Keywords

Introduction

We […] need to strengthen our defences against terrorism, build our resilience and improve further the way we work together. Central to all of this is how we share information effectively. […] existing information systems need to be fully implemented and applied. For example, Member States still need to do more to implement Prüm.

Julian King, European Commissioner for the Security Union (12 July 2016). (European Commission, 2016)

The Prüm systemFootnote 1 is a transnational system that links European Union (EU) Member States’ national databases and works on the basis of reciprocal automated searching and comparison of DNA profile information, fingerprints and vehicle registration data. The aims of the Prüm system are directed towards stepping up cross-border cooperation, particularly in combating terrorism and cross-border crime (Council of the European Union, 2008a, 2008b). Almost a decade after the EU implemented this transnational regime of data exchange, Julian King, European Commissioner for the Security Union, was invited to the Third LIBEFootnote 2 Security Dialogue hosted by the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee in the European Parliament to talk about the Implementation and State of Play of the Prüm Decisions. As the above quotation outlines, Julian King argued in favour of the application and implementation of transnational regimes to set up and harmonize cross-border information systems based on biometrics in the name of unifying and integrating anti-terrorism and crime control policies.

In this book our aim is to contribute to the sociological and criminological literature on technological infrastructures, borders and specific visions of Europe. We take the Prüm system as an exemplary case of an EU techno-political project promoting integration in the area of security policies in order to reflect on the implications for de facto hidden integration and disintegration processes in Europe. It is important to note that we purposefully maintain a distinction between the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’. As Misa and Schot write (2005, p. 2), ‘For many people, Europe increasingly represents the space occupied by the EU. (…) to a significant extent, European and EU identities have merged’. We feel that, in times when nationalist rhetoric is stronger than ever and the cultural and political claims of the EU are much contested, the study of European integration processes is a pressing analytical issue. In line with that view, we argue that it is important to acknowledge the diversity of visions of Europe and to distinguish them from the views and practices of the EU as a political project materialized by supra-state institutions.

The programmatic policy agenda of integration in the EU is built into expectations of ‘full’ and ‘more’ implementation of information systems that—as we will outline in this book—are a response to diverse and less visible techno-scientific processes of (dis)integration across Member States. By looking into the Prüm regime of transnational biometric data exchange, we address the interplay between specific visions of Europe which foster the idea of Europe’s technological and political integration in law enforcement through borderless data exchange and the role of selected EU Member States in implementing or resisting those visions, a process that substantially contributes to how large-scale cross-border information systems evolve and are maintained.

We are interested in the multiplicity of what Misa and Schot (2005, p. 3), reflecting on technological infrastructures, have called the ‘hidden integration and hidden fragmentation of Europe’. The authors propose to study the history of European integration with a ‘focus not only on integration but also on fragmentation, segregation, disintegration, conflict, and exclusion (and without) underestimating the power of nationalism and the role of nation-states’ (Misa & Schot, 2005, p. 7). Hidden integration and disintegration is the result of the linking and delinking of technological infrastructures between nation-states. It also incorporates the movement of people, knowledge and artefacts across nation-states as certain ways of appropriating knowledge and artefacts in local contexts.

While Prüm evolved and became a techno-political security project carried out formally by the EU’s Member States, we concur with Misa and Schot in approaching the notion of Europe and the processes of EU’s integration as having been contested throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century, and not as a grand project with a set agenda, carried out from the top down. Through this lens, we are likewise interested in the hidden integration, but also disintegration, through shared and competing visions of Europe and nationhood in Europe, made manifest through technologies. In the context of Prüm, we understand Prüm primarily as the manifestation of one specific vision of Europe as a security union enacted by the EU through the enforcement of expansive data exchange across borders.

The vision implicit in the introductory quote by Julian King, which portrays Member States as implementers of the EU security agenda, turns out to be just one of many visions. We follow the proposal of Misa and Schot in viewing selected technology developments, such as the Prüm system, as Europe-building practices. Such practices reveal how specific concepts and visions of Europe—and, we might add, of nationhood—become enacted through the designs of transnational DNA database systems. But they also play out when Member States appropriate the requirements to join the transnational DNA data exchange as responses to and articulations of their own visions of Europe and nationhood. Thereby, we also follow other scholars influenced by the tradition in the history of technology that explores the ‘hidden integration’ deriving from an analysis of new transnational polities as outcomes of large-scale techno-political attempts at European integration (Misa & Schot, 2005; Schipper & Schot, 2011; Pelizza, 2020). Studies in this tradition have focused on ‘infrastructural Europeanism’, by investigating European transportation, energy, water and communication infrastructures, and studying how particular—potentially conflicting—visions of Europe become enacted (Pelizza, 2020). Pelizza has explored how, throughout the emergence of the EU’s migration management regimes and specific migration control technologies, including biometrics, multiple visions of ‘Europe’ have been enacted. While some actors and their visions are privileged, authorized and legitimized, others are marginalized or excluded.

The technological infrastructures in which we are interested are biometric database systems crossing borders for the EU and Member States’ law enforcement. Our reflection will mainly focus on the Prüm system and portray and critically examine its implications for the hidden integration and disintegration of Europe. More particularly, we will use the case of transnational DNA-related data exchange within the Prüm system to illuminate our reflections about the complex, multi-layered and hidden processes of integration and disintegration and to introduce and explore forms of what we will term ‘bioborders’ in law enforcement.

We understand bioborders to be elements that enable, restrict or constrain the linking of national DNA databases and the circulation of biometric data across state borders. By developing the notion of bioborders, we aim to develop an analytical approach that makes explicit the somewhat invisible bordering practices among transnationally expansive biometric technologies. The concept of bioborders also helps make visible the different visions of Europe enacted by nation-state-based actor networks entangled with national DNA databases and helps capture the reverse patterns of bordering practices linked to transnational biometric data exchange regimes.

The concept of biobordering is useful in reconstructing how the territorial foundations of national state autonomy are partially reclaimed and, at the same time, partially purposefully suspended. We explore these processes through five country cases: Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the UK.

The country cases have been selected with the aim of presenting diverse, yet complementary, examples of the dynamics, tensions and ambivalences of biobordering processes. The German case is that of a political driving force promoting permeable bioborders, while the Netherlands represents the case of a technological front-runner enabling technically and scientifically DNA data exchange across bioborders in the Prüm system. Our cases also include countries that have used Prüm to catch up with international crime control regimes and step up to EU standards as part of a drive for national modernization (Poland), countries that participate extensively in the Prüm system while maintaining a national protectionist regime (Portugal) and countries that remain ambiguous about the project of the EU and negotiate conditional participation in the Prüm system (the UK).

Yet, we wish to make clear that the book goes beyond the arguments around hidden integration and disintegration developed within approaches towards a European History of Science and Technology (Gillingham, 2003; George & Bache, 2001). We do so by providing an in-depth understanding of the ways in which infrastructures are partially polycentrically governed across borders with regard to the concentration of authority to design, interpret and control technology.

Our study confirms the role of particular communities of practices, which have been called a European ‘forensic technocracy’ (Prainsack & Toom, 2010), on the one hand, and the power of nation-states’ embedded agency, on the other hand. In identifying the technocratic drivers of integration in the case of the Prüm regime, Prainsack and Toom (2010) highlighted the role of forensic genetic scientists and their international organizations in standardizing forensic DNA profiling technologies across national borders. In order to further assess the role of nation-states’ embedded agency, we believe that it is important to also explore how transnational technological infrastructure projects such as Prüm that provide new infrastructures for information exchange within police collaboration (re)appropriate, (re)shape and contest notions of bioborders.

The development of transnational systems for the mass exchange of biometric data at and across borders has challenged conventional notions of borders. In migration studies, there is extensive literature about how digitization and biometrics have changed the character of border controls, which are explicitly about the control of border-crossings of people (Amoore, 2006; Leese, 2016; Bigo, 2014; Tsianos & Kuster, 2016; Dijstelbloem & Broeders, 2015). Yet, there is still a substantial lack of research on how digitization and biometrics have also changed the character of borders more ‘silently’ and ‘implicitly’ by enabling and facilitating border-crossings of people while simultaneously implementing systems designed to detect the mobility of ‘risky individuals’, such as criminal suspects. Aiming to fill this gap, this book brings to the fore how biometric data is increasingly travelling across borders in order to limit, control and contain the mobility of selected people, namely, criminalized populations. Consequently, the technological underpinnings of transnational criminal investigation and police collaboration regimes (Bigo, 2008; Hufnagel & McCartney, 2017; Machado, Granja, & Amelung, 2020) are at the heart of this book.

Prüm as a Case Through Which to Study the Dynamics of Bioborders and Their Impacts on Hidden Integration and Disintegration in the EU

We focus on the Prüm system, which established the mandatory exchange of forensic DNA data amongst EU Member States, because it is an underexplored example that portrays diverse instances of biobordering. The book builds on extensive research carried out in a five-year project funded by the European Research Council.Footnote 3

In law enforcement, different mechanisms to store and exchange biometric data continue to exist in parallel. In the context of DNA data, the Interpol DNA Gateway and Interpol DNA Database (IDD), as well as the Europol Information System (EIS), enabled DNA data exchange before the Prüm DNA data exchange was established. However, the exchange of DNA data within Prüm is still an interesting case because it became the favoured option when the scope and efficiency of the previously established information systems remained limited (Luif, 2007).

We focus on DNA data exchange, rather than on the exchange of fingerprint and vehicle data, in the Prüm regime for the following reasons. First, forensic DNA data is underexplored as a biometric identifier used to track transnational mobility of criminal suspects. Although there is considerable literature on how DNA technologies have been used in several national contexts (Williams & Johnson, 2008; Hindmarsh & Prainsack, 2010; Machado & Prainsack, 2012), their transnational uses remain poorly analysed, and cross-country comparisons are almost absent. Second, investigating DNA technologies allows us to study the ‘bio-value’ linked to DNA in law enforcement, which has evolved with the promise of DNA technologies working as a successful ‘truth machine’ (Lynch, Cole, McNally, & Jordan, 2008). Thus, this study provides an opportunity to engage in an in-depth analysis of how the transnational exchange of DNA data reflects the hidden (dis)integration of Europe materialized through seemingly uncontested biometric technologies. Third, the ‘bio-value’ of DNA forensic tools also conveys certain notions of risky people and specific modalities associated with transnational mobility and emphasizes certain modes of regulation in law enforcement (Machado et al., 2020). Such modalities are expressed through preferences for biometric evidence and constructions of suspicion related to it. One example of this is the priority given to certain crimes in criminal investigation over others. As Lawless puts it:

The Prüm regime’s emphasis on certain forms of evidence could potentially shift the focus of international policing from certain crimes onto others. The exchange of DNA, fingerprints and registration data could divert transnational police activity towards certain physical crimes to people or property but away from other recognized transnational threats such as fiscal or computer crime. (Lawless, 2016, p. 177)

By looking into the transnational exchange of DNA data, we, thus, explore the different logics of biobordering dynamics at work at the EU level by highlighting the legal, scientific, technical, political and ethical dimensions of data exchange across borders. Such biobordering dynamics enable a levelling mode of ordering aimed at diminishing technical, scientific and legal ‘obstacles’, and by doing so facilitate a seemingly smooth techno-political integration across the EU. We complement this EU-level-focused analysis with country case analysis that emphasizes the legal, scientific, technical, political and ethical dimensions related to the governance and uses of biometric technologies both at a national level and in transnational collaboration. We demonstrate how certain patterns coincide and others become distinct in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the UK.

We provide a panorama of cross-country dynamics and of the different countries’ situations by demonstrating how the particularities of national policy regulations and judicial traditions, as well as technological infrastructures and techno-political cultural repertoires, either enforce, complement or counter the biobordering dynamics of the EU. Therefore, we examine, portray and compare in detail the experiences and traditions of several countries with regard to their use of national forensic DNA databases, recent applications of forensic genetic innovations and forms of engagement with the Prüm system.

Taken together these elements reveal a multiplicity of heterogeneous dimensions constituting bioborder regimes. The portrayals of each country’s position regarding DNA data exchange provide insights into how national autonomy and sovereignty is claimed, negotiated and suspended not only through legal and political bordering processes but also through scientific and technical bordering practices that correspond with techno-political cultures and manifest specific regimes for biological data retention and exchange.

Book Overview

We begin, in Chap. 2, with an outline of the historical evolution of biometric databases in the EU and explore how these developments reconfigure notions of borders within the EU and at its outer edges. Our aim is to outline the EU’s political and technical attempts to secure the unhindered flow of biometric data among Member States. The historical summary covers the evolution of a range of diverse biometric technologies and database systems and their use in the context of crime and migration control. This broad framework helps us to understand why the Prüm system is of relevance to the reconsideration of bioborders.

In Chap. 3, we begin by reviewing recent impulses from border studies to clarify why we are proposing to use the concept of ‘biobordering’. We introduce the concept of ‘biobordering’ and use it to explore the modes of ordering through ‘distributed agency’ across actors including biometric specialists, criminal justice system personnel, data protection authorities and oversight bodies enacting and reinforcing borders through biological data in unexpected manners. We argue that the concept of biobordering is useful in trying to understand the modes of ordering entangled with large-scale IT database infrastructures for the exchange of biometric data. The chapter continues by outlining the notion of biobordering and its meaning in the context of the transnational exchange of DNA data regulated by the Prüm system. Taking the nationally grown crime control regimes into account, we argue that our conceptual proposal of bioborders is useful in capturing how the territorial foundations of national state autonomy are partially reclaimed—what we will call rebordering—and, at the same time, partially purposefully suspended—what we will call debordering. The chapter portrays how political and regulatory ambitions regarding European integration have translated into practices of debordering bioborders in the EU. This provides the basis for a closer look at how different biobordering regimes have evolved among EU Member States and how their modes of ordering have responded to the EU’s debordering tendencies. We close with an introduction to the case studies in the next chapters, which reveal emergent processes of de- and rebordering that are maintaining and contesting specific visions of Europe and enforcing references to state autonomy.

In Chap. 4 we portray the German case, which serves to illustrate an expansive and diffusive mode of debordering and provides evidence of the political blaming/shaming of Prüm non-compliers. Germany’s DNA database started in 1998 and has grown into one of the biggest in the EU. Its location in Central Europe has made Germany interested in rapidly increasing its bilateral exchange relations. Led by its Minister of the Interior, Germany was among those countries that drove the creation of the Prüm Convention. The German vision of Prüm was to harmonize international police collaboration by relying on biometric data. The politically dominant narrative of the government has repeatedly used the rhetorical repertoire of blaming and shaming with regard to those Member States not yet participating properly in the Prüm system and has thus echoed the debordering claims of the EU. However, several civil societal actors within Germany, casting a critical eye over the evolution of the database, have warned of risks deriving from the Prüm regime relating to privacy, the lack of transparency and accountability, and the manipulation of the assumption of innocence. In consequence, they have called for oversight and safety mechanisms, not necessarily as national standards in the sense of rebordering, but for the whole Prüm system.

Chapter 5 presents the case of the Netherlands. The Netherlands also serves as an exemplary case of an expansive and diffusive mode of debordering, although with important differences to Germany. The Dutch DNA database has been operational since 1997, and the Netherlands has a track record of ‘innovation’ regarding the regulation and practical application of genetic technologies for forensic purposes. In 2003, the Netherlands became the first country to regulate the use of genetically determined externally visible characteristics in criminal investigations. Since then, controversial uses of DNA data, such as familial searching and DNA dragnets, have gained importance in criminal investigations in the country. Like Germany, the Netherlands was also involved from the beginning with the Prüm Convention and, since then, has been a front-runner in building and implementing the technical framework for Prüm in its most expansive form. The Netherlands is the most active country in the Prüm regime (exchanging DNA data with all operational countries), and Dutch experts have proactively trained and supported implementation in other Member States of the Prüm system and have made considerable efforts to study and monitor cross-border DNA matches between the Netherlands and other operational Member States.

Chapter 6 provides insights into the Polish situation. Poland represents a country ambitious to catch up with an expansive mode of debordering. Among the five cases presented in the book, Poland was the last to join the EU. However, it then developed an ambitious approach to catching up with international crime control standards. Poland established its DNA database in 2007. From the beginning, issues of standardization and the facilitation of international DNA data exchange were considered as fundamental to Poland’s project to technologically modernize and integrate into the political EU. Poland joined the Prüm system in 2013 and, according to the latest data available, is one of the most proactive members, having established connections with 20 other countries. As a Member State aiming to further internationalize and modernize, police collaboration and expansion of its capacities as a security state frame the discourse about the importance of joining collective efforts to control cross-border criminality in the EU.

Chapter 7 explores the Portuguese case, which serves as an example of latent rebordering dynamics. Portugal established its forensic DNA databases in 2008 on the basis of one of the most restrictive regulatory frameworks in the EU with regard to the criteria for the entry and deletion of DNA profiles. In 2015, Portugal started connecting with the Prüm system’s genetic data exchange. Portugal represents a situation where the requirements of the EU regulations regarding Prüm have been fully enforced while, simultaneously, access to biometric data has been severely restricted. This situation mainly derives from particularities of national policy and judicial traditions. Portugal, thereby, enacts dynamics of rebordering that maintain restrictive regimes of regulation, legislation and data protection as a consequence of its own historically and culturally shaped political and judicial environment. Portuguese bioborders are thus addressed through a continuously oscillating pendulum between debordering and rebordering dynamics.

The final country case—that of the UK—follows in Chap. 8. The UK case serves as an example of an ambiguous mode of bordering. The UK established its database in 1995 and is, thereby, the possessor of the world’s oldest, and one of its largest, DNA databases. For several decades the UK has been dealing with substantial social and ethical implications related to the size and scope of its database. In this regard, the ‘S. and Marper’ case became a landmark against which to orient the possibilities and limitations of using forensic DNA. The UK withdrew from the Prüm system in December 2014. However, after running tests with other countries, it decided to rejoin the Prüm system in 2015, a decision that became operational in 2019. However, the recent Brexit scenario has politicized decision-making on bioborders and brought new challenges regarding the UK’s position in the Prüm system. The UK’s ambiguous mode of bordering is evidenced by its simultaneous rebordering, by negotiating limitations on access to its own data, and debordering, by claiming access to ‘foreign’ data.

The book concludes with Chap. 9, which summarizes, first, the modes of ordering at the EU level resulting in debordered bioborders, emphasizing the legal, scientific, technical and political dimensions. It does so by providing an overview that visualizes the analytical tools applied in each of the country case studies. Second, the final chapter shows how the Member States’ modes of ordering—which have national technical, scientific legal, organizational and civic epistemological dimensions—have resulted in diverse forms of de- and rebordered bioborders. The chapter also discusses how the mandatory elements of the Prüm Decisions were politically enforced without taking into consideration the significant differences between EU countries. Thus, disintegration comes as a contingency regarding, for example, operational and organizational traditions, legislation, the nature of the criminal justice system and national variations around the human and economic resources to invest in forensic DNA databases, DNA profiling technologies and other kinds of police information databases.

The levelling mode of ordering at the EU level enforced a specific version of bioborders that reflects the political belief that the interoperability of DNA databases is a mere technical–scientific issue. Thus, ‘European integration’ is believed to be achieved by the harmonization of scientific and technical procedures between laboratories and police forces in different countries.