Satellite Infrastructures and Law in the Making of Planetary Knowledge

Imaginations of Planet Earth as-a-whole—that is, Earth conceived in planetary terms by wide publics—have been shaped over several decades by the growing capabilities of artificial Earth satellites to image the whole Earth, to specify all locations, and to integrate the Earth’s diverse orbital space with everyday human activities. Different Earth orbits are becoming more densely used, more securitized, more intensely managed from Earth, and more integral to activities on Earth.

This Article focuses on two categories of satellite systems that contribute directly to planetary knowledge, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Earth Observation Satellite Systems (EOSS). GNSS and EOSS have earlier military and intelligence origins, but were readily associated with 1990s-type “globalization”—the encouragement of trade and communication, and the monitoring and discouragement of illicit activities and flows. More recently both have also been integral to a process of “planetization”—the construction and wide diffusion of understandings of Earth in planetary terms, as a shared and contingent habitat with many dependencies. This Article traces the policies and conditions under which data from these satellite systems has become (for the time being) open and widely available to general publics, and the basis for “planetary” infrastructural development and dependence.

We argue that the major GNSS have all become “infrastructural”: broadcasting without charge freely available signals which enable timing, positioning, and navigation via receivers and downstream products for billions of users, as well as a fast-increasing range of important environmental uses. EOSS supply images and other data which flow into scientific models of Earth systems and many business and governmental use cases—with or without charge or restriction, depending on the provider and on government controls. EOSS have become, or are becoming, infrastructural for many forms of planetary knowledge. However, the provision of comprehensive, free-to-all, and highly reliable GNSS and EOSS data and services is not legally embedded or guaranteed, and it is far from assured. Both are “dual use” and vulnerable to kinetic or cyber disruption in conflict. GNSS are government-provided but readily spoofed or jammed, and governments are seeking to develop more resilient alternatives. EOSS are often privately owned or government-controlled, and the data or downstream products are increasingly liable to private enclosure or to government restriction on release. Questions about their assured availability and extension swirl together with renewed nationalism, military prioritization, and contestations of “planetary” politico-legal thinking and its imaginaries. It is now necessary to “think infrastructurally” about legal, policy, and economic means to ensure the reliable and universal availability, sustenance, and supplementation of these important foundations of planetary knowledge.

This paper was presented at the CJIL 2025 Symposium, Technological Innovation in Global Governance, held in January 2025, and is published in Chicago Journal of International Law, Volume 26, Issue 1 (2025).

Sensoring the Oceans: The Argo Floats Array in the Governance of Science Data Infrastructures

What role do governance arrangements, background legal rules, and the core infrastructures play in enabling data collection, determining what “ocean data” is produced, and when and how it is made available? We explore this question by focusing on data about oceanic features produced by Argo – an international program, operationalized by state agencies and research institutions, that comprises arrays of autonomous floats for ocean observation. Through examination of annual meeting notes, interviews, and observation of the Argo Steering Committee’s annual meeting, we analyze the techniques and practices involved in planning, testing, calibrating, validating, and error-correcting that ultimately lead to the production, transmission, and dissemination of Argo data. We then position Argo within the institutional governance of oceans, weather, climate and, most recently, earth systems to illustrate both the evolution of Argo’s role and its evolving and uneasy position within different governance approaches. In the conclusion, we challenge the utility of “ocean data” as an analytical category and highlight the risks of over-coordination and institutionalization of data infrastructures. We suggest that allowing data infrastructures like Argo to develop organically might lead to productive (if unexpected) connections, fusions, or splits, which might in turn reorient the focus of observation towards unexplored interactions between and within earth systems. We hope that our analysis helps bring to the fore some core data-infrastructural features of planetary governance as it now exists and will (have to) rapidly further evolve.

The final version of this working paper will be published in “Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule” (Cambridge University Press), edited by Fleur Johns, Gavin Sullivan, and Dimitri van Den Meerssche.

Attributive Justice in International Law: The Global Law and Infrastructure of Pathogen Genomic Sequence Data-Sharing and Benefit-Sharing

A succession of epidemic diseases among humans in the first decades of the 21st century renewed long-standing controversies about power imbalances and justice in the global production, use, and distribution of scientific data and its benefits. A new area of contention concerns digital genomic sequence data (GSD). The largely-forgotten idea of ‘attributive justice’, articulated by Hugo Grotius (1625), helps make sense of otherwise-disparate demands for GSD justice.

At least two kinds of attributive justice claims are made in relation to GSD. One is for attribution of credit to scientists and others involved in medical services or other procurement of samples—a scientist-focused attributive justice. These claims are mobilized especially in efforts to rectify existing power and resource imbalances in science production, both within national societies and by scientists from developing country. These claims have considerable traction, but not in formal international law.

A second claim relates to demands by developing countries either to control GSD, or at least to receive benefits from commercial use of it when the underlying biological sample originates specifically in their territory. These claims have been pursued in efforts to extend the 2010 Nagoya Protocol. Other existing or pending international treaty regimes embedded in entirely separate institutions also address benefit sharing in relation to oceanic, plant, or human digital sequence sharing, complicating the formation of a coherent or unified set of rules. Contentions about widely used sets of data- governance principles such as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reus- able (FAIR) data also arise in each treaty regime.

Infrastructural regimes for the sharing of sequences have become major sites for both the scientist-relative and state-relative attributive justice claims. The most widely used platform for access to GSD of all kinds is the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) (including GenBank). A leading alternative is GISAID, which is similar in being free to use but conditions GSD access and sets requirements for attribution of

scientific credit. While GISAID goes further than INSDC in supporting scientist-relative attributive justice claims, the two infrastructures are broadly similar with regard to state-relative claims for attribution of GSD and benefit-sharing. The infrastructures have recently begun trying to ensure that metadata accompanying each sequence attributes it to samples taken from a particular country, but not that the GSD is systematically linked to its com- mercial outcomes. These infrastructures embed norms and ideologies of their original builders, such as a normative commitment to ‘Open Science’, and the economic and epidemic-security interests of richer OECD countries.

Attributive justice entitlements of particular scientists and states will not leverage universal principles of distributive virus- and vaccine-justice but are reinforcing significant shifts toward orders of respect and recognition in global health research and (slowly) in sequencing infrastructures. The contributions of attributive justice have been underestimated.

Professor Benedict Kingsbury published his article 'Attributive Justice in International Law: The Global Law and Infrastructure of Pathogen Genomic Sequence Data-Sharing and Benefit-Sharing' in the Summer 2023 issue of NYU Journal of International Law and Politics.

Human Rights in a Use Case World

Digital engineers diagram ‘use cases’ to design software, based on practical needs of the quotidian product user rather than big normative claims. Human rights lawyers work in the reverse direction, starting from principles of universal application then applying these to hard cases. These two modes of thinking and practice have existed separately. Digital automation of government services using algorithms and AI is bringing them abruptly together and into mutual learning. The chapter examines controversies and court decisions over digital welfare state programmes in Australia (Robodebt), the Netherlands (Syri), and the United Kingdom (Universal Credit), highlighted by Philip Alston as UN Special Rapporteur. The normative practice of human rights must grapple with data concentration and computerized decisions wherever power is exercised. The chapter proposes ‘thinking infrastructurally’ as a path to bring human rights thinking into the fast-escaping public–private practices of algorithmic government and machine learning.

This paper has been published in The Struggle for Human Rights: Essays in honour of Philip Alston (Nehal Bhuta, Florian Hoffmann, Sarah Knuckey, Frédéric Mégret, and Margaret Satterthwaite eds., Oxford University Press 2021).