Welcome to the EES: Europe’s New Surveillance Architecture

In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother watched everyone, all the time. The surveillance was obvious, oppressive, and total. On October 12, 2025, the European Union will activate something more subtle but perhaps more effective: the Entry/Exit System (EES), a comprehensive biometric surveillance infrastructure that will track every non-EU/EEA national crossing Schengen borders. No telescreens required, just your fingerprints and face.

The system represents a fundamental shift in how mobility is conceived and controlled. A system for which there has been remarkably limited opportunity to discuss or contest.

The European Commission launched its public information campaign approximately one week ago. For a system whose regulatory framework was adopted in November 2017. That is close to eight years ago. In other words, this is not a consultation but a notification of compliance requirements.

Redefining Mobility

At its core, the EES embodies a troubling principle: that freedom of movement is not a right to be protected but a privilege to be monitored, granted differentially based on the accident of one’s nationality. The system creates an explicit two-tier framework where EU/EEA citizens move freely while third-country nationals submit to biometric cataloging at every border crossing.

This lack of reciprocity is disturbing. When EU/EEA citizens travel to most countries worldwide, they do not face equivalent systematic biometric surveillance. The EES thus enshrines a form of structural inequality into the architecture of international mobility. It enforces the assumption that some people’s movements warrant tracking while others’ do not.

Deconstructing the Official Justifications

The European Commission frames the EES through several key narratives. Let’s have a look at them.

Security and Counter-Terrorism

The security justification operates on the premise that comprehensive surveillance of ordinary travelers will prevent determined criminals and terrorists. This logic has a fundamental flaw: it assumes that malicious actors will dutifully present themselves for biometric collection at official border crossings rather than circumventing the system entirely.

Mass surveillance of millions of legitimate travelers to potentially catch a handful of threats represents a profound disproportion between means and ends. This looks more like a security theater at an industrial scale. It is visible, expensive, and reassuring to some, yet of questionable effectiveness against the threats it purports to address.

Detecting Overstayers

The overstayer justification treats all visitors as potential immigration violators requiring preemptive tracking. One might note the irony: to solve the problem of some people staying too long, we must collect biometric data on everyone, including those who have no intention of overstaying and no history of doing so.

This represents a striking reversal of presumption. Rather than addressing overstays through targeted enforcement or policy reforms, the EES assumes guilt and demands that travelers prove their innocence through submission to biometric surveillance. The proportionality of creating a permanent, centralized database accessible across 29 countries to address the problem is somewhat debatable.

Preventing Document and Identity Fraud

Fraud detection is presented as a technical problem requiring technical solutions. Yet one must ask: could fraud detection be achieved without creating a massive, permanent biometric database on all third-country nationals? The answer is almost certainly yes, but such alternatives would not simultaneously serve the broader surveillance infrastructure ambitions that the EES enables.

The system’s scope far exceeds what would be necessary for fraud detection alone. It creates not just a verification mechanism but a comprehensive tracking apparatus. One that records not merely identity but movement which makes it possible to create detailed profiles of individuals’ travel patterns across time.

Traveler Convenience

Perhaps the most Orwellian aspect of the EES messaging is its framing as a convenience for travelers. The mandatory collection of fingerprints and facial images at every border crossing is presented as somehow quicker and more comfortable than a passport stamp.

This narrative conflates convenience for border authorities, who benefit from automated processing and reduced staffing needs, with convenience for travelers. Travelers must now factor in additional time for biometric collection, navigate potential technical failures, and accept that their most sensitive personal data will be stored and shared across multiple governments.

The promise of automation deserves particular attention. Automated systems are indeed convenient for those who fit neatly within their parameters. However, they are profoundly inconvenient, and potentially devastating, for those flagged by algorithmic errors, caught in edge cases, facing technical glitches, or simply do not fit the expected narrative. Automation removes human judgment and discretion from border encounters, replacing nuanced decision-making with rigid, algorithmic processing.

Border situations are inherently complex. Travelers may face unusual but legitimate circumstances: documentation issues, emergency travel, humanitarian needs, or simple misunderstandings compounded by language barriers. Human border officials can exercise judgment, ask clarifying questions, and make contextual decisions. Automated systems cannot.

Moreover, algorithmic bias is well-documented: facial recognition technology performs significantly worse on individuals with darker skin tones, and algorithms often perpetuate existing prejudices regarding which nationalities or travel patterns appear “suspicious.” Once flagged by an automated system, correction becomes extraordinarily difficult. The error propagates across all Schengen borders, with human officials typically deferring to “what the computer says” rather than questioning the system’s judgment.

This creates an accountability vacuum. Who bears the responsibility when automated systems make consequential errors such as denying entry, flagging innocent travelers, or misidentifying individuals? The algorithm cannot be questioned or held accountable, and authorities can hide behind claims of technical neutrality. The facade of objectivity masks fundamentally political decisions about who deserves scrutiny and who merits trust.

For vulnerable populations like refugees, individuals with inconsistent documentation and those from countries designated as “high risk” automation compounds existing disadvantages. These are precisely the groups most likely to face legitimate complexities in their travel circumstances, yet they encounter a system with no capacity for understanding context or extending compassion.

What the Official Narrative Omits

Several critical concerns remain conspicuously absent from the European Commission’s public messaging.

Privacy Erosion and Normalization

The EES represents one of the largest biometric databases ever created, storing fingerprints and facial images of hundreds of millions of individuals. This data will be retained for three years and accessible to border authorities across 29 countries and potentially shared with law enforcement agencies.

The privacy implications are staggering, yet they receive minimal attention in official communications. Instead, the focus remains relentlessly practical: what travelers must do, not what they are surrendering or what risks they face from this mass data collection.

This normalization matters. Each expansion of surveillance infrastructure makes the next expansion easier to justify and implement. What begins as border security becomes precedent for other forms of biometric tracking and control.

Impact on Refugees and Asylum Seekers

The EES’s emphasis on “preventing irregular migration” sits in profound tension with international obligations to protect refugees and allow individuals to seek asylum. The system will record refusals of entry, creating an additional barrier for those fleeing persecution.

By framing migration primarily as a security threat requiring technological control, the EES advances a vision of border management fundamentally at odds with human rights principles. It prioritizes surveillance over protection, control over compassion, and treats the desperate and the dangerous as indistinguishable categories requiring identical processing.

The EU’s obligations under international refugee law require allowing people to reach safety and claim asylum. Yet the infrastructure and ideology embodied in the EES work systematically against these obligations, making it harder for vulnerable individuals to access protection while increasing the risks they face in attempting to do so.

Mission Creep and Data Sharing

Infrastructure, once built, rarely remains constrained to its original purpose. The EES creates a powerful apparatus that will inevitably face pressure for expansion. Will the data be used for additional law enforcement purposes? Will retention periods be extended? Will the system expand to include additional biometric markers or integrate with other surveillance systems?

These questions remain largely unaddressed, yet history suggests that surveillance infrastructure tends toward growth rather than constraint. The lack of robust safeguards and the opacity of data-sharing agreements create substantial risks for future expansion beyond the system’s stated purposes.

Differential Treatment and Structural Discrimination

The EES treats all third-country nationals as presumptive threats requiring monitoring. This differential treatment based on nationality, regardless of individual behavior, history, or circumstances, raises fundamental questions about discrimination and equality.

While not “racist” in the narrow legal sense, the system embeds assumptions about whose movements merit trust and whose require surveillance. These assumptions correlate strongly with global power dynamics, wealth disparities, and post-colonial hierarchies. The EES does not merely reflect these inequalities; it technologically reinforces and perpetuates them.

The Broader Context: Digital Identity and Control

The EES cannot be understood in isolation. It is part of a global trend toward comprehensive digital identity systems, biometric tracking, and algorithmic governance. As I explored in my previous post on mandatory digital ID, we are witnessing the construction of infrastructure that fundamentally alters the relationship between individuals and states.

These systems share common characteristics: they collect and centralize sensitive personal data, they create detailed digital profiles of individuals’ activities and movements, they enable unprecedented surveillance capabilities, and they shift power dramatically toward those who control the infrastructure. The EES contributes to this architecture, normalizing biometric surveillance and demonstrating that comprehensive tracking systems can be implemented despite privacy concerns.

What makes this trend particularly concerning is its incremental nature. Each system is justified on its own terms. Border security here, fraud prevention there, public health elsewhere. Yet cumulatively, they create an infrastructure of control that would have been politically impossible to propose directly. This comprehensive surveillance infrastructure emerges not through a single authoritarian decree but through a thousand technical deployments, each presented as reasonable, necessary, and limited in scope.

The question is not whether any individual system like the EES serves legitimate purposes. The question is what kind of society emerges when biometric surveillance becomes normalized, when movement requires permission granted through technological mediation, and when the infrastructure exists to track, analyze, and control human mobility at unprecedented scale and detail.

What Now?

The EES launches on October 12, 2025. There will be no referendum, no meaningful public debate, and apparently no need for one. The public information campaign focused on how to comply rather than whether this should exist at all.

This implementation strategy reveals much about how surveillance expansion operates in contemporary democracies. Rather than seeking democratic legitimacy through open debate, proponents present surveillance as technical necessity, inevitable modernization, and convenient innovation. By the time the public learns the details, the decision is made, the infrastructure is built, and compliance is mandatory.

The EES deserves rigorous scrutiny not because it is uniquely terrible but because it exemplifies broader patterns that deserve our attention: the framing of surveillance as security, the treatment of privacy concerns as obstacles rather than rights, the creation of two-tier systems based on nationality, and the normalization of biometric tracking as a condition of mobility.

Welcome to the Entry/Exit System. Your fingerprints and facial image will be collected, stored, and shared across 29 countries. This is, we are assured, for your convenience and security. One can only marvel at the efficiency with which Orwell’s dystopian vision has been repackaged as administrative modernization.

The question that remains is not whether the EES will launch. That has already been decided. My question would be, what now? Will we permit this to be the beginning of a much more comprehensive architecture of control, or should we insist on democratic debate, robust safeguards, and fundamental limits on surveillance power before the next expansion is presented as inevitable?

AI Transparency Statement
This post was co-created with Claude AI through an iterative conversation. The author provided the core concerns about the EES and editorial vision. Claude researched, drafted, and structured the arguments. The author then edited for voice, accuracy, and perspective. This represents a genuine human-AI collaboration rather than AI assistance to human writing.