Guest lecture with Prof. Tasniem Anwar

The Law & Technology Research Group at Sciences Po presents Guest lecture with Prof. Tasniem Anwar (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

Ideological risk assessments are a relatively new and severely contested practice in countering terrorism. Nevertheless, whether it is in the context of terrorism trials, or in preventive contexts such as blacklisting, extremist content removal, or visa decisions, such ideological risk assessments increasingly become at the center of terrorism measures.

Often these decisions are (partly) automated. Algorithms are used to determine whether the acts or discourse of an individual results from a terrorist motivation, or whether there is a potential risk of terrorist activities, often far in advance of any concrete terrorist violence or membership of a terrorist organizations. This raises fundamental questions in democratic societies: How do automated systems make such decisions? And how can we regulate them to ensure a form of accountability against digital harms?

In this lecture, I investigate how emerging technologies are used in countering terrorism and their potential for social and digital harms in our society.

Dr. Tasniem Anwar is assistant professor at the department of Criminology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She conducted her PhD on the prosecution of terrorism financing at the department of political science at the University of Amsterdam. The findings are published in academic journals including Security Dialogue and the Journal of Law and Society. Her current research interests include: counter-terrorism financing, terrorism trials, and emerging security technologies for countering terrorism.