Smart Border Research Articles

The French customs authority system is an example of effective combatance against customs offenses for Ukraine

The article analyzes the structure and functioning of French customs authorities, emphasizing their role in combating offenses in the customs sphere and the possibility of adapting their experience for Ukraine. The French customs service consists of several units responsible for various aspects of customs control, from intelligence to investigations and technical support. Special attention is paid to the use of innovative technologies, such as risk analysis systems and «smart borders», which significantly increase the efficiency of customs operations. These technologies allow accurate control of goods, vehicles and passengers, which ensures prevention of customs offenses. The results show that the structure of the French customs authorities, divided into specialized directorates (intelligence, operations, investigations and technical support), significantly contributes to the prevention of fraud, illegal trade and security threats. Active use of risk analysis systems and cooperation with international organizations helps France manage cross-border risks and ensure compliance with European standards. The French model offers a valuable plan for the modernization of the customs service of Ukraine and its integration into European and world standards. On the basis of the analysis of the experience of France, conclusions were drawn regarding the possible directions of development of the Ukrainian customs service, in particular through the introduction of modern technologies, automation of processes and strengthening of international cooperation. The integration of advanced risk management methods and automated control systems will allow Ukraine to improve the transparency, security and efficiency of customs operations, reducing the number of offenses and corruption.

Smart Ellis Island? Tracing techniques of automating border control

The buzzword “smart borders” captures the latest instantiation of media technologies constituting state bordering. This article traces historical techniques of knowledge-production and decision-making at the border, in the case of Ellis Island immigration station, New York City (1892–1954). State bordering has long been enabled by media technologies, engulfed with imaginaries of neutral, unambiguous, efficient sorting between desired and undesired migrants—promises central to today’s “smart border” projects. Specifically, the use of “proxies” for decision-making is traced historically, for example, biometric or biographic data, collected as seemingly authentic and neutral stand-ins for the migrant. Techniques of selecting, storing, and correlating proxies through media technologies demonstrate how public health anxieties, eugenics, and scientific technocracy of the Progressive Era formed the context of proxies being entrusted to enable decision-making. This pre-digital history of automation reveals how the logics and politics of proxification endure in contemporary border regimes and automated media at large.

Self-adaptive bifold-objective rate optimization algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a set of several sensor nodes that are used for monitoring heterogeneous physical objects. In WSNs, irregular and bursty traffic Leads to the congestion problem, which incites a decrease in Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and increases packet loss as well as end-to-end delay. In the recent era, manifold efforts have been carried out to reduce network congestion however, these solutions have slow and premature optimization. To address optimization issues, this paper presents a self-adaptive source-sending rate optimization algorithm, which is a hybrid version of Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA-III) and Bifold-objective Proportional Integral Derivative (BPID) called N3-BPID. These techniques play a significant role in optimizing source rates to reduce network congestion. NSGA-III is a reference-based evolutionary approach, which dynamically configures the PID coefficients to get an optimal response. Furthermore, a novel bifold-objective fitness function is designed that balances the trade-offs between two PIDs performance indexes such as the Integral of Absolute Error and the Integral of Square Error. Due to simplicity and efficiency, an identically weighted aggregation mechanism is applied to ensemble both objectives into a single one. The proposed work is implemented to demonstrate a smart border surveillance application using Network Simulator v3 and compared with the state-of-the-art congestion control model Cuckoo Fuzzy PID (CFPID). The experimental result reveals that the proposed algorithm has significantly outperformed existing schemes in terms of PDR by 6.82%, packet loss by 24.52%, end-to-end delay by 15.31%, and queue length deviation by 8.93%.

IOT and ROBOTICS based Border Security using Machine Learning

The escalating security challenges at borders necessitate the implementation of robust and intelligent solutions. This paper investigates the potential of integrating Internet of Things (IoT) devices and robotics with machine learning (ML) for improved border security. IoT sensors strategically deployed along the border perimeter gather real-time data on environmental conditions, human movement, and potential intrusions. Robots equipped with sophisticated sensors and surveillance cameras further augment data collection capabilities. Machine learning algorithms analyze the collected data to identify anomalies, suspicious activities, and potential border breaches. This integration of technologies fosters a comprehensive border security system that is efficient, cost-effective, and adaptable to evolving threats. Keywords- Internet of things(IOT), Robotics, Machine Learning, Surveillance, Sensor Networks, Arduino, Facial Recognition , Object Detection, Intruder Alert, Smart Border

“So, if you ask whether fences work: they work”—the role of border fortifications for migration control and access to asylum. Comparing Hungary and the USA

This paper analyzes the role of border fortifications for migration control and access to asylum based on two case studies: the Hungarian–Serbian and U.S. American–Mexican borders. The research is based on qualitative interviews on both sides of the borders. It shows that despite other options for border control, fortifications still play an important role, especially for asylum seekers. Fences fulfill a material, a symbolic and a filtering function here. The three functions contribute in different ways to preventing asylum seekers from crossing the border, thus depriving refugees of the opportunity to apply for asylum. The paper shoes that fences fulfill functions that other forms of border control (such as shifting or smart borders) cannot accomplish in the same way and it thereby contributes to understanding the ‘puzzle’ of contemporary border fencing.

Data feminism and border ethics: power, invisibility and indeterminacy

ABSTRACT Human activities are being increasingly regulated by means of technologies. Smart borders regulating human movement are no exception. I argue that the process of digitization – including through AI, Big Data and algorithmic processing – falls short of respecting (fundamental) rights to the extent to which it ignores what I term to be the problem of indeterminacy. While adopting a data feminist approach in this paper, assuming that data is the ‘new oil’, that is power, I begin theorizing indeterminacy from the imminent risks of datafication as a new instrument of oppression perpetuating injustice and widening inequality gaps. I conclude that technologies regulating human activities must stand ethical scrutiny, especially if they can and do result in (human) rights violations. Unlike the oil being extracted from the ground, data is de facto extracted from people endowed with agency, autonomy, rights and contexts – all which ought to be respected and protected.

Trade Facilitation at the Peru–Chile Land Border: Policy Impact of Digital Importation and Prearrival Declarations

This policy report examines the impact of the Peruvian Foreign Trade Public Policy implemented at the Santa Rosa Centre of Compliance (CAFSR) at the land border between Peru and Chile, presenting original research and quantitative analysis of statistics from the CAFSR at the Peruvian border collected by the National Superintendency of Customs and Tax Administration (SUNAT) from 2019 to 2022. The results show that customs compliance controls have been expedited, simplified, and modernised by both the digital importation process and mandatory prearrival customs declarations. However, the analysis calls for two further risk assessment strategies to be adopted by customs administrations in both countries. First, applying additional filters to identify fraud in prearrival customs declarations could expedite the release of low-risk consignments and help to ensure higher-risk consignments are subject to additional border restrictions. This paper suggests implementing an innovative blockchain technology that allows for the timely and accurate sharing of encrypted customs declarations to administrations in Peru and Chile. Second, upgrading infrastructure and logistics at the CAFSR could increase the capacity of the border post to facilitate increased binational trade.
 
 As a result, expediting the flow of goods and reducing time and costs facilitate trade. To maintain and enhance the advances, evaluating the infrastructure, logistics, and the automatic assignation of control channels is necessary. The flow of goods increased at CAFSR, even though the percentage per type of control (physical, documentary, or free) remains steady. Hence, the evaluation and adoption of this paper's recommendations are necessary as they also include the Smart Borders Project, announced to be executed up to 2024, aimed to automatize customs control and make it less intrusive and more intelligent through the extensive use of technology, risk assessment and data mining.

E-Securing the EU Borders: AI in European Integrated Border Management

In the European Union, the external borders were not always conceived as European ones. However, after experiencing a range of threats, the European policymakers identified external borders' importance to European security. Not forgetting that borders are connected with national authority, the EU through Frontex has made progressive steps towards a coordinated or even common border management. The main tools to achieve that are the shared European IT systems. Their enhanced capabilities, mostly based on Artificial Intelligence, will further establish the European Smart Borders. There is a complex "network” of IT border systems already operating or prospect automated ones that are necessary to be resilient and align with core fundamental rights.

Wykorzystywanie systemów sztucznej inteligencji (SI) na zewnętrznych granicach Unii Europejskiej. Możliwości, zagrożenia i wyzwania

The European Union and its Member States are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enhance border controls. This is one of the manifestations of a broader trend of moving towards the so-called smart borders of the Union. This article presents EU initiatives on the development and implementation AI-based digital technologies to improve the control and security of the Union’s external borders. The main directions of the use of AI were analyzed, i.e. in the field of automatic recognition of fingerprints and faces, emotion detection, algorithmic profiling and monitoring, analysis and forecasting of migration. The aim of the article is, on the one hand, to show that the careful implementation and use of AI-based technology for border control can bring many benefits. On the other hand, however, these benefits must be balanced with the significant threat posed by these technologies to the protection of the fundamental rights of the individual.

Smart Border is Watching You! Fundamental rights implications of automated data processing and decision-making at the EU Border

Smart Border is Watching You! Fundamental rights implications of automated data processing and decision-making at the EU Border

A Semantic Knowledge based Context-aware Formalism for Smart Border Surveillance System

A Semantic Knowledge based Context-aware Formalism for Smart Border Surveillance System

Towards Understanding of User Perceptions for Smart Border Control Technologies using a Fine-Tuned Transformer Approach

Smart Border Control (SBC) technologies became a hot topic in recent years when the European Union (EU) Commission announced the Smart Borders Package to improve the efficiency and security of the border crossing points (BCPs). Although, BCPs technologies have potential benefits in terms of enabling traveller' data processing, they still lead to acceptability and usability challenges when used by travelers. Success of technologies depends on user acceptance. Sentiment analysis is one of the primary techniques to measure user acceptance. Although, there exists variety of studies in literature where sentiment analysis has been used to understand user acceptance in different domains. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study where sentiment analysis has been used for measuring the user acceptance of SBC technologies. Thus, in this study, we propose a fine-tuned transformer model along with an automatic sentiment labels generation technique to perform sentiment analysis as a step towards getting insights into user acceptance of BCPs technologies. The results obtained in this study are promising; given the condition that there is no training data available from BCPs. The proposed approach was validated against IMDB reviews dataset and achieved weighted F1-score of 79% for sentiment analysis task.

Graphene-Based RFID Tag Antenna for Vehicular Smart Border Passings

Globalization has opened practically every country in the globe to tourism and commerce today. In every region, the volume of vehicles traveling through border crossings has increased significantly. Smartcards and radio frequency identification (RFID) have been proposed as a new method of identifying and authenticating passengers, products, and vehicles. However, the usage of smartcards and RFID tag cards for vehicular border crossings continues to suffer security and flexibility challenges. Providing a vehicle's driver a smartcard or RFID tag card may result in theft, loss, counterfeit, imitation, or vehicle transmutation. RFID sticker tags would replace RFID tags as vehicle border passes to solve the mentioned problem. The RFID sticker tag adheres to the windscreen, side screen, dash, hood, or door of the vehicle, or any other acceptable location. Any damage or stripping from the installed location may cause data corruption and cannot be reused. Overall, these sticker tags will make the border crossings more secure and efficient. This article focuses on designing a rectangular-shaped RFID sticker tag antenna made of graphene sheets as a possible solution for smart border crossings. The proposed antenna is mathematically designed and analyzed with CST software to determine the optimum parameters. The design parameters are then used to create an antenna on a prepared graphene sheet. The performance results are carried out with CST software and a network analyzer. The designed RFID antenna stick on a car windscreen offers approximately 900 MHz bandwidth over the frequency range from 1.8 GHz to 2.7 GHz with an average gain of 1.23 dBi at the frequency to be used of 2.4 GHz microwave RFID band. The radiation is an omnidirectional pattern. The proposed graphene-sheet rectangular-shape monopole antenna is compact, low-cost, and bendable to fit into the windscreen of a car while retaining excellent wave propagation capabilities. These findings illustrate the suggested antenna's potential as an RFID tag antenna in a vehicular smart border pass system.

Examining Nigeria’s Digital Identity Project as Tool for Economic Inclusion and Regional Integration

Access to the digitised economy has an increased penetration across the spectrum of Africa's rural and urban population. In Nigeria, which is the context of this study, there is a long unsettling debate delineating citizens residing within any locality in Nigeria as 'indigenes' or 'settlers'. This is at variance with the concept of 'transnational citizenship', which confers rights to social inclusion in any individual's nation-state. Digital identity registration becomes imperative to preserve social order and broaden the lines of inclusion for access to social services and monitoring access to the digital economy. The National Identity Number (NIN) is the digital identity for Nigerian citizens and residents, which can be leveraged for economic digitisation and regional and continental integration efforts. The research methodology employs descriptive and explanatory analysis of national, regional and continental policy frameworks applicable to Nigeria's digital identity management systems. Boundaries of inclusion, transnational citizenship and the Westphalian Treaty of nation sovereignty form the theoretical underpinning of the study. This is used to present digital identity as a vital tool for socioeconomic inclusion, regional and continental integration. The case study of the Schengen Agreement as a successful integrative digital identity system fostering economic integration in Europe forms the basis of the recommendation. This calls for the ultimate use of digital identity to enhance international operable smart border practice, which would in turn guarantee border security while encouraging the desired free movement of persons and goods within the African continent

Smart border patrol using drones and wireless charging system under budget limitation

Harsh environmental factors surrounding the national borders as well as their extensive length make the use of manned systems for monitoring every location on the border a risky, expensive, and hardly possible task. Smart border patrol using small-size drones may provide significant help in patrolling areas inaccessible to patrol agents, reduce agent response time, and increase the safety of patrol agents working in dangerous regions. However, the short flight duration associated with small-size drones due to battery limitation can be a serious drawback for such a system for seamless surveillance. Therefore, this paper proposes a drone-based continuous surveillance system for border patrol with a dynamic wireless battery charging system that is built onto an electrification line (E-line). To control the maximum time interval between two consecutive flights to a particular section of the border, a permitted revisiting gap is assigned to each location on the border based on its criticality. A multi-objective mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model is developed to minimize both the total length of the E-line system for the wireless charging system and the number of drones to satisfy the revisiting gap constraint for a secure border patrol. A solution algorithm is proposed to achieve the Pareto-optimal set. This method provides the decision-maker with a set of candidate solutions to choose from based on their priorities and budgetary constraints. We illustrate our method using a case study on a segment of the US-Mexico borderline.

Establishment of Biometric Verification System Based on Design Science Research Methodology and Sensing System for Smart Border Control

Establishment of Biometric Verification System Based on Design Science Research Methodology and Sensing System for Smart Border Control

Contextualizing Security Innovation: Responsible Research and Innovation at the Smart Border?

Current European innovation and security policies are increasingly channeled into efforts to address the assumed challenges that threaten European societies. A field in which this has become particularly salient is digitized EU border management. Here, the framework of responsible research and innovation (RRI) has recently been used to point to the alleged sensitivity of political actors towards the contingent dimensions of emerging security technologies. RRI, in general, is concerned with societal needs and the engagement and inclusion of various stakeholder groups in the research and innovation processes, aiming to anticipate undesired consequences of and identifying socially acceptable alternatives for emerging technologies. However, RRI has also been criticized as an industry-driven attempt to gain societal legitimacy for new technologies. In this article, we argue that while RRI evokes a space where different actors enter co-creative dialogues, it lays bare the specific challenges of governing security innovation in socially responsible ways. Empirically, we draw on the case study of BODEGA, the first EU funded research project to apply the RRI framework to the field of border security. We show how stakeholders involved in the project represent their work in relation to RRI and the resulting benefits and challenges they face. The paper argues that applying the framework to the field of (border) security lays bare its limitations, namely that RRI itself embodies a political agenda, conceals alternative experiences by those on whom security is enacted upon and that its key propositions of openness and transparency are hardly met in practice due to confidentiality agreements. Our hope is to contribute to work on RRI and emerging debates about how the concept can (or cannot) be contextualized for the field of security—a field that might be more in need than any other to consider the ethical dimension of its activities.

Deterritorialization of Controls and Smart Borders

SMART borders for seamless Trade, Travel and Transport was the slogan chosen by the World Customs Organisation to celebrate the World Customs Day in 2019. This concept, which refers to the massive use of information technology for the purpose of deterritorialization of controls, has been the subject of numerous discussions in various academic venues, conferences and seminars held over the last two years. This article attempts to summarise the evolution of the concept with the most recent trends that are reshaping the commercial landscape and business processes of Customs and other border authorities.

The British-Irish Border in the Context of Brexit

The subject of the paper is reflections on the consequences of Brexit for the functioning of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The author explains what this border means when the United Kingdom is no longer a member of the European Union, and thus the border may be a barrier to the free movement of people, goods, capital and services. At the same time, it is stressed that the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union will have a significant impact on the change of the function of this border, which from then on is no longer an internal border of the Union.
 The aim of the paper is therefore to analyse the consequences of this change, with a simultaneous indication of different models of the UK’s functioning with relation to the European Union and their impact on the British-Irish relations, especially with regard to the various dimensions of the border as a barrier.
 The article presents various scenarios of solutions that will determine their mutual relations as a result of negotiations between the European Union and Great Britain, especially with regard to access to the single European market, which in turn will be influenced by the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland in the scope of the free movement of people, goods, capital and services. The author used the system analysis method and the comparative method.
 The author puts forward the thesis that if the negotiations cause a fairly strong loosening of relations between the UK and the European Union, to mitigate the consequences of such a situation for the Irish-British relations, it will be necessary to find and develop bilateral solutions that will facilitate border crossing. The Smart Border 2.0 concept can constitute such a solution.

Bordering the World in Response to Emerging Infectious Disease: The Case of SARS-CoV-2

Facing emerging zoonose SARS-CoV-2, states decided unilaterally to close borders to individuals and revealed deep processes at work ‘bordering of the world’. Smart borders promoted by international organizations have allowed the filtering of indispensables (merchandise, data, capital and key workers) from dispensables (human beings) and, above all, the redefinition of the balance of biopolitical power between state and society. The observation of the unprecedented phenomenon of the activation and generalization of the global border machinery captures a common global dynamic. After a round-the-world tour of border closures between 21 January and 7 July 2020, we concentrate on a few emblematic cases: the Schengen zone, the USA–Canada and USA–Mexico borders, Brazil–Uruguay, Malaysia–Singapore and Morocco–Spain. We interrogate the justification and the strategies of border closure in a context of the global spread of an emerging epidemic, going beyond the simple medical argument. Choices appear to be dependent on ideological orientations henceforth dominant on the function and role of borders. We will discuss the acceleration of the bordering of the world, the forms of its outcome and its difficult reversibility.