of my aunt who used to tell us, ‘The river will take it all away’,” Simona recalls. “The elderly neighbor across the street was talking to us from his window. His wife was on dialysis, and all night long we exchanged glances. He was a professor, a great man. He lost his entire library. I used to watch him look at his books in the water. The next day helicopters were flying all the time, and we didn’t know what was happening.”

For a while they stayed with some neighbors. “When we were able to return home, we realized we had to fend for ourselves. No one helped us. If you wanted water, you had to find it yourself. Volunteers and organized help never reached our area. Then we started to clean up.” 18 months later, in September 2024, Faenza, like dozens of areas in central Europe, was flooded again by the Boris storm.

Satellite image of the Italian city of Faenza from ​ESA/NASA, May 2023

That same night, 42-year-old cook Francesca Placci lost what she had painstakingly built over a lifetime. “My apartment was completely submerged, the water reached up to 3 cm from the ceiling,” she says.

Raffaela Paladini, an expert in trauma management after a disaster, visited Faenza as an “emergency psychologist” providing assistance to dozens of people. “Such a situation certainly has a traumatic impact. People who go about their daily lives as we all do, at some point in time find themselves in an emergency situation faced with something that disrupts their daily routine. This interruption initially causes confusion, a sense of disorientation, emptiness and despair. It can then trigger very different emotions, such as anger, rage and guilt.”

Flood in Faenza, Italy, 17 May 2023. Source: Dario Argenti / Shutterstock.com

“We are financially exhausted. Everything needed to be replaced. The frustration was growing as there was no government support. I spent months looking for help, knocking on doors of public services, but in vain. But the worst part was the psychological impact. Every time it rained, I had an anxiety attack. I couldn’t sleep, waking up in the middle of the night to check if the river had swollen again. My mother, who was always strong, began to show signs of dementia. She was no longer the same.”

And for 66-year-old retiree Mirella Emiliani, everything has changed. “I used to pay attention to appearance, I had nice clothes, an organized home. Now, I have nothing. I don’t even have my old photos. The flood has changed my relationships with people. My few real friends did everything they could to help me. Others just disappeared. When it rains, I’m still scared. I think I can’t go through the same thing again. No one warned us in time. Nothing was done right. Now, I live day by day, because I learned that life can change in an instant.” 

However, all the affected people say almost the same thing: “this disaster has changed me, but it has also highlighted the power of solidarity”. Andrea Bazzocchi returned home after 1.5 years of suffering. “We are trying to rebuild our lives, step by step; this experience has taught us a lot, but we cannot live in fear. We move forward with optimism.”

The cross-border data research was organised and coordinated by the Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting (MIIR.gr) in the framework of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet).

The data collection, analysis and visualization was carried out by Konstantina Maltepioti. The data analysis was checked by the Deutsche Welle team. The illustrations were created by Louisa Karageorgiou.

A total of 6 EDJNet members participated in the survey, which was conducted from November 2024 to March 2025: MIIR (Greece), Atlatszo (Hungary), Facta (Italy), El Confidencial, Civio (Spain), PressOne (Romania).

The survey was published on 29 March 2025 in www.miir.gr and www.efsyn.gr. 

See the scrollytelling of the survey here.
Read the methodology of the survey here.

In late June 2020, Robert Williams, an African-American resident of Detroit, was arrested at the entrance of his home in front of his two young daughters. No one could tell him why. At the police station, he was informed that he was considered a suspect in the 2018 robbery of a store, as his face was identified by in-store security surveillance footage. The identification was based on an old driver’s licence photo. After thirty hours in custody, Robert Williams was eventually released. The cynical confession of the Detroit police officers was disarming: “the computer probably made a mistake.” 

A similar incident occurred in June 2019 to Michael Oliver, also an African-American Detroit resident, who was arrested after the alleged identification of his face on a security-camera video. He was taken to trial, where he was eventually acquitted three months after his arrest. Similarly, in a test study of Amazon’s Rekognition software, the program incorrectly identified 28 members of Congress (!) as people who had previously been arrested for a crime. The misidentifications overwhelmingly involved blacks and Latinos. But do not assume that this only happens in the US. 

As discussed in the previous two parts of MIIR’s investigation on “The Digital Walls of Fortress Europe”, the EU, as part of a new architecture of border surveillance and mobility control, has in recent years introduced a number of systems to record and monitor citizens moving around the European space.

The EU is using different funding mechanisms for research and development, with an increasing emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which can also use biometric data. Between 2007 and 2013 (but with projects running until 2020) the most relevant of these was the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), followed by Horizon 2020. These two programmes have funded EU security projects worth more than €1.3 billion. For the current period 2021-2027, Horizon Europe has a total budget of €95.5 billion, with a particular focus on ‘security’ issues. Technologies such as automated decision-making, biometrics, thermal cameras and drones are increasingly controlling migration and affecting millions of people on the move. Border management has become a profitable multi-billion-euro business in the EU and other parts of the world. According to an analysis by TNI (Border War Series), the annual growth of the border-security market is expected to be between 7.2 % and 8.6 %, reaching a total of USD 65-68 billion by 2025. 

The largest expansion is in the global Biometric Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) markets. The biometrics market itself is projected to double its turnover from $33 billion in 2019 to $65.3 billion by 2024. A significant part of the funding is directed towards enhancing the capabilities of EU-LISA (European Agency for the Operational Management of Large Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice) which is expected to play a key role in managing the interoperability of databases for mobility and security control. The activities of this supercomputer are funded by:

• a grant from the general budget of the EU. 
• a contribution from the member states related to the operation of the Schengen area and Eurodac related measures.
• direct financial contributions from member states. 

Chris Jones, Executive Director of the non-profit organisation Statewatch, has been following the money trail starting in Brussels for several years. He explains that “EU-research projects are usually run by consortia of private companies, public bodies and universities. Private companies receive the largest sums, more than public bodies.” A recent Statewatch study (Funds for Fortress Europe: spending by Frontex and EU-LISA, January 2022) highlights that around €1.5 billion was directed to private contractors for the development and strengthening of EU-LISA in the period 2014-2020, with the largest increase occurring after 2017 and the peak of the refugee crisis. 

The surveillance oligopoly

One of the most important contracts signed in 2020, worth €300 million, was between French companies Idemia and Sopra Steria for the implementation of a new Biometric Matching System (BMS). These companies often win new contracts as they have agreements for the maintenance of the EES, EURODAC, SIS II and VIS systems. Other companies that have been awarded high-value contracts for EU-LISA-related work are Atos, IBM, and Leonardo – for €140 million – and the consortium Atos, Accenture and Morpho (later Idemia) which in 2016 signed a contract worth €194 million.

Data collected by Statewatch also shows cooperation – usually through joint ventures – in the expansion of the EU-LISA system with companies of Greek interests, such as Unisystems SA (owned by the Quest Group of former President of the Association of Greek Industrialists Th. Fessa), which signed a €45 million contract in 2019. Similarly, European Dynamics SA (owned by Konstantinos Velentzas) participated in a €187 million contract awarded in 2020, and Luxembourg-based Intrasoft International SA (previously owned by Kokkalis interests) is participating with five other companies in a €187 million project in 2020. 

The new frontier of AI and the pressures on the EU

In April 2021, the European Commission published its long-awaited draft regulation on artificial intelligence (AI ACT). The consultation process is expected to take some time. This important piece of legislation exceeds 200 pages and which will be – among other things – a refinement of the data protection legislation (Directive 680/2016). There is expected to be considerable pressure exerted by companies and operators in the sector until the bill is submitted in its final form to the European Parliament.

MIIR has investigated the records of official meetings on AI and digital policy issues between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager (“A Europe Fit for the Digital Age”), Commissioner Thierry Breton (Internal Market) and their staffs between December 2019 and March 2022. It emerges that at least 14 agencies, private sector giants and consortia of companies related to the security and defence sector met with key representatives of the European Commission 71 times in 28 months to discuss issues related to digital policy and AI. Most meetings with the Commissioners were held by DIGITALEUROPE, an organisation representing 78 corporate members, including major defence and security companies such as Accenture, Airbus and Atos. Other consortia were also identified to be lobbying heavily, such as the European Round Table for Industries (ERT) which represents a number of defence and security companies such as Leonardo, Rolls-Royce and Airbus.

High-risk systems

The proposal for the European regulation (COM/2021/206 final) adopted in April 2021, gives a good overview of the AI systems and applications that are expected to be regulated, and the risks of their unregulated operation at Europe’s entry points. As stated: “[…] it is appropriate to classify as high-risk AI systems intended to be used by the competent public authorities responsible for tasks in the areas of immigration management, asylum and border control as polygraphs and similar tools or for detecting the emotional state of an individual; for assessing certain risks presented by natural persons entering the territory of a member state or applying for a visa; for assessing certain risks presented by natural persons entering the territory of a member state or applying for a visa; for assessing the risk of a person’s personal data […]”

The critical parameter

The scope of the field where ‘high-risk’ AI systems can be applied seems wide. Despite hopes that a new directive will regulate how they operate, there is one parameter that may remove this possibility. As revealed in an internal presentation by the European Commission’s internal review that took place in May and was brought to light by Statewatch, the new regulation, if passed, will come into force 24 months after it is signed and will not apply to all systems, as it is not expected to be retroactive to those on the market before the effective date.

Robo-dogs in action: Algorithms and nightmarish research projects

“There is a great effort by EU institutions and member states to increase the number of deportations. The EU has poured money and resources and these databases to essentially say ‘we want to help remove these people from European soil’,” Statewatch’s Chris Jones points out. Indeed, automation and the use of industry-pushed algorithmic tools are already playing an important role at Europe’s entry points, raising many questions about safeguarding the rights of refugees and migrants. It is not only the profiling that worries those who criticise these EU projects, but also the quality of the data on which this process is based. “It looks like a ‘black box’, where we don’t know exactly what’s inside,” says refugee law specialist and anthropologist Petra Molnar, who focuses on the risk of automation without a human factor in decision-making when it determines human lives.

Some of the major pilot systems funded in the past few years include the following:

• iBorderCtrl – “smart” lie detectors 

Combines facial matching and document authentication tools with AI technologies. It is a “lie detector”, tested in Hungary, Greece and Latvia, and involved the use of a “virtual border guard”, personalised for the gender, nationality and language of the traveller – a guard asking questions via a digital camera. The project was funded with €4.5 million from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, and has been heavily criticised as dangerous and pseudo-scientific (“Sci-fi surveillance: Europe’s secretive push into biometric technology”, The Guardian, 10 December 2020; “We Tested Europe’s New Lie Detector for Travelers – and Immediately Triggered a False Positive”, The Intercept, 26 July 2019).

It was piloted under simulated conditions in early July 2019 at the premises of TRAINOSE in a specially designed area of the Security Studies Centre in Athens. Before departure the traveller had to upload a photo of an ID or passport to a special application. They then answered questions posed by a virtual border guard. Special software recorded their words and facial movements, which might have escaped the attention of an ordinary eye, and in the end the software calculated – supposedly – the traveller’s degree of sincerity.

On 2 February 2021, the European Court of Justice ruled on a lawsuit brought by MEP and activist Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) against the privacy of this research project, which he called pseudo-scientific and Orwellian.

• Roborder (an autonomous swarm of heterogeneous robots for border surveillance) 

• Foldout 

The €8.1 million Foldout research project does not hide its aims: “in recent years irregular migration has increased dramatically and is no longer manageable with existing systems”. The main idea of the project, piloted in Bulgaria and being rolled out in Finland, Greece and French Guinea, is to place motion sensors on land sections of the border where terrain or vegetation makes it difficult to detect an irregular crossing. With any suspicious movement, human or vehicle, there will be the possibility of sending a drone to that point or activating ground cameras for additional monitoring. The consortium developing it is coordinated by the Austrian Institute of Technology (which has received €25 million from 37 European projects).

Among the organisations lobbying for these projects at the European level, we met EARTO, a consortium of research centres and project beneficiaries in various fields, including security. These included KEMEA in Greece, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (140 EU-funded research projects, including Roborder) and the Austrian Institute of Technology (Foldout). 

Many of the Horizon 2020 research projects (Roborder, iBorderCtrl, Foldout, Trespass, etc.) have been described by their own authors as still “immature” for widespread use. However, the overall shift in the European Union’s approach to the use of AI for mobility control and crime prevention can be seen in the ever-increasing funding of the European Security Fund. One such project is the supply of thousands of mobile devices by the Greek police that will allow citizens to be identified using facial recognition and fingerprinting software. The total cost of the project, undertaken by Intracom Telecom, exceeds €4 million and 75% comes from the European Security Fund. 

The Samos “experiment”

“Borders and immigration are the perfect laboratory for experiments. Opaque, high-risk conditions with low levels of accountability. Borders are becoming the perfect testing ground for new technologies that can later be used more extensively on different communities and populations. This is exactly what you see in Greece, right?”, asks lawyer Petra Molnar. The answer is in the affirmative, both for the north and the south of the country.

On the island of Samos on Greece’s south-eastern border with Turkey, at the new migrant camp which the Greek government is almost advertising, two special pilot systems called HYPERION and CENTAUR are being put into operation.

• HYPERION is an asylum management system for all the needs of the Reception and Identification Service. It processes biometric and biographical data of asylum seekers, as well as of the members of NGOs visiting the relevant structures and of the workers in these structures. It is planned to be the main tool for the operation of the Closed Reception Centres (CRCs) as it will be responsible for access control, monitoring of benefits per asylum seeker using an individual card (food, clothing supplies, etc.) and movements between the CRCs, and accommodation facilities. The project includes the creation of a mobile phone application that will provide personalised information to the user, to act as their electronic mailbox regarding their asylum application process, with the ability to provide personalised information.
• CENTAUR is a digital system for the management of electronic and physical security around and within the premises, using cameras and AI behavioural analytics algorithms. It includes centralised management from the Ministry of Digital Governance and services such as: signalling perimeter breach alarms using cameras (capable of thermometry, focus and rotation) and motion analysis algorithms; signalling of illegal behaviour alarms for individuals or groups of individuals in assembly areas inside the facility; and use of unmanned aircraft systems to assess incidents inside the facility without human intervention. 

“CENTAUR uses cameras that have a great ability to focus on specific individuals, cameras that can also take someone’s temperature. The most important thing is not that CENTAUR will use this image for security reasons, it is that behavioural analysis algorithms will also be used, without explaining exactly what it means,” says lawyer and member of Homo Digitalis, Kostas Kakavoulis. As he points out, “an algorithm learns to come to certain conclusions based on some data we have given it. Such an algorithm will be able to distinguish between the fact that person X may have increased aggressive behaviour, and may attack other asylum seekers or guards, or may want to escape from the accommodation facility illegally. Another use of behaviour analysis algorithms is lie analysis, which can judge whether our behaviour and our words reflect something that is true or not. This is mainly done through the analysis of biometric data, the data that we all produce through our movement in space, through our physical presence, through our physical appearance and also the way we move our hands, the way we blink, the way we walk, for example. All these may seem insignificant, but if someone can collect them over a long period of time and can correlate them with the data of many other people, they may be able to come to conclusions about us, which may surprise us, about how aggressive our behaviour can be, how much anxiety we have, how afraid we are, whether we are telling the truth or not.” In the current legislation, it is prohibited to process personal data without the possibility of human intervention. 

Lawyer Petra Molnar has recently been researching the effects of AI applications on the control of migration flows. She was in Samos at the opening of the new closed reception centre. “Multiple layers of barbed wire, cameras everywhere, fingerprint stations at the rotating gate, entry-exit points. Refugees see it as a prison complex. I will never forget that. On the eve of the opening I was at the old camp in Vathi, Samos. We talked to a young mother from Afghanistan. She was pushing her young daughter in a pram and hurriedly typed a message on her phone that said: ‘If we go there, we’ll go crazy’. And every time I look at the camps with these systems, I realise that it embodies that fear that people have when they’re going to be isolated, and surveillance technologies are used to further control their movements.” 

Médecins Sans Frontières described the new structure in Samos as a “dystopian nightmare”. They were not alone. “The CENTAUR system is framed by the use of highly intrusive technologies to protect privacy, personal data as well as other rights such as behavioural and motion analysis algorithms, drones and closed circuit surveillance cameras. There is a serious possibility that the installation of the YPERION and CENTAUR systems may violate the European Union legislation on the processing of personal data and the provisions of Law 4624/2019”, the NGO Homo Digitalis points out. The Hellenic Human Rights Association, HIAS Greece, Homo Digitalis and a Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London Dr Niovi Vavoula filed a request before the Greek Data Protection Authority (DPA) on 18 February 2022 for the exercise of investigative powers and the issuance of an Opinion on the supply and installation of the systems. On Wednesday 2 March 2022, the Authority commenced an investigation of the Department of Immigration and Asylum in relation to the two systems in question. 

The automation fetish

“The problem is that authorities, and politicians, are beginning to perceive advanced data analytics as factors in some kind of objective and unbiased knowledge about security issues, because they have this aura of mathematical precision. But artificial intelligence and machine learning can actually be very accurate in reproducing and magnifying the biases of the past. We should remember that poor quality data will only lead to bad automated, biased decisions,” says researcher George Glouftsios.

We wonder why we use robot dogs, sound cannons and lie detectors at our borders but do not use AI to weed out, for example, racist border guards. 

Flash forward. In 2054 the Washington DC police department has created a special pre-crime police team that arrests crime suspects before they even commit the crime. The predictions are made by three mutant human beings, who are in a state of permanent hypnosis and are able to see the future, including the potential criminal, before he or she even goes through with the act. It is a stretch – for the moment – to claim that we are approaching the fantasy of Philip Dick in Minority Report.

But what is not far off is the existence of various systems of behavioural analysis including lie detectors, facial and emotional recognition software, with automated decision-making on the horizon. All this – in a context of militarisation of the EU’s external borders, in a context of treating people on the move as a potential threat – risks creating a dangerous human laboratory, a high-risk experiment around fundamental human rights. 

Check out: Part 1 – The ecosystem of European biometric monitoring and surveillance data

Check out: Part 2 – Trapped in a digital surveillance system

*This article has been produced within the Panelfit project, supported by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission (grant agreement n. 788039). The Commission did not take part in the production of the article and is not responsible for its content. The article is part of the independent journalistic production of EDJNet