On the Greek island of Samos, a refugee camp ringed by barbed wire and police checkpoints operates under constant technological watch. Residents must press their fingerprints to biometric scanners to move in or out, often waiting over an hour to pass through turnstiles. Cameras mounted above housing containers record their movements. Many were never informed they would be filmed or why. The surveillance infrastructure, called Centaur, channels CCTV and drone footage through motion analysis software to a control room at Greece's Ministry of Migration and Asylum in Athens.
Two Israeli companies supply key components of Centaur: Viisights, whose behavior recognition technology appears on camp footage, and Octopus, which provides command-and-control software for CCTV networks. Both firms are substantially owned or funded by AWZ Ventures and have supplied Israel's ministries of defense and public security. This technological architecture now extends far beyond the camp. In August, Greece signed a €3.5 billion defense agreement with Israel for an integrated air defense system called Achilles Shield—the largest defense contract in Greek history. Beyond missiles and munitions, the deal includes multi-mission radars and an AI-enabled command center. Israel Aerospace Industries, which will supply components of the system, also manufactures the Maritime Heron drones that Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, operates over the Mediterranean.
The Achilles Shield purchase arrives amid regional tensions, yet it has drawn concern from states opposed to Israel's military operations in Gaza. A June Pew Research survey found Greece's population largely distrustful of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The central governance question remains unresolved: should there be restrictions on an EU member state's ability to purchase weapons and surveillance systems from a government that a UN Human Rights Council Commission has determined committed genocide? Currently, no such limits exist. European human rights rules scrutinize what weapons member states export to others, but remain silent on what they buy. The EU AI Act excludes military and national security systems entirely from its scope. Greece's contract faces constraints from neither framework.
The rights of people detained and monitored at Europe's borders fall into the same regulatory void. Journalist Antony Loewenstein has documented in The Palestine Laboratory how Israel's export success stems from testing technology on populations under occupation. That logic travels from West Bank checkpoints to Aegean watchtowers and beyond. Greece's surveillance systems target both people and aircraft.
In 2024, Greece's Hellenic Data Protection Authority fined the Ministry of Migration and Asylum €175,000 over Centaur and its biometric companion system Hyperion—the largest penalty ever imposed on a Greek public body. The violations included inadequate impact assessments and failure to inform monitored individuals. The fine was negligible against a system reportedly worth €55 million in EU funds and changed little in practice. Yet for camp residents, the finding offered at least a formal acknowledgment of their rights. Greece's data protection authorities could act because Centaur processes personal data of people in the camp. Meanwhile, EU authorities exclude defense and national security from their scope under Article 2(2) of the GDPR and Article 2(3) of the EU AI Act. The border-industrial complex operates within this regulatory gap. Europe's most ambitious AI rights framework would regulate a hiring algorithm in Athens but has nothing to say about a national system fusing sensor data and automated threat analysis, built by architects of occupation technology.
European institutions have constructed an AI vocabulary centered on proportionality, impact assessments and human oversight—yet this language stops precisely where state coercive power begins, which is where regulation was always most needed. Since 2023, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Canada and others have suspended or banned arms transfers to Israel. The European Commission proposed suspending trade concessions under an EU-Israel Association Agreement from 2000, a measure that as of April 2026 still lacked unanimous support, despite UN experts calling suspension a minimum requirement under international law and the UN Human Rights Council Commission concluding in September 2025 that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
These instruments regulate what Europe sells but almost none regulate what Europe buys. The legal frameworks place moral duty squarely on the seller. Whether concerning Greece or any other EU country, human rights conditionality in European arms policy attaches to export licenses, not procurement decisions. Israeli defense exports reached $19.2 billion in 2025, with Europe purchasing 36 percent of the total. Sales of observation and optronics systems used for surveillance rose from 6 percent of Israeli defense exports in 2024 to 22 percent in 2025. Europe remains the largest regional buyer across the entire portfolio.
As a minimum standard, European states should apply human rights due diligence to defense and dual-use purchases with the same rigor they apply to export licensing. The two assessments ask different questions, requiring adapted rather than copied criteria. Export licensing asks what a buyer will do with a weapon. Procurement due diligence asks what a purchase does for a seller. In Greece's case, the answer is concrete: $3.5 billion flows to an industry whose systems are marketed on their performance in Gaza and Lebanon, at a moment when UN experts urge states to confront their inaction on the obligation to refrain from aiding unlawful occupation. European governments already demand this scrutiny of private companies under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which treat a purchasing relationship as a channel through which a buyer contributes to harm.
With ammunition, one might argue a seller has no influence over who is harmed after sale. With high-tech weapons, this argument collapses entirely. Achilles Shield will be delivered to Greece in stages over 35 months and will depend on Israeli firms for spare parts, training, software updates and threat assessment tuning. Greece has essentially purchased a decades-long relationship with these companies. The software, data-handling and update terms of these contracts, currently protected as commercial confidences, should be published. A state unable to tell its people what its command systems do, or who else can access what they see, has outsourced more than procurement.
In Europe, the AI Act's military exclusion should be removed. There is no principled reason why systems with the greatest capacity to kill are the ones the EU has agreed in advance not to regulate. The case for the carve-out collapses the moment military AI literally generates kill lists and tracks people to their homes—systems that help facilitate genocide in Gaza. Reopening the AI Act is politically unlikely, so what is needed is a separate binding legal instrument covering military and national security AI, written with the enforcement power that Article 2(3) currently withholds. The greater a system's capacity to kill, the stronger the case for regulating it.
People held behind biometric turnstiles on Samos, Palestinians targeted by these systems in Gaza, and anyone else who may one day face the new Greek-Israeli defense technology are all at the mercy of an apparatus that sorts people into 'the watched' and 'the expendable' in the border necrotechnics of life and death. The question facing every country is not how to buy this surveillance and military architecture more responsibly, but whether to enter into these arrangements at all—especially with a government whose policies the International Court of Justice has found breach the prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid, and which Amnesty International has documented as maintaining an apartheid system against Palestinians. There is no version of European technology policy worth defending that is selective about whose human rights are worth defending within its borders and beyond.
