122° Nexa Lunch Seminar - Cracking AI Secrecy: EU Migration Law & Governance and Beyond

Deirdre Curtin

European University Institute

TOMMASO FIA

University of Tübingen

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

from 13.00 to 14.00

Centro Nexa su Internet & Società
Politecnico di Torino, via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1st floor)

(For more information on how to reach us, click here)

Virtual classroom: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent

In core government and for public tasks hugely sensitive for citizens such as migration governance in Europe, the use of AI systems developed and provided under contract gives migration authorities and private providers the power to keep their deployment secret and to refuse access to their key components.

This talk explores the complex interplay between public and private drivers of secrecy surrounding procured AI technologies in European migration governance, demonstrating how these forces converge and reinforce one another. We examine AI secrecy as an institutional framework shaped by both public and private law forms of secrecy, applying the spectrum of secrecy from deep (‘unknown unknowns’) to shallow secrecy (‘known unknowns’).

Specifically, our talk delves into the sources of ‘political secrecy’ in migration and security authorities, highlighting how migration agencies and authorities protect the existence and use of AI systems from the civil society and affected persons (such as third country nationals). Next, it analyses the legal frameworks that sustain AI vendors’ private secrecy, such as trade secrecy, secrecy in procurement procedures and agreements.

In examining the various secrecy points, the talk critiques the limited impact of the newly enacted AI Act in addressing the entrenched secrecy of AI deployment and development in migration governance. Finally, we condense the main takeaways and examine the broader repercussions of AI secrecy beyond the context of migration governance, touching upon its implications for a new equilibrium transcending the conventional public/private divide.

Biographies

Prof. Deirdre Curtin is Professor of European Law at the Law Department of the European University Institute, a position she has held full time since 2016. Specialising in European Union law and governance, her research interests include public accountability, transparency, governmental secrecy and the protection of fundamental rights in Europe and beyond (in particular privacy and data protection).

Dr. Tommaso Fia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Law and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Tübingen. His research areas encompass (EU) data governance, private law, the commons, and property theory. He is particularly interested in normative approaches and theories of justice applied to data governance, and the political economy of data.