The Datafication of Counterterrorism
Counterterrorism practices, institutions, and discourses have expanded over the past 20 years. This enlargement has come with extraordinary costs for international law’s integrity and traction especially revealed in the pushback against the classification and regulation of non-international armed conflicts under a laws of war framework. There are particularly adverse consequences for the integrity of human rights and humanitarian law norms because the institutional and political interests represented by counterterrorism seek to displace these norms and reclaim complex conflict and fragile space as primarily subject to exceptional and nationally defined counterterrorism legal regimes. Little systematic attention has been paid to the patterns of harm and impunity defining the post 9/11 counterterrorism landscape grounded in the widespread use of such technologies. New technology deployment in counterterrorism opens new vistas of harm, consolidates existing patterns of concern, and pervasively operates in legal gray zones. Metadata collection is spawning the datafication of counterterrorism, and the central role technology plays in consolidating its practices and institutions. In the counterterrorism realm, the lack of normative constraint on privacy and data protection functions as a positive incentive for States to invoke this legal framework when addressing security or conflict challenges instead of armed conflict or human rights derogations / limitations frames. This in turn strengthens and consolidates the counterterrorism architecture through ongoing iteration and validation.
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