![]() Frank van der Linde, who was placed on a terror watchlist in his native Netherlands and later removed, is one of the rare visible threads in an otherwise unseen mesh. O nly a handful of Europeans have become aware that their own data is being stored and none is known to have been able to force disclosure. But the full contents of what it holds are unknown, in part because of the haphazard way that EDPS found Europol to be treating data. Incoming records are meant to be strictly categorised and only processed or retained when they have potential relevance to high-value work such as counter-terrorism. In theory, Europol is subject to tight regulation over what kinds of personal data it can store and for how long. Photograph: Jerry Lampen/ANP/AFP/Getty Images If made law, the proposals could in effect retrospectively legalise the data cache and preserve its contents as a testing ground for new AI and machine learning tools.Įuropol denies any wrongdoing, and said the watchdog may be interpreting the current rules in an impractical way: “ Europol regulation was not intended by the legislator as a requirement which is impossible to be met by the data controller in practice.”Įuropol had worked with the EDPS “to find a balance between keeping the EU secure and its citizens safe while adhering to the highest standards of data protection”, the agency said.įounded as a coordinating body for national police forces in the EU and headquartered in The Hague, Europol has been pushed by some member states as a solution to terrorism concerns in the wake of the 2015 Bataclan attacks and encouraged to harvest data on multiple fronts.Įuropol buildings in The Hague. Last year, it proposed sweeping changes to the regulation underpinning Europol’s powers. The commission says the legal concerns raised by the EDPS raise “a serious challenge” for Europol’s ability to fulfil its duties. “In Europe, Europol is the platform that supports national police authorities with this herculean task.” “Law enforcement authorities need the tools, resources and the time to analyse data that is lawfully transmitted to them,” she said. ![]() The EU home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson appeared to defend Europol. The European commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, has argued that Europol supports national police authorities with the ‘herculean task’ of analysing lawfully transmitted data. Data protection advocates say the volume of information held on Europol’s systems amounts to mass surveillance and is a step on its road to becoming a European counterpart to the US National Security Agency (NSA), the organisation whose clandestine online spying was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. ![]() Sensitive data in the ark has been drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime.Īccording to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Europol’s cache contains at least 4 petabytes – equivalent to 3m CD-Roms or a fifth of the entire contents of the US Library of Congress. The unprecedented finding from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) targets what privacy experts are calling a “big data ark” containing billions of points of information. T he EU’s police agency, Europol, will be forced to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc’s data protection watchdog.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |