Digital Borders Research Articles

China’s Data Sovereignty and Security: Implications for Global Digital Borders and Governance

China’s Data Sovereignty and Security: Implications for Global Digital Borders and Governance

An Infrastructural Brussels Effect: The translation of EU Law into the UK's digital borders

This article gives an account of the legal standards and safeguards that guide and constrain the current design of the UK's digital borders. Based on an empirical engagement with the development of Cerberus – an advanced risk-based analytics platform aimed at the detection of previously ‘unknown’ threats – the article presents a dual argument. On the one hand, it provides an account of the remaining salience and extraterritorial reach of EU law in setting standards for the collection, retention, processing and sharing of Passenger Name Records (PNR) data in the UK. This PNR data is a constitutive component of the digital border. Through the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the UK is now bound to comply with the rather stringent legal safeguards developed by the CJEU (in Opinion 1/15) on the retention and automated processing of PNR data. Our analysis shows the different channels through which EU law obtains this extraterritorial reach, how compliance can be monitored and enforced, and, crucially, how it has influenced and constrained the technical design of the UK's digital borders – a salient and unexplored phenomenon that we describe as an Infrastructural Brussels Effect. Yet, on the other hand, the article empirically shows that this is not merely a process of norm diffusion and extraterritoriality. Once legal standards become infrastructurally embedded in Cerberus, we witness normative translations and sociotechnical shifts with important legal and political consequences. Legal standards on ‘reasonable suspicion’ and the ‘objective evidence’ of ‘risk’, we argue, are given specific meaning through a logic of relational inference and algorithmic pattern detection (leading to forms of ‘concern by association’). By studying the entanglements between legal norms and material infrastructures – an approach we describe as infra-legalities – these normative effects become visible and contestable, providing a productive site for the sociolegal study of law and algorithmic governance.

Surveillance and Five Eyes: Changing Dimensions of India’s Cyber Security

Cyber security becomes more challenging in the interconnected global environment when digital borders surpass physical boundaries. This study closely looks into the dynamic interactions that exist between the Five Eyes Alliance’s widespread surveillance tactics and India’s cyber security resilience. Amid this complex web of international data protection dynamics, the tactics used by India provide insights into the difficulties faced and the creative solutions advancing the country’s digital defence. A thorough understanding of India’s response to the evolving threats posed by the cooperative intelligence efforts of Five Eyes’ alliance is shedding light on the multifaceted dimensions of the country’s cyber security posture as it navigates this challenging terrain. This investigation adds significant information to the larger conversation on global cyber security by highlighting the necessity of flexible tactics and creative solutions for protecting digital assets, both globally and domestically in India.

The neoliberal welfare state and its discontents. Slow violence against irregular migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT Welfare rights in Norway, as in other European nation-states, are increasingly used as techniques of control and management of irregular migration. Proliferation of borders is generated by dispersal of welfare rights, establishing structural differentiations. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with irregular migrants in Norway, we argue that the neoliberal welfare state produces precarious subject positions in three mundane ways: (a) through demarcation and diversification of rights; (b) through governmentality of time and temporality, such as the imposition of waiting; and (c) through access or lack of access to services in the welfare state, including what we call digital borders. Exploring the bordering structures of the welfare state we analyse the complex relation between technologies of government and its effect on everyday life of irregular migrants and we understand this relation as slow violence. This slow violence operates and is legitimized through the legal, policy and neoliberal welfare structures of the state. We show that the welfare state’s implication in migration management is legitimated by the Norwegian state’s principles of universalism and egalitarianism. Simultaneously, the seeping of migration management into welfare state principles and practices as well as the neoliberalization of the welfare state dwindle egalitarianism as a principle and value.

Rethinking Digital Borders to Address Jurisdiction and Governance in the Global Digital Economy

Digitalization is transforming economic activities, necessitating updated legal and policy frameworks for appropriate jurisdiction and governance. The borderless nature of digital trade introduces complexities around applicable laws, taxes, responsibilities, and liabilities. This paper reviews current debates on regulating digital spaces and reimagining digital borders to support equitable governance. Doctrinal and comparative analyses examine jurisdictional complexities. Grounded Theory assess regulatory initiatives. Ambiguous jurisdiction enables large platforms to circumvent laws. Prescriptive control risks stifling innovation. Blending scope-based rules with effects-based standards can balance control and openness. Principles-based extraterritorial applications of law aligned to global accords, demarcating platforms’ responsibilities based on risk levels and impacts are suggested. It calls for cooperation advancing rights and fairness.

Securing the Digital Perimeter Intrusion Detection for Robust Data Protection in Cybersecurity

In cybersecurity, protecting the digital boundaries is very important to avoid data leaks and illegal access. In order to keep data safe, intrusion detection systems (IDS) are very important for keeping an eye on things and finding strange behavior. This paper suggests a new way to make IDS better at protecting the digital border. Propsoed method uses complex encryption algorithms to make sure that data is safer within the digital borders. When you protect private data, it stays safe even if someone breaks into your network and gets to the data without the decoding key. In addition, our system uses machine learning techniques to constantly look at network traffic trends and find strange things that could mean an attack. First, it gives you tracking and reports in real time, so you can quickly deal with security risks. The second reason is that encryption protects the privacy, security, and validity of data. Third, adding machine learning improves the accuracy of IDS by lowering the number of false alarms and finding new risks. The paper discuss strong data protection in cybersecurity, the digital boundaries must be protected with advanced encryption methods and IDS that are based on machine learning. This method improves network security, keeps private data safe, and lowers the risk of hacking.

Challenges in smart nation building: a solution-oriented framework based on a systematic literature review

PurposeNations are opening their “digital borders” to allow the free movement of business, employment and skills. However, this process of digitalization is fraught with challenges. This study aims to identify these challenges to build a solution-oriented framework for smart nations.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducted a systematic literature review, analyzing 69 peer-reviewed academic papers out of 5,958 identified papers.FindingsThe identified challenges for smart nation building were categorized as follows: people and society, technology and innovation, digital infrastructure, politics, governance, economics and business and sustainability. To overcome these challenges, this study highlights the need for a holistic national approach, which includes solutions such as improving education, technology-driven innovations, investments for building smart nation infrastructure, top political leadership involvement, national vision and action plan, national regulatory frameworks, business environment and job creation, stakeholder engagement, renewable energy use and technological integration – all of which are key for sustainable development.Research limitations/implicationsThis study provides directions for building a smart nation framework, but the literature review results are confined to articles, conference papers and book chapters. This study could be further enriched if the findings are cross-checked with experts. This limitation will be addressed in future research.Originality/valueGiven the dearth of literature on this nascent concept, the insights from this study can guide policymakers and industry leaders involved in smart nation building and benefit researchers engaged in theoretical development.

Social Media Manipulation Deep Learning based Disinformation Detection

The rapid grow and use of different social platforms enhanced communication between different entities and their audiences plus the transformation through digitalization of existing, e.g., ideas and businesses, or the creation of new ones fully existing or depending on this digital environment. Nevertheless, next to these promising aspects, social media is a vulnerable digital environment where a diverse plethora of cyber incidents are planned and executed engaging a diverse range of targets. Among these, social media manipulation through threats like disinformation and misinformation produce a broad span of effects that cross digital borders into the human realm by influencing and altering human believes, behaviour, and attitudes towards specific ideas, institutions, or people. To tackle these issues, existing academic, social platforms, dedicated organizations, and institutions efforts exist for building specific advanced and intelligent solutions for detecting and preventing them. Regardless, these efforts embed defender’s perspective and are focused locally, at target level, without being designed to fit a broader agenda of producing and/or strengthening social media security awareness. On this behalf, this research proposes a deep learning-based disinformation detection solution for facilitating and/or enhancing social media security awareness in respect to offender’s perspective. To achieve this objective, a Data Science approach is taken based on the Design Science Research methodology, and the results obtained are discussed with a keen on further field developments regarding intelligent, transparent, and responsible solutions countering social manipulation through realistic participation and contribution of different stakeholders from different disciplines.

Digital borders in spatial-temporal mobility: Social inclusion and exclusion of Chinese migrant students in Macao

While mobile social media has increasingly become embedded in migrants’ daily lives, how mobile social media affects migrants’ cross-border experiences remains under-researched. Based on a 2-year ethnographic study, this article demonstrates a more complex relationship among mobile social media, migrants’ spatial-temporal mobility, and their subjective experience of social inclusion and exclusion. Situated in a Chinese cross-border context (Macao Special Administrative Region), this article elaborates on how mobile social media leads to heterogeneous and synchronous spatial-temporal mobility in a homogeneous time-narrative. This article further explains how and why mainland students’ social exclusion transforms into digital inclusion, where the blurring boundaries create the possibility of digital and social inclusion but also risk deeper exclusion and internal borders. The article argues for a new epistemology of the border, which is complicated, heterogeneous, and paradoxical, while mobile social media reinvigorates the border concept in how it constructs and deconstructs territorial/internal boundaries and inclusion/exclusion dynamics.

Web analytics and supply chain transportation firms' financial performance

<abstract> <p>In the dynamic landscape of today's digitized markets, organizations harness the power of vast and swiftly accessible data to glean invaluable insights. A significant portion of this data emanates from user behavior on business websites. Unraveling the intricacies of this user behavior has become paramount for businesses, serving as the compass guiding the adaptation and evolution of their digital marketing strategies. Embarking on an exploration of this digital frontier, our study delves into the virtual domains of enterprises entrenched in the supply chain sector of the Greek economy. The spotlight falls upon four dominant transportation firms of the Greek supply chain sector, to unravel the relationship between their website activities and the prediction of their stock market prices. Our analytical tools, adorned with sophisticated statistical methodologies, embracing normality tests, correlations, ANOVA, linear regressions and the utilization of regression residual tests were deployed with precision. As the analytical methodology was deployed, a revelation emerged: The digital footprints left by customers on the virtual domains of supply chain firms provided the ability to predict and influence stock prices. Metrics such as bounce rates, the influx of new visitors and the average time on websites emerged as important factors, that could predict the fluctuations in the stock prices of these Greek supply chain firms. Web analytics have been discerned as a determining factor for predicting the course of transportation firms' stock prices. It serves as a clarion call for global scrutiny, inviting scholars and practitioners alike to scrutinize analogous firms on a global canvas. In this convergence of virtual footprints and financial trajectories lies not just a revelation for today but a harbinger of insights that resonate far beyond the digital borders of the Hellenic transportation sector.</p> </abstract>

Digital routes and borders in the Middle East: the geopolitical underpinnings of Internet connectivity

ABSTRACT In the second half of the 2010s, the Arabian Peninsula experienced major foreign policy changes that suggested a reshuffling of the region as a security complex. This paper offers an analysis of the geography of Internet data routing in the Middle East in order to assess whether foreign policy shifts apply to cyberspace and the potential for meaningful cybersecurity cooperation. We specifically focus on the Qatar blockade and the Abraham agreements. Our main hypothesis is that the architecture of connectivity can reveal the level of existing cooperation between data-routing operators of different countries and can therefore serve as one among many indicators for the level of trust (or lack thereof) between these countries and, as a result, for the potential success of cyber cooperation. We argue that the architecture of connectivity only partially reflects foreign policy shifts in the Gulf Region and despite the political announcements, digital borders and rivalries in the region remain deep and could potentially create obstacles for meaningful cybersecurity cooperation.

Zoom in and zoom out the glocalized network: when transnationalism meets geopolitics and technopolitics

ABSTRACT Drawing on theories on transnationalism and organizational crisis communication, this research uses the lens of glocalized networks with both global and local connections to examine how Zoom, as a transnational tech firm, responds to geopolitics and technopolitics during the volatile times of a global pandemic. Based on digital, text, and video data, corporate documents, media interviews, and coverage, the research traces Zoom's trajectory before and during the pandemic. I first describe how glocalized networks enabled Zoom's birth and growth, especially taking advantage of cross-border talent flow and fundraising. Second, I assess how the same glocalized networks become a liability, forcing the firm to zoom in and out along the hardening physical and digital borders, due to shifting geopolitics and technopolitics in and between the United States and China. Results shed light on the transnational logics shaping Zoom's network reconfiguration to defend and restore its image that has been threatened by national security accusations.

Digital sovereignty and taking back control: from regulatory capitalism to regulatory mercantilism in EU cybersecurity

ABSTRACT In recent years, we have been able to observe the emergence and mainstreaming of an EU discourse on digital sovereignty, which highlights the importance of gaining back control of EU digital infrastructure and technological production, based on the EU's perceived loss of economic competitiveness, limited capacity to innovate, high degree of dependence on foreign digital infrastructures and service providers and, related to all these factors, difficulty in providing EU citizens with a high level of cybersecurity. Bearing in mind that a considerable percentage of these infrastructures and service providers are under private sector control, the present article asks how this sovereignty discourse conceptualises the role of the private sector in EU cybersecurity. Drawing from a Regulatory Capitalism theoretical model, this article proposes that the EU has instead entered a Regulatory Mercantilist phase where it seeks to reassert its control over cyberspace, impose digital borders, accumulate data wealth and reduce its dependence on external private sector actors whose values may not reflect those of the EU order. A new approach to cybersecurity is emerging, in which the non-EU private sector can be perceived as much of a threat as foreign powers, and from whom digital sovereignty must be secured.

Law's New Cartographies. Spatialization, Digital Borders and Spaces of Vulnerabilities

Law's New Cartographies. Spatialization, Digital Borders and Spaces of Vulnerabilities

Deconstructing the isolated astronaut-artist paradigm

In the context of a viral outbreak and necessary physical distancing, the emergence of new or the evolution of older artistic behavioural schemes becomes evident. We correlate the isolation space of the artist with the cockpit of a spaceship and the navigation and communication interfaces used by an astronaut. The cybernetic domain between physical space(s) and artist(s) can be thought of as consisting of many ‘organs’. It includes a core (black box), many-layered limits: skin, walls, mental and digital borders as well as mechanisms of connectivity with external entities (other astronauts in art spaceships). This space could be a bedroom, a studio, an office or any different location the artist uses as an isolated bubble of information sharing and manipulation (material and immaterial). For the construction of such an (astronaut, artist) ontology we use metaphors, etymological references, transformed concepts and creative analogies between the actual and the subjective space. As one case study for this paradigm, we experimented with a telematic performance of Heiner Müller’s Hamlet Machine titled, I want to be 171.

Infrastructure-embedded control, circumvention and sovereignty in the Russian Internet: An introduction

Pursuing the autonomisation and “sovereignisation” of their national Internet (RuNet) since the early 2010s, authorities in the Russian Federation are establishing increasingly stricter regulations on Internet innovation and practices. Since 2018, the team of the ResisTIC (Criticism and circumvention of digital borders in Russia) project explores how different actors of the RuNet resist and adapt to the recent wave of authoritarian and centralizing regulations. One of the project’s primary objectives is to explore the extent to which control and circumvention strategies are embedded in, and conducted by means of the infrastructure of the RuNet. This special issue provides a detailed overview of the different strands of research undertaken by the ResisTIC project team at the crossroads of digital sovereignty, data and infrastructure. Articles by the project team are entwined with contributions by specialists based in Russia and worldwide.

Attribution of Responsibility after Failures within Platform Ecosystems

ABSTRACT As digital platform ecosystems grow in prominence, their interconnectedness and complexity also grow, making operational failure likely. How failures in such systems affect user perceptions of separate ecosystem components, however, is not well understood. This research investigates attribution of responsibility and discontinuance recommendations for ecosystem components after failures of ambiguous origin. Building on attribution theory, platform ecosystems literature, and research on digital borders, we conducted two scenario-based experiments investigating negative consequences of failure for ecosystem components. We also explored contingent effects from design elements (border strength) and contextual factors (disruption severity). Results demonstrated that when failures occur, negative consequences diffuse to all ecosystem components, with apps receiving the strongest discontinuance recommendations. Greater disruption severity increased discontinuance recommendations for the app. Furthermore, border strength between ecosystem components shifted negative consequences for failure toward the platform (e.g., operating system [OS] and device). Perceptions of locus and controllability were the primary mechanisms driving attributions of responsibility for failure. However, contrary to attribution theory, lack of failure stability increased blame for the app instead of reducing it. Despite higher coordination costs, our results indicate the importance of better-integrated ecosystems that experience fewer faults and that app developers bear the greatest burden in delivering this experience. Furthermore, attribution for failure can be shaped by clearly delineated borders. Thus, design decisions affecting border strength should be actively managed by ecosystem participants, and app developers may be incentivized to elevate border strength.

Digital Racial Borders

It is the core and intended function of borders to discriminate. Descriptively, their purpose is to differentiate or distinguish among different categories of persons, sorting those who may enter and belong from those who may not. But it is also a core function of modern borders to discriminate in the normatively prejudicial sense—they allocate fundamental human rights differentially on the basis of race, gender, class, national origin, sexual orientation, and disability status, among others. In this essay, I briefly sketch what I have described elsewhere as the contemporary system of racial borders: border regimes that variously allocate and curtail mobility and migration on a racial basis, largely relying upon facially race neutral mechanisms. Second, I reflect on the increasing prevalence of digital technologies in border regimes and their enforcement, with an emphasis on their racial implications, drawing from my recent report to the UN General Assembly on racial discrimination in digital border enforcement. The contribution of this essay is thus to reflect on the co-constituting and mutually reinforcing effects of racial borders and digital borders, which require specific attention together as digital racial borders.

Digital borders in the European Union

The world is facing a new geoeconomic order in which digital media has changed the rules of the game. Borders are fuzzy and both companies and consumers try to strike a balance between free market access and the restrictions that protected economic interests establish. Based on these parameters, the European Union is trying to restructure the single market by applying global solutions that nevertheless collide with the protection measures demanded by economic operators, blocking the provision of services and the free movement of goods through so-called geoblocking. This practice consists of blocking access to services and/or the offer of products depending on the geographical origin of the user/client, either by redirecting users to local websites or simply by restricting access to their product brochure. The fact that consumer associations and users of digital platforms have considered this blockade as a real attack on the digital single market has led the European Union to seek legislative solutions. That is why the European Commission has promoted Regulation 2018/302, which aims to prevent unjustified geographical blocking and other forms of discrimination based on the nationality, place of residence or place of establishment of clients in the internal market. The justification of these protective measures as well as their location in the global geoeconomic space are studied in this work.

Controlling the Schengen Information System (SIS II): The Infrastructural Politics of Fragility and Maintenance

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the Schengen Information System (SIS II) – the largest data infrastructure supporting police cooperation and border controls in the European Union. Through the SIS II, national authorities exchange information about individuals and objects, and this across national and institutional boundaries. Yet, the SIS II does not always perform as anticipated in its design scripts. Following common threads about infrastructural politics across Science and Technology Studies, political geography and critical security studies, we explore fragility and maintenance as being intrinsic to the functioning of data infrastructures and crucial sites of governance. We show how the SIS II is kept under continuous control to operate as a controlling data infrastructure. This article contributes to a critical inquiry into the datafication of border controls by interrogating how data acquire the status of allegedly credible and accurate information. Ultimately, this approach pinpoints the inherent fragility of seemingly mighty data infrastructures and casts a light on those actors and processes that sustain, through maintenance, contemporary digital borders.