In two recent Horizon Europe research projects, adaptable and mobile AI-based surveillance assemblages are developed to secure both the external and internal borders of the European Union. AlgorithmWatch looked into project material that revealed a lopsided fixation on defense.
Two of the EU’s ongoing Horizon Europe research projects, SEAGUARD and BorderForce, are set to expand the digital surveillance infrastructure for the EU border regime, with a focus on mobile and adaptable “intelligent” solutions.
These projects started in late 2024 and shall provide new tools to implement the bloc’s ambitious and politically contentious “Migration Pact,” while delivering on the EU institutions' promise of “seamless,” “uninterrupted” border crossing. The extremely invasive technology is allegedly required to reduce waiting times and queues at EU borders without compromising security.
“I think these technologies are likely in place in order to apprehend people early on prior to, during or shortly after their border crossing and to bring them to detention centers where the screening and border procedures can then take place,” says Pauline Fritz, co-research and advocacy coordinator at the Border Violence Monitoring Network.
“This allows EU authorities to uphold the legal fiction of non-entry, i.e. the idea that people only ‘formally’ enter the EU after having gone through the screening procedures and entering asylum procedures. Alternatively, if the screening results in a rejection of their claim to asylum,” solutions such as the ones developed in BorderForce could be used “to justify the continued detention and subsequent return.” The technologies would also likely be designed to prevent "invisible" or “organized” crossings via “smuggling” networks,” concludes Fritz, “as to prevent people transiting through and reaching an EU country without having passed through the formal screening and border procedures.”
Only scarce information is publicly available about SEAGUARD and BorderForce, but AlgorithmWatch obtained documents through access to documents requests filed to the EU Commission’s Research Executive Agency (REA).
The BorderForce project is coordinated by the Austrian Institute of Technology, and co-funded by the EU with 4 million euros. According to project documents, the flexible surveillance systems would be capable of quickly adapting to “evolving threats.” With “self-sufficient,” “transportable” command and control stations, it aims at filling gaps left by the “fixed” monitoring assemblages that currently cover just 13% of the EU’s external borders, BorderForce participants lament.
Surveillance towers with anti-drone features will integrate data collected from swarms of unmanned vehicles that communicate with each other, multiple autonomous sensors, satellite data (including minuscule “CubeSats”), and open source data from the web and social media to provide real-time actionable data and threat assessments. Headsets that provide augmented 3D maps of border areas would allow border guards to interact more easily with all elements of the BorderForce surveillance assemblage, allowing them “to respond and adapt” to any circumstances “within a relatively short notice”.
SEAGUARD promises to develop and deploy similar maritime surveillance, but in this case our information requests were answered with an almost fully redacted Grant Agreement of the project. Crucial details were not available for public scrutiny, including headlines, working packages, deliverables, milestones, and even critical risks coming with the project.
We tried to challenge the agency’s decision, but REA’s director, Marc Tachelet, denied further disclosure: “The use cases, methodology, and operational contexts contain information that could expose vulnerabilities in security infrastructures and detection mechanisms or reveal strategic capabilities that could be exploited by adversaries or criminal entities,” he wrote. Tachelet added that revealing such basic details of SEAGUARD would undermine the project’s overall effectiveness, “by allowing hostile actors to adapt and circumvent the proposed security measures and compromise classified or sensitive collaborations with governmental and defence agencies. The exposure of this information could pose a direct threat to the integrity and effectiveness of security and defence operations.”
This fixation on defense agencies and operations is (unsurprisingly) at odds with the “exclusively civilian” focus of Horizon Europe projects. This might be due to the presence of the defense community in the project.
Members of the SEAGUARD consortium include Portugal's Defense Ministry and a plethora of important private players in the industry, military technology vendors such as Magellium, Azur Drones, and UTEK. Participants in the BorderForce project are also revealing. As documented in the material we obtained, its proposal was shaped by the Border Guards of Albania, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, Lithuania, and Bulgaria, according to their own operational needs.
If these technologies become operational, they will bring technological components developed in previous controversial EU-funded projects to the market, such as NESTOR, TRESSPASS, ARESIBO, and ROBORDER.
Such surveillance assemblages were measures in the wake of geopolitical tensions caused by the “instrumentalization of migrants.” “Third countries are considered to push migrants at the EU's borders for political reasons,” says Silvia Carta, advocacy officer at the Brussels-based NGO PICUM. In such cases, “member states could invoke derogations from standard EU asylum rules, limiting access to protection for people crossing their borders.” According to Carta, “mobile tech and AI-enabled border management systems may serve to facilitate the enforcement of these exceptional and restrictive measures.”
In other words, both SEAGUARD and BorderForce increase automated discrimination. “On the one hand, the EU promotes the use of technologies to facilitate the 'seamless’ movement of citizens and goods. On the other, it develops and deploys invasive tools to detect people suspected of being undocumented − often using discriminatory proxies like race or ethnicity.” This ultimately leads to violent immigration enforcement, such as detention and deportations. Given the extreme opacity surrounding SEAGUARD, and the fact that BorderForce is marketed as a model to be replicated all over Europe − and beyond −, we can safely conclude that the EU is betting big on these projects. We’ll be watching.
Want to learn more about EU-funded experiments at our borders? Read our long-read article:
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