The director of the Turner prize-nominated investigative group Forensic Architecture has said he has been barred from travelling to the US after being flagged as a security risk.
Eyal Weizman, who is also a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, was due to attend the opening of an art exhibition in Miami on Wednesday, but was informed via email last week that his right to travel to the US under a visa waiver programme had been revoked.
He told the Guardian that he then went to the US embassy in London on 14 February to apply for a visa but was told by an official that an algorithm had identified a security threat related to him.
Weizman, who holds British and Israeli passports, said the embassy official suggested the threat could be related to something he was involved in, people he was in contact with, places he had visited, hotels where he had stayed, or a pattern of relations among those things.
The embassy official asked him to provide details about his travel over the last 15 years, including who had paid for it, and specifically queried whether he had visited Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia or met nationals from those countries, he said.
Weizman said the official also told him Homeland Security investigators could assess his case more promptly if he supplied the names of anyone in his network who he thought might have triggered the security algorithm. He said he declined to pass information to the US government “about people in human rights jeopardy”.
Weizman said he feared the security investigation could have “a chilling effect” on the kinds of open source investigations carried out by Forensic Architecture, which includes a investigation into a CIA drone strike in Pakistan and a joint-study with the investigative website Bellingcat into the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons.
“It means that there is a chilling effect on our ability to [do] human rights investigation that rely on wide and diverse network of collaborators,” he said. “Sometimes we are in direct or remote contact with people in places where violations have happened – in Syria, in Palestine, in the US, in Germany. They always include the people on the field, the communities that suffer the consequence of state violence directly, activists, social movements and experts.
“The minute that there is [a security risk], the entire network could be in jeopardy. There is already a concern in using electronic communication with two people.”
Weizman had hoped to open a retrospective of Forensic Architecture’s work at Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design, which opens to the public on Friday.
He said his wife, Ines Weizman, was detained and interviewed at JFK airport in New York on her way to Miami to attend the exhibition. She was separated from their daughters for two-and-a-half hours. The academic said: “That was very unpleasant for the kids who are still small. There was a lot of questioning about me.”
In a statement presented by his wife at the exhibition preview, and published on the collective’s website, he said: “I am alarmed that relations among our colleagues, stakeholders and staff are being targeted by the US government as security threats.”
Forensic Architecture, uses modern technology such as remote sensing, 3D modelling and vessel-tracking to search for evidence of human rights violations. Its work also includes an inquiry into the Israeli bombing the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, and the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, north London, which triggered the biggest riots in modern English history.
Nick Waters, a senior investigator at Bellingcat, said tweeted: “Eyal is a man who has consistently used his remarkable intellect to investigate abuses of power. Some of those abuses have included the US. The revocation of his visa is a travesty and should be reversed immediately.”
A spokesman for US Customs and Border Protection said: “[Our officers] have the statutory authority to refer any individuals for additional screening about whom we need more information to make a determination of risk. These referrals are based on multiple factors that could include a combination of an individual’s activities, associations, and travel patterns.”