Surveillance and Restrictions on Mobility Since the March 2020 decision of Turkey to no longer accept POM returned from Greece – as per the conditions of EU-Turkey Deal of 2016 – due to a rejected asylum claim or inadmissibility of submitting a claim, the Greek government has adopted a patent and unmistakable modus operandi of ‘control and containment’. Under Article 39 of the International Protection Act – adopted into Greek law on the 1st of November 2019 and implemented on the 17th of November 2021 – any person who enters Greece without sufficient documentation to prove the right to remain, either issued by the Greek authorities or recognized by the authorities, is subject to reception and identification procedures. Significantly, section four of the article (4636/2019) frameworks the de facto detention, for a maximum of 25 days, for reasons of submitting claim for asylum; enabling, as outlined in Article 39(4), a ‘restriction of their freedom’ inter alia the 24/7 surveillance in detention facilities, the impossibility of mobility, the threat of physical and psychological violence and the, in effect, limitation of applying for asylum. Marios Kaleas, the governor of the Greek Asylum Service voiced in an interview with the Guardian in direct reference to the International Protection Act: “There are people who for years evade detection by never declaring themselves to authorities… For purposes of control, of having a full picture of who is here and for national security and public order reasons, they have to be traced.” This is not the first instance of an overt, all-seeing surveillance apparatus created by the Greek government over POM, reminiscent of early uses of drones at the Greek ‘borderscape’ in early 2017, and misinformation campaigns of migratory flows in 2015. This time, however, surveillance devices deployed by the Ministry involving the tracking, tracing, negotiating, and ultimately restricting of mobilities of POM has reached dystopian proportions. Initially introduced in Greece’s National Migration Strategy 2020-21, the mythological Centaur has itself been rendered non-fiction. A fully functioning network of surveillance, tethered to the Ministry’s headquarters in Athens, the Centaur system – surpassing 33 million euros from EU coffers – is an “integrated digital system of electronic and physical security management placed inside and around the facilities using cameras and a motion analysis algorithm (AI Behavioural Analytics).” Currently operated in Samos’ MPRIC and soon to be in Chios, Leros, Kos and Lesvos, POM are de facto monitored, according to Algorithm Watch, via “various technological solutions including a CCTV system and video monitors, drone flights over the facilities to detect incidents, perimeter violation alarms with cameras, control gates with metal detectors and X-ray devices and an automated system for public announcements, broadcast from loudspeakers.” Notwithstanding the nostalgic eminence of Michel Foucault’s elaborations on scopic power and the Panopticon, the lived reality of POM within this apparatus of control lends itself to a protracted system of waiting whilst being watched, regulated, and trapped inside what has been respectively branded by the MMA as Closed Controlled Access Centres (CCACs). Image Source: Samos Advocacy Collective 9