One Thing After Another: The Politics of Police Technologies by Chris Jones
From spot-checks to pervasive surveillance
“That is what I wished to avoid,” she said. “They have now taken to spot-checks on passengers leaving the country. They whittle away our liberties one by one” (Greene, 1969).
In Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt, the titular Aunt Augusta begins a lengthy journey with a trip from London to Paris by plane. Whilst at Heathrow airport, she is desperate to avoid customs officials inspecting her bags. Armed with a thorough knowledge of the relevant security procedures – and the unwitting support of her hapless nephew – she succeeds.
The novel is presumably set in the late 1960s, the time at which it was written. Since then, we have gone from occasional spot-checks on passengers to blanket pre-departure profiling, (Statewatch, 2020) x-ray scans of luggage and bodies, the possibility of lengthy and invasive interrogations, and occasional swab tests for explosives.
Were Aunt Augusta catapulted into the present, her horror would surely be multiplied a hundredfold – though as a well-heeled white woman, she would certainly have less to worry about than many other people at the airport.
The ongoing securitisation of borders is not only designed to give states greater control over human movement. It also provides new opportunities for states to track down and crack down upon activists, journalists and dissidents (Statewatch, 2025).
This both precedes and echoes other securitisation processes designed to increase states’ policing powers. The gradual integration of increasingly advanced forms of digital technology only adds to the possibilities for more surveillance and repression.
The creation, connection and integration of vast quantities of data on people, objects and processes is increasingly fundamental to securitisation efforts. This is, in part, driven by a belief that appears to be widely-held by security planners, officials and politicians: the possibility of technological ‘solutions’ to social and political problems.
That belief is underpinned by the speed and power of modern digital technologies. For security officials (and corporate sales departments), the value of these technologies resides in the possibilities they offer for the continual monitoring and assessment of goods and people.
This is not a new phenomenon. The police first began using digital computers in the 1970s, leading to warnings about dangerous new possibilities for state surveillance and political policing (Anderson and Pounder, 1979).
Since then, various new ways of gathering and processing data have been held up by state and corporate representatives as solutions to crime, terrorism, radicalisation, immigration, and so on. The last decade alone has seen data-driven policing, intelligence-led policing, social media intelligence and big data – amongst other things – pulled out of the techno-corporate bag of tricks.
This suggests that the digital harvest sought by the police is in fact one of fruits that ripen, but are never quite ready. Nevertheless, the reaping and sowing continues. The latest addition to this list of data-processing techniques is artificial intelligence (AI). While its possibilities are clearly over-hyped, it undoubtedly offers new tools and possibilities to the state, and new dangers for political activists.
We should note, however, that the authorities do not necessarily need advanced digital technologies to undermine or repress social and political movements. Good old-fashioned human labour often does the job just fine.
This has been made clear by the astonishing depravity of the spycops scandal in the UK (Statewatch, 2025). An official inquiry has revealed that over five decades, hundreds of undercover police officers were deployed to spy on and undermine primarily left-wing and progressive groups. Many of them had intimate relationships with those they spied on, and at least one – Bob Lambert – fathered a child with one of his ‘targets’, who had no idea he was a police officer (Lambert, 1988).
AI for repression?
Nevertheless, it is possible to map – at least in part – the technologies used by the police and how they function.
Police forces undoubtedly harvest data from the phones of activists they arrest (Statewatch, 2025). They may also engage in more general monitoring of activists’ telecoms, making it possible to see where they have been, who they have been in contact with, and when (Zeit Online). They may also directly tap peoples’ devices, whether with spyware or more traditional means.
There are various ways to uncover this kind of information.
People may discover traces of intrusion or spyware on their devices. In many countries, data on police contracts with private companies may be at least partly-accessible. Freedom of information laws offer a means to acquire more information on tools and technologies, even if requests are often denied or answers are insufficient. Academic research projects often obtain far greater access to information than journalists or activists, and may offer useful insights. For example, an ongoing project in the UK is attempting to map all the AI tools used by the country’s police forces (Probable Futures).
Reinforcing everyday injustices
So-called ‘predictive’ policing tools, for example, are premised on the idea that information already known to the police – whether about people, a particular location, or both – can be used to inform future police patrols and interventions.
The reality is otherwise. Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the UK, are amongst the many states using tools designed to predict where a crime might take place, or by whom a crime may be committed. The crimes in question can be wide-ranging and will depend on the data fed into the system. They could cover, for example, burglary, vehicle theft, public disorder, or assault.
These tools provide new means for the authorities to monitor, repress and punish people and communities. This simply reinforces the quotidian racist, classist and gendered injustices meted out by the police (Statewatch, 2025).
The reasons for this are fairly obvious – the police data that feeds these systems reflects historic and existing biases within the criminal justice system and wider society. Similar effects will likely be seen wherever a ‘predictive’ system is deployed. Patrick Williams has aptly noted that predictive policing would best be referred to as “predictable” policing (Amnesty International, 2025).
These banal realities have done little to stem the enthusiasm amongst police and border officials for new technologies built on so-called AI (Statewatch, 2025), the calculations and outcomes of which can be even harder to scrutinise than in less complex systems.
Opposition to particular technologies is not enough
Decades of campaigns against new police, surveillance, security and border powers have largely failed to halt their growth. Even supposedly ‘progressive’ governments tend to continue providing new repressive powers to the forces of law and order, with fear and suspicion whipped up by media outlets to help usher in new laws.
However, just because a campaign fails to halt the introduction of a particular law or policy does not mean it is a failure. The development of new coalitions, increased public awareness of a particular issue, or the testing of new strategies and tactics can all be seen as a form of victory for a campaign or movement (Engelfried, 2021). Likewise, a ‘failed’ campaign against one particular policy or activity may prevent future similar attempts by governments and corporations (Estes, 2026).
This makes it imperative that we continue to fight against ongoing attempts to weaken data protection and privacy laws, to introduce new spying powers, to weakly (or not at all) regulate AI technologies, and to give greater search and surveillance powers to the police and border agencies. We also need to understand what those powers and technologies are, both to inform our struggles and to improve our digital security.
At the same time, opposition to a particular law, technology or corporation will, on its own, never be sufficient. Nor will the cheerful illegalism embodied in the character of Aunt Augusta do much to ensure collective safety and well-being.
The technological forces that are reshaping police powers are generated through complex webs of money, power, science and academia. They are ultimately underpinned by an economic model – capitalism – focused on the production and extraction of value at all costs. Overcoming that is a far larger challenge than single-issue campaigns. Nevertheless, whoever or whatever our more immediate target is, that is what we must keep in our sights.
List of resources
“Automated Racism: How Police Data and Algorithms Code Discrimination into Policing.” Amnesty International, Feb. 2025 www.amnesty.org.uk/documents/108/Automated20Racism20Report20-20Amnesty20International20UK20-202025.pdf.
“Automated Suspicion: The EU’s New Travel Surveillance Initiatives.” Statewatch, 9 July 2020, www.statewatch.org/automated-suspicion-the-eu-s-new-travel-surveillance-initiatives/.
“Computers and Privacy.” HMSO, 1975, statewatch.omeka.net/items/show/9863.
Engelfried, Nick. “Overwhelming Odds, Unexpected Alliances and Tough Losses — How Defeating Keystone XL Built a Bolder, Savvier Climate Movement.” Waging Nonviolence, 19 Jan. 2021.
“From Malpensa to Tel Aviv: Italian Police Use Israeli Software to Spy on Anti-Deportation Activists.” Statewatch, 25 Feb. 2025, statewatch.org/news/2025/february/from-malpensa-to-tel-aviv-italian-police-use-israeli-software-to-spy-on-anti-deportation-activists/.
Greene, Graham. Travels with My Aunt. Penguin Books, 1969.
“HN10 Robert Lambert ‘Bob Robinson.'” Spycops Research, 4 January 2018, www.spycopsresearch.info/spycops/hn10-robert-lambert-bob-robinson.
“Networks of (In)Security: How Global Counter-Terrorism and Security Norms Threaten Civic Space and Human Rights.” Statewatch, 27 Nov. 2025, statewatch.org/publications/reports-and-books/networks-of-in-security-how-global-counter-terrorism-and-security-norms-threaten-civic-space-and-human-rights/.
“Nick Estes: ‘Our History Is the Future’ & Revolutionary Certainty.” YouTube, uploaded by Psychic Militancy and The Red Nation, 22 June 2026, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GemBIp296Tc.
“Police Racism and Criminalisation across Europe Increasingly Fuelled by Digital ‘Prediction’ and Profiling Systems.” Statewatch, 30 June 2025, statewatch.org/news/2025/june/police-racism-and-criminalisation-across-europe-increasingly-fuelled-by-digital-prediction-and-profiling-systems/.
Pounder, Chris, and Stuart Anderson. “The Police Use of Computers.” Technical Authors Group, c. 1980, statewatch.omeka.net/items/show/14769.
“Probable Futures: Mapping AI Tools in Criminal Justice across England & Wales.” probablefutures.github.io/ai-mapping/.
“Protect Not Surveil.” protectnotsurveil.eu/.
“Safety Not Surveillance.” Open Rights Group, www.openrightsgroup.org/campaign/safety-not-surveillance/.
“Security AI in EU Agencies.” Automating Authority: Artificial Intelligence in European Police and Border Regimes, Statewatch, 9 Apr. 2025, statewatch.org/automating-authority-artificial-intelligence-in-european-police-and-border-regimes/#toc-6.
“Tell-All Telephone.” Zeit Online, web.archive.org/web/20150316054838/https://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention.
“Under Observation: The Computer and Political Control.” Campaign Against the Model West Germany, 1979, statewatch.omeka.net/items/show/9799.
“UK: Police Footage of Protests Can Be Held for Decades.” Statewatch, 2 Oct. 2025, statewatch.org/news/2025/october/uk-police-footage-of-protests-can-be-held-for-decades/.
“UK: Undercover Policing: New Archive Sheds Light on the Spycops Scandal.” Statewatch, 3 July 2025, statewatch.org/news/2025/july/uk-undercover-policing-new-archive-sheds-light-on-the-spycops-scandal/.
About the Author
Chris Jones is a researcher and journalist working on issues related to policing, migration, security and surveillance. He has worked for the civil liberties organisation Statewatch since 2010. His work has also been published by EUobserver, The Guardian, The Intercept, Middle East Eye, Politico Europe and Público.