BRUSSELS — The European Union wants to make Europol the central nervous system for police to trade data and use cutting-edge technologies, as part of plans to beef up the bloc’s internal security.
The European Commission unveiled plans on Wednesday to strengthen the way its law enforcement agency based in The Hague fights crime, as the bloc seeks to formulate a tougher response to threats ranging from cyberattacks to hybrid aggression previously linked to Russia-backed actors.
“We are proposing to strengthen Europol’s mandate by enhancing information exchange and we are embedding cutting-edge technology at the heart of its operations,” said Commission Executive Vice President for tech and security Henna Virkkunen.
The plans for a new Europol mandate include doubling its budget to €3 billion, increasing staff numbers twofold and “develop[ing] advanced technological capabilities,” the EU executive said. Some of the agency’s new toys would include a cloud infrastructure to share data in real time for crime-fighting operations, as well as technology and innovation hubs to deploy new tools such as AI.
Europol currently supports cross-border investigations between national police in EU countries — often by facilitating data sharing and helping to analyze that data.
The new mandate proposed on Wednesday needs to be signed off on by EU member countries in the Council and lawmakers in the European Parliament.
The EU executive suggested a “fundamental shift” in how Europol sifts through the data it collects, relaxing current rules that require data to be sorted into different categories before determining if Europol can legally use it. That’s been a “key operational bottleneck,” the Commission said in the text, since Europol deals with high volumes of unstructured data.
The police agency has been asking for more leeway in how it deploys everything from artificial intelligence to decryption technology, which it says is critical to fighting modern-day crime effectively.
But Wednesday’s proposal also set Europol up for another epic fight with privacy authorities and watchdogs, which have clashed with the agency over issues such as retaining data about people without links to criminal activity or data it received from the EU border agency, Frontex.
Civil society coalition Protect Not Surveil warned on Wednesday that the Europol reforms “dangerously erode privacy, automate surveillance, and sideline oversight.”
Romain Lanneau, a legal researcher with the surveillance watchdog Statewatch, said the proposals to exchange data automatically are “thwarting the rule of law in the EU” because they go against EU rules stating that Europol can only support national police in tackling specific serious crimes.
Belgian European Parliament lawmaker Saskia Bricmont said her Greens group “strongly supports” justice cooperation in Europe, but that the “far-reaching reform” to Europol “must not lead to mass surveillance or allow unlimited access to personal data.”
The EU police agency has repeatedly come under fire from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), the privacy regulator that oversees Europol, for overstepping in its data collection and processing. The EDPS has also pushed back against previous proposals to expand Europol’s remit.
Wojciech Wiewiórowski, who currently serves as the acting head of the EDPS, said in a statement ahead of Wednesday’s proposal that his authority will prepare an opinion on the proposal and assess whether it raises any privacy concerns.