Increasing militarisation

It added that the towers represent a “physical marker of where the Hostile Environment begins”, contribute to the increasing militarisation of borders and push people into taking more dangerous routes.

“The towers are not neutral. They are active agents in an increasingly automated system of border apartheid designed to filter, categorise and repel those deemed as ‘undesirable’,” said MRN, adding that in the context of the UK’s forthcoming the Border Security Bill – which seeks to give border authorities counter-terrorism-style powers to deal with migrants – people seeking safety are increasingly framed as a national security threat, leading to their further dehumanisation.

“These towers and their AI algorithms do not make seeking asylum safer,” it said. “They enforce border apartheid and exclusion: acting as a first port of entry into the UK’s digital hostile environment. While autonomous surveillance towers and other forms of border securitisation such as drones raise important questions about the potentially deadly consequences for migrants, they should also make us question the wider encroachment and normalisation of surveillance (and tech companies) in our day-to-day lives.

“Ultimately, surveillance is being implemented without consent, and we have a right to demand transparency and the ability to scrutinise this technology, and what it means for human rights.”

For Storey – who has created and released a film based on his research into the Anduril towers – the biggest remaining question is whether data collected by the towers is used to determine asylum cases and whether, in the context of the upcoming Border Security Bill, it could be used as evidence in criminal prosecutions against migrants.

Computer Weekly contacted Anduril regarding the claims made about its autonomous surveillance towers, but received no acknowledgement or response by time of publication.  

Computer Weekly also contacted the Home Office about every claim made in the story – including how data generated or captured by the towers is used in asylum cases – but similarly received no response by time of publication.

The threat to migrant safety

MRN said that although the Home Office has been reluctant to share details of the towers on the basis that it could assist “organised criminal gangs”, it has also tacitly acknowledged the threat that increased border surveillance presents to the safety of migrants.

“Disclosure of the requested information could aid the criminals seeking to facilitate these dangerous small boat crossings by informing organised criminal gangs about the technology being deployed against them, enabling them to develop countervailing activity to increase their likelihood of success, support their planning and inform new tactics and routings,” it said in response to one of Storey’s FoI requests.

However, it also noted that, if details about the towers were revealed, “migrants may be placed in even greater jeopardy by making them less easy to detect by UK and French patrols engaged in safety of life at sea (Solas) operations”.

As a result, the Home Office decided to apply a section 31 law enforcement exemption on everything in the request, which allows state authorities to withhold information if it is “likely to prejudice … the operation of immigration controls”.

Heightened danger

According to MRN, despite the department’s resistance to transparency, the Home Office’s response to Storey clearly identifies the impact that increased border surveillance has on migrant deaths: “It is no secret that increased surveillance and policing at borders pushes migrants into more remote and dangerous crossing points while forcing them to increasingly rely on intermediaries (so-called people smugglers).”

Noting that a record number of people lost their lives attempting to cross the Channel in 2024 (as reported by the UN’s Missing Migrant Project) – as well as the high death-rate at the US-Mexico border, where the Electronic Frontier Foundation has mapped 563 such surveillance towers – MRN added that as autonomous surveillance technologies become “increasingly embedded along the English coastline, the English Channel may emerge as its own lethal frontier”.

It said this process has already happened at the US-Mexico border, where the towers form part of a deterrence infrastructure designed to push migration routes into more “rugged and deadly terrain”, and which has led to notable increases in migrant mortality.

“It is not difficult to realise that the UK government has utilised these towers as part of a border apartheid strategy, employing this AI surveillance assemblage to further militarise the southern maritime border,” it said.

Drawing comparisons between US and UK border practices, Storey added that while the surveillance towers dotted remotely along the harsh terrain of the border with Mexico are actively framed as a deterrent, the surveillance towers in the UK – which can be found in plain sight in relatively quaint English landscapes – are framed around humanitarian assistance of migrants.

However, he added that given this framing – as well as the vast array of technologies state authorities can leverage to surveil an area as small as the English Channel – it begs the question of why people are still dying.

“What’s the technology really doing? It’s ostensibly being used for humanitarian purposes, but is it actually succeeding in what they’re claiming it’s doing?” he asked, adding that the obvious solution would be for the UK government to open safe and legal routes to the UK, instead of relying on expensive technology such as AI to “enforce a border that keeps people out who are in desperate need”.

Transparency and data storage concerns

While the Financial Times covered the Home Office’s Anduril contract when it was announced, MRN and Storey said there has been little to no scrutiny of the towers since, and that they are concerned by the department’s resistance to transparency, even in response to FoIs.

Specifically, they cited a lack of information on contract details, the location of the towers (which have been manually identified and logged by Storey), the data sharing agreements underpinning their operation, and how the information collected by the towers may be used to determine asylum cases for those crossing the Channel.

So far, the only contract details have been confirmed in an FoI response from the Home Office to researcher Anna Christoforou, which revealed that its Anduril contract – CCTC: Common operating picture and command interface – is valued at £16,087,370, and runs from 22 June 2022 to 22 June 2025.

Storey said that, from his experience, the FoI system is more about opacity than transparency, and trying to open up information on border and immigration issues in particular is like a “game of cat and mouse” with the Home Office. “It’s extremely obvious they don’t really have any intention of actually disclosing information that would lead to proper public awareness, discourse, transparency et cetera … there’s no interest in having a public discussion about this surveillance of people,” he said.

Commenting on the application of the law enforcement exemption to the information requested by Storey, independent data protection and FoI consultant Tim Turner told Computer Weekly it could have been misapplied if the department did not complete a “prejudice test”, which requires organisations to balance the potentially detrimental impacts of disclosure with the public interest value of the information being released.

“The exemption is definitely expressed in a way that implies that it has been done in a blanket way,” he said. “That’s not to say that they haven’t applied the prejudice element, but there’s zero evidence that they have. The exemption doesn’t apply if they haven’t done it.”

MRN and Storey also expressed similar concerns around the lack of transparency over where the data is ultimately stored, which they believe can most likely be found in Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Oracle infrastructure.

They said that, because the Home Office confirmed to MRN via FoI in September 2024 that data from its electronic visa platform are hosted on AWS, it could be the case that this provider is being used to store data collected and processed by the towers.

Highlighting the fact that Anduril makes use of AWS Marketplace to conduct tests with LatticeOS for potential customers, MRN said this indicates that AWS is used to host Anduril data once long-term contracts are formalised.

According to the Marketplace webpage, “Anduril Lattice Operating System runs on a Kubernetes cluster hosted in EC2”, which is a cloud compute platform offered by AWS.

However, Oracle and Anduril also have a partnership to bring Lattice to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure globally. According to an Oracle webpage, “Anduril will deploy Lattice on Oracle Cloud Isolated and National Security Regions, which are Oracle’s air-gapped cloud infrastructure for mission-critical, classified defense, and intelligence workloads. Lattice will also be available in Oracle Cloud Regions, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, and Oracle Government Clouds in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.”

Computer Weekly contacted both Anduril and the Home Office for confirmation on where data collected by the towers is stored, but did not receive a response from either. 

MRN and Storey say they are awaiting further FoI responses related to each of the towers identified, which ask for details of any Data Protection Impact Assessments, Equality Impact Assessments, privacy safeguards, data-sharing agreements and information on the involvement of private companies.

Next steps

MRN is encouraging people to take a range of actions to challenge the Home Office’s use of surveillance towers, including asking those who live in the vicinity of one to write to their local MP expressing concerns, flagging the existence of further towers to MRN or Storey, and setting up local campaigns in opposition to the towers.

To understand whether the data collected by the towers are being used to influence or determine the outcome of asylum cases, MRN is also encouraging those that have crossed the Channel after June 2022 to submit subject access requests to the Home Office if they are concerned their data could have been captured.