Automating Crime Prevention, Surveillance, and Military Operations

1. Contextualizing automation in crime and security domains.- Part I. Automating Policing.- 2. Predictive policing as "social sorting on steroids?" Data (in)justice in practices of forecasting crime.- 3. Platform policing.- 4. Information in formation: algorithmic law enforcement and the life of data.- 5. Information systems in the area of freedom, security and justice: is EU movig toward indiscriminate mass surveillance of foreign nationals?- Part II. Automating Criminal Courts.- 6. Presumption of guilt and responsibility for the acts of others: postulates of criminal law in the age of automated justice?.- 7. Deciding on detention by using a computer program: Prior v1.0 as a tool for more fair judicial decisions?.- Part III. Automating Surveillance.- 8. Diffuse-disciplining: the pervasive nature of autonomous policing systems and their consequences.- 9. Automating spatial injustice: the case of Iran's surveillance of physical and virtual spaces.- Part IV. Automating Intelligence and military Operations.- 10. Project Maven, big data analytics and ubiquitous knowledge: the impossible promises and hidden politics of algorithmic vision.- 11. Humans, (semi)autonomous weapons systems and the assault on key principles of international humanitarian law.

Ales Zavrsnik is a Senior Researcher Associate at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). He was an EURIAS Fellow 2017/18 at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH, in Zurich. In the past, he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Norwegian Research Council at the University of Oslo (2012), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute für ausländisches und internationals Strafrecht in Freiburg i. Br. (2009). He co-managed several international scientific networks of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) programme that were dedicated to technology, law, surveillance and delinquency on the Internet (e.g. currently Action CA16121 "From Sharing to Caring: Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy" and Action IS0807 "Living in Surveillance Societies" or the Action IS0801 "Cyberbullying" in the past).

His research interest lay in the intersection of law, crime, technology, and fundamental rights. He led a research project funded by the Slovenian National Research Agency "Law in the age of big data: Regulating privacy, transparency, secrecy and other competing values in the 21st century" (2014 - 2017). His most recent scientific achievements include an edited book "Big Data, Crime and Social Control" (Routledge, 2018); and "Drones and Unmanned Aerial Systems: Legal and Social Implications for Security and Surveillance" (Springer, 2015). He organized several conferences in these research areas, for example "Big data: Challenges for Law and Ethics" (Ljubljana, 2017) and "Spy in Sky: Regulatory issues of drones and unmanned aerial systems" (Ljubljana, 2013). He was an independent Ethics Expert with the European Research Council (ERC) and for the REA, the researcharm of the European Commission, for Horizon 2020 projects.