The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly invoked to ‘revolutionize’ practices of global security governance, including in the domain of border control. Legal scholarship tends to confront these changes by foregrounding the rule of law challenges associated with nascent forms of governance by data, and by imposing new regulatory standards. Yet, little is known about how these algorithmic systems are already reconfiguring legal norms and processes, while generating novel security techniques and practices for knowing and governing “risk” before the border. Exploring these questions, this article makes three important contributions to the literature. On an empirical level, it provides an original socio-legal study of the processes constructing and implementing Cerberus – an AI-based risk-analysis platform deployed by the UK Home Office. This analysis provides unique insight into the institutional frictions, legal mediations and emergent governance formations involved in the introduction of this algorithmic bordering system. On a methodological level, the article directly engages with the focus on ‘legal infrastructures’ in this special issue. It uses an original approach (infra-legalities) which follows how legal and infrastructural elements are relationally and materially tied together in practice. Rather than trying to conceptually settle the relation between law and infrastructure – or qualifying law as a sui generis infrastructure – the article traces incipient modes of governmentality and regulatory ordering in which both legal and infrastructural elements are metabolized. In its account of Cerberus, the article analyzes this emergent composition as a dispositif of speculative suspicion. Finally, on a normative and political level, the article signals the significant stakes involved in this algorithmic enactment of risk. It shows how prevailing regulatory tropes revolving around ‘debiasing’ and retention of a ‘human in the loop’ offer a limited register of remedy, and work to amplify the reach of Cerberus. We conclude with reflections on critiquing algorithmic systems like Cerberus through the emergent infrastructural relations they enact.

This article examines the phenomenon of interface governance. It uses two interface technologies—Universal Credit’s digital account (United Kingdom) and ArriveCAN (Canada)—to explore how interfaces and their predictable glitches govern relations between state officials and members of the public. Drawing on tools of government literature, it argues that interfaces do not achieve their stated goals evenly (improved efficiency, digital literacy). Instead, they generate several unintended effects, including heightened bureaucratic intensity, diffused responsibility, and even eroded public trust in state agencies. It urges socio-legal and administrative justice scholars to take interfaces seriously and calls on scholars to adopt socio-legal-technical methods to better conceptualize the effects of infrastructure governance and to imagine other possibilities for public administration.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has strongly promoted a human-centric and trustworthy approach to artificial intelligence (AI). The 2021 proposal for a Regulation on AI that the EU seeks to establish as a global standard is the latest step in the matter. However, little attention has been paid to the EU’s use of AI to pursue its own purposes, despite its wide use of digital technologies, notably in the field of border management. Yet, such attention allows us to confront the highly moral discourse that characterises EU institutions’ communications and legislative acts with a concrete example of how the promoted values are realised “on the ground”. From this perspective, this paper takes the case study of the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS), an EU information technology system (planned to become operational in May 2023) that will provide travel authorisation to visa-exempt third-country nationals using a profiling algorithm. The paper shows, on the one hand, that ETIAS constitutes another piece in the massive infrastructure of digital surveillance of third-country nationals that the EU has been building for years. On the other hand, ETIAS’s algorithmic process is shown to be an instrument of differential exclusion that could well have an adverse impact on certain groups of foreign travellers. Ultimately, this paper argues that far from falling outside the scope of the trustworthy approach to AI championed by the EU, ETIAS – and more broadly the systematic risk evaluation predominant in the EU’s use of AI – is a constitutive part of it.