Suspect Development Systems: Databasing Marginality and Enforcing Discipline

Algorithmic accountability law—focused on the regulation of data-driven systems like artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision-making (ADM) tools—is the subject of lively policy debates, heated advocacy, and mainstream media attention. Concerns have moved beyond data protection and individual due process to encompass a broader range of group-level harms such as discrimination and modes of democratic participation. While a welcome and long overdue shift, the current discourse ignores systems like databases, which are viewed as technically “rudimentary” and often siloed from regulatory scrutiny and public attention. Additionally, burgeoning regulatory proposals like algorithmic impact assessments are not structured to surface important –yet often overlooked –social, organizational, and political economy contexts that are critical to evaluating the practical functions and outcomes of technological systems. This Article presents a new categorical lens and analytical framework that aims to address and overcome these limitations. “Suspect Development Systems” (SDS) refers to: (1) information technologies used by government and private actors, (2) to manage vague or often immeasurable social risk based on presumed or real social conditions (e.g. violence, corruption, substance abuse), (3) that subject targeted individuals or groups to greater suspicion, differential treatment, and more punitive and exclusionary outcomes. This framework includes some of the most recent and egregious examples of data-driven tools (such as predictive policing or risk assessments), but critically, it is also inclusive of a broader range of database systems that are currently at the margins of technology policy discourse. By examining the use of various criminal intelligence databases in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we developed a framework of five categories of features (technical, legal, political economy, organizational, and social) that together and separately influence how these technologies function in practice, the ways they are used, and the outcomes they produce. We then apply this analytical framework to welfare system databases, universal or ID number databases, and citizenship databases to demonstrate the value of this framework in both identifying and evaluating emergent or under-examined technologies in other sensitive social domains. Suspect Development Systems is an intervention in legal scholarship and practice, as it provides a much-needed definitional and analytical framework for understanding an ever-evolving ecosystem of technologies embedded and employed in modern governance. Our analysis also helps redirect attention toward important yet often under-examined contexts, conditions, and consequences that are pertinent to the development of meaningful legislative or regulatory interventions in the field of algorithmic accountability. The cross-jurisdictional evidence put forth across this Article illuminates the value of examining commonalities between the Global North and South to inform our understanding of how seemingly disparate technologies and contexts are in fact coaxial, which is the basis for building more global solidarity

Citizenship deprivation

Most critical analyses assess citizenship-deprivation policies against international human rights and domestic rule of law standards, such as prevention of statelessness, non-arbitrariness with regard to justifications and judicial remedies, or non-discrimination between different categories of citizens. This report considers instead from a political theory perspective how deprivation policies reflect specific conceptions of political community. We distinguish four normative conceptions of the grounds of membership in a political community that apply to decisions on acquisition and loss of citizenship status: i) a ‘State discretion’ view, according to which governments should be as free as possible in pursuing State interests when determining citizenship status; ii) an ‘individual choice’ view, according to which individuals should be as free as possible in choosing their citizenship status; iii) an ‘ascriptive community’ view, according to which both State and individual choices should be minimised through automatic determination of membership based on objective criteria such as the circumstances of birth; and iv) a ‘genuine link’ view, according to which the ties of individuals to particular States determine their claims to inclusion and against deprivation while providing at the same time objections against including individuals without genuine links. We argue that most citizenship laws combine these four normative views in different ways, but that from a democratic perspective the ‘genuine link’ view is normatively preferable to the others. The report subsequently examines five general grounds for citizenship withdrawal – threats to public security, non-compliance with citizenship duties, flawed acquisition, derivative loss and loss of genuine links – and considers how the four normative views apply to withdrawal provision motivated by these concerns. The final section of the report examines whether EU citizenship provides additional reasons for protection against Member States’ powers of citizenship deprivation. We suggest that, in addition to fundamental rights protection through EU law and protection of free movement rights, three further arguments could be invoked: toleration of dual citizenship in a political union, prevention of unequal conditions for loss among EU citizens, and the salience of genuine links to the EU itself rather than merely to one of its Member States

Does identity matter?

We examine the question of whether identity is just a `label' or whether it matters in affecting outcomes, such as education, employment or political orientation, using data on Turkish and ex Yugoslavian second generation immigrants in Austria and Germany. We begin with an empirical investigation of identity formation, with a focus on parental investment in their child's identity, and use this to understand the impact of the child's own identity on own outcomes, a generation later. The results suggest that identity does not have a significant effect on education, employment and political orientation, thus suggesting that a strong ethnic/ religious minority identity does not constrain the second generation or hamper socioeconomic integration

Citizenship Deprivation: A Normative Analysis. Liberty and Security in Europe No. 82, 19 March 2015

Most critical analyses assess citizenship-deprivation policies against international human rights and domestic rule of law standards, such as prevention of statelessness, non-arbitrariness with regard to justifications and judicial remedies, or non-discrimination between different categories of citizens. This report considers instead from a political theory perspective how deprivation policies reflect specific conceptions of political community. We distinguish four normative conceptions of the grounds of membership in a political community that apply to decisions on acquisition and loss of citizenship status: i) a ‘State discretion’ view, according to which governments should be as free as possible in pursuing State interests when determining citizenship status; ii) an ‘individual choice’ view, according to which individuals should be as free as possible in choosing their citizenship status; iii) an ‘ascriptive community’ view, according to which both State and individual choices should be minimised through automatic determination of membership based on objective criteria such as the circumstances of birth; and iv) a ‘genuine link’ view, according to which the ties of individuals to particular States determine their claims to inclusion and against deprivation while providing at the same time objections against including individuals without genuine links. We argue that most citizenship laws combine these four normative views in different ways, but that from a democratic perspective the ‘genuine link’ view is normatively preferable to the others. The report subsequently examines five general grounds for citizenship withdrawal – threats to public security, non-compliance with citizenship duties, flawed acquisition, derivative loss and loss of genuine links – and considers how the four normative views apply to withdrawal provision motivated by these concerns. The final section of the report examines whether EU citizenship provides additional reasons for protection against Member States’ powers of citizenship deprivation. We suggest that, in addition to fundamental rights protection through EU law and protection of free movement rights, three further arguments could be invoked: toleration of dual citizenship in a political union, prevention of unequal conditions for loss among EU citizens, and the salience of genuine links to the EU itself rather than merely to one of its Member States

Geographical Range Extension of the Spotfin burrfish, Chilomycterus reticulatus (L. 1758), in the Canary Islands: A Response to Ocean Warming?

In recent decades, numerous marine species have changed their distribution ranges due to ocean warming. The Spotfin burrfish, Chilomycterus reticulatus, is a reef fish with a global distribution along tropical, subtropical and warm-temperate areas of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. In this work, we analyzed the presence of this species, between 1990 and 2019, at two islands of the Canarian Archipelago under varying oceanographic conditions: El Hierro (the westernmost island, under more tropical conditions) and Gran Canaria (a central-east island, under more cooler conditions). We expected that, under increased ocean temperatures in recent decades, the number of sightings has increased in Gran Canaria relative to El Hierro. We compiled information from different sources, including interviews and local citizenship databases. A total of 534 sightings were reported: 38.58% from El Hierro and 61.43% from Gran Canaria. The number of sightings on Gran Canaria has significantly increased through time, at a rate of 0.1 sightings per year; at El Hierro, however, the number of sightings has not significantly changed over time. Sea Surface Temperature has linearly increased in both El Hierro and Gran Canaria islands over the last three decades. Positive Sea Surface Temperature anomalies, particularly in 1998 and 2010, including high winter minimum temperatures, provide an ideal oceanographic context to favour the arrival of new individuals and, consequently, the increase in the number of sightings in Gran Canaria. Still, potential donor areas of fish recruits remain unknown