The EU looking to head down Orwellian black hole

Under the guise of Project Indect, a five year research program that includes: Police Service of Northern Ireland, computer scientists at York University, and fellow researchers in nine other European Union countries, The EU wants to develop “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behavior or violence”.

These programs are meant to act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and individual computers. The project has already received £10 million in funding from the EU and is a part of its ever expanding role in crime fighting, terrorism and managing travel of people. Already this year the EU has increased its budget in these areas by 13.5% or nearly £900 million.’

This is all suppose to help develop what the European Commission is referring to as a “common culture” of law enforcement to be developed across the EU over the next five years.

According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include “to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence”.

It talks of the “construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive”.

Source: Telegraph Online – EU funding ‘Orwellian’ artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for “abnormal behaviour”

The program isn’t without its detractors however. Among them is Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty a human rights group, and Stephen Booth, and analyst with European think tank Open Europe.

Chakrabarti considers the massive type of surveillance that Project Indect and Adabts – the acronym for Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behavior and Threats in crowed Spaces, a separately funded program by the EU to the tune of nearly £3 million so far – are sinister steps for any country to be taking. Chakrabarti added that this type of action is absolutely chilling consider the it is to include all European Union countries.

For Stephen Booth the scale is “Orwellian” to say the least.

According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

“This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them,” he said.

“The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked ‘is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?'”

Source: Telegraph Online – EU funding ‘Orwellian’ artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for “abnormal behaviour”

As well Open Europe believes that all this data collected by the likes of the Project Indect could be used by a little known EU agency called the EU Joint Situation Control (SitCen) which it believes is the beginnings of an EU secret service. It has been referred to by others as “Europe’s CIA”.

a big hat tip to papa