PROJECT FOLLOW

FOLLOW analyses the ways in which private companies operate in the frontline of security practice. FOLLOW is a 5-year research project at the AISSR, UvA... Empirical focus: FOLLOW focuses on the financial sector, but we are interested in other, non-financial, examples as well. We analyse how knowledge about suspicious transactions is formed by banks, national Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) and courts. At each link in the chain, we study the challenges of privacy and the (unintended) side-effects. FOLLOW asks: what gets lost and added in the process of translating financial transactions? How does financial warfare lead to financial data profiles; influential typologies of vulnerable sectors; and case law on terrorism facilitation?... We visualise the path of the suspicious transaction as a chain of translation, whereby commercial transactions are collected, stored, transferred and analysed in order to arrive at security facts (including for example frozen assets, closed accounts,..