This book is motivated, to a large extent, by some recent troubling developments in public discourse, namely the developments in information and disinformation practices. From the beginning of history, various and diverse means or channels of communication have been used to inform, misinform (unintentionally) and disinform (deliberately). However, in recent decades, the emergence and development of new information and communications technologies (ICT), combined with the ever-increasing digitalisation and globalisation of almost every aspect of modern life, among others, have opened up new and uncharted avenues to that end. This book therefore focuses on disinformation practices occurring with the help of digital media as these practices bring to the fore profound negative ramifications for the functioning of a democratic polity.

In particular, disinformation – nowadays frequently yet not uncontroversially labelled ‘fake news’ , ‘alternative facts’ or ‘post-truth’ in English (and imported therefrom to many other languages), ‘nepnieuws’ in Dutch or ‘infox’ in French – affects the values and principles on which many democratic polities, including the European integration project, have been built, namely democracy sensu largo , the rule of law ( Rechtsstaat ) and the respect for fundamental rights. (This classical ‘constellation of ideals that dominate our political morality’ will be referred to, in this Introduction, simply as ‘democracy’.) Disinformation further affects many other aspects of public life, e.g. political and journalistic practices, all over the world – a development that appears to transcend cultural and political contexts.

From a cursory look at recent history, the 2016 referendum on the departure of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) (the so-called ‘Brexit’ ) and the presidential elections that took place the same year in the United States (US) – and related alleged disinformation practices – have been perhaps the strongest reminder of the importance and the power of disinformation in society, sparking debates in academic, political and artistic circles, and beyond.

To what extent does the status quo of irregular migration to Europe pose a challenge for democracy? The surge of people moving, predominantly from war-torn, repressed and impoverished countries in the Middle East and Africa to the outer borders of Europe, which started in the early 2010s and which intensified in the summer of 2015 – and the implications for the Old Continent that this massive fiow of people has caused – gave an impetus to the present book. It seeks to contribute to the contextualisation, better understanding of and drawing of lessons from the status quo of irregular migration to Europe and its relation to the values and principles on which Europe has been built.

Migration in Europe (i.e. within, to and away from), as anywhere in the world, is by no means a novel phenomenon. Immigration to the Old Continent once again gained its momentum and – consequently – public attention in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring. A sequence of protests against authoritarian political regimes in Africa and the Middle East that broke out on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia resulted in democratisation for some of them, but in others led to political unrest and even civil war. The latter caused an intensified emigration therefrom, largely towards Europe. The Italian island of Lampedusa – located less than 120 km from the Tunisian shore – and the vessels that have sunk around that island have become symbolic. Lampedusa perhaps marked the first sign that this influx of people constituted a serious problem and hence people started naming it a ‘crisis’. Subsequent events only magnified the problem: perhaps the biggest mark has been left by the ongoing Syrian civil war.

A series of events have led to the idea for this book and the first one is more than obvious: the Edward Snowden affaire On 6 June 2013 Glenn Greenwald published in The Guardian the first in a series of articles – and later co-authored a few other – on global mass surveillance practices led by the United States ‘National Security Agency (NSA) On the first day, the worldwide public learned that the NSA has obtained a clandestine court order from a secretly operating court of law, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and on its basis the Agency has been collecting metadata on telephone calls of millions customers of a major private telecommunications provider, Verizon This provider was forbidden from disclosing both the order itself and its compliance with it On the second day (7 June), the worldwide public learned further that these practices had not been limited to a single provider and that the NSA was allegedly’ tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S Internet companies ‘: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple The worldwide public also learned that the NSA has been ‘listening’ to anything about anybody whose data merely flew throughservers located on US soil, even when sent from one overseas location to another Finally, the NSA has shared these data with its fellow agencies in the US, such as with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) These practices were variously codenamed – labels of surveillance programmes such as PRISM, Xkeyscore, Upstream, Quantuminsert, Bullrun or Dishfir have since entered the public debate– and their aim was to procure national security with the help of surveillance (These practises were not a novelty for the NSA has operated domestic surveillance programmes since the Agency's establishment in 1952 It is also true that surveillance practices are as old as humanity and over time have became an integral part of modernity, but these have intensified in the aft ermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.)