By Mark Ballard for The Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
At the initiative's heart is the desire to work with industry to
create more and better surveillance systems that it can use to
monitor the public in order to prevent terrorist attacks.
The EC Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security
said in a statement it would publish a green paper, inviting
consultation on "what role the Union could play in order to foster
detection technologies in the service of the security of its
citizens".
The green paper was drawn up from the results of a conference of
"major European business" and the public sector last November,
called the Public-Private Security Dialogue: Detection Technologies
and Associated Technologies in the Fight against Terrorism.
Ben Hayes, spokesman for civil liberties campaigner Statewatch,
said private industry has been given too much control over Europe's
surveillance policy.
A Statewatch report published in April warned that the EU had
been handing private defence firms the power to decide how EU money
was spent implementing security measures in civil society.
Hayes said these were areas where the defence firms stood to
benefit. Moreover, those firms were worried about $1bn of state
subsidies given to US firms to develop civil surveillance in the
name of homeland security – detailed in Statewatch's Arming
Big Brother report.
European firms feared this would give US firms an unfair
advantage in the emerging market of civil surveillance, so they had
sought, and won, more say on EU funding.
Yet, said Hayes, people representing the interest of civil
liberties against big business were under-represented. The April
report, Arming Big Brother, documented the creation of the
European Security Research Advisory Board (ESRAB), which advises
the EC on matters related to security spending. A third of its
members were from industry, another third from member states and
academia. Only two out of 50 members represented the civil
liberties of European citizens.
Statewatch had dubbed this conjunction of public administration
and private industry the "security-industry complex", a play on the
phrase used by US President Dwight David Eisenhower to
warn in 1961 that unprecedented amounts of money being given to
private industry by the military should not result in unwarranted
influence of war profiteers over policy.
"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of
defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and
liberty may prosper together," he said.
The EC, however, said its surveillance consultation would
consider civil liberties. Surveillance and "detection technologies"
were "inherently intrusive", said the EC statement.
"Their use needs to be carefully analysed, in order to establish
limitations to their intrusiveness where necessary," it added.
It also said any legislation that came out of the consultation
must "fully comply" with EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the
European Convention on Human Rights.
"Particular attention must be paid to compliance with the
protection of personal data and the right to private life," it
said.
The consultation will ask how the EC should address itself to
the task of watching its citizens. In particular how different
surveillance technologies should be standardised and integrated,
how they should be used and what should be done at mass events like
sports games.
It will consider surveillance, biometrics, tools for analysing
communications and documents, and devices for detecting illegal
substances.
The strong say of the private sector in these matters was
decided by the European Council in 2004, when it adopted the The
Hague Programme ("strengthening freedom, security and justice in
the European Union"). This noted the importance of an industrial
say in the matters of civil policy, said the statement.
"This Green Paper aims to provide the ingredients for initiating
such dialogue within the field of detection technologies," it
added.
The green paper – "on detection technologies in the work of
law enforcement, customs and other security authorities" – was
published Monday, but is not yet available to the public.
© The Register
2006
