Event

Four years ago, a rather small group of complicated individuals set to explore why Europol was so interested in gathering and keeping the data of people even if they were not directly linked with criminal investigations. And why it was prepared to go to war with the EU's data protection watchdog over the issue. They wanted to keep everything and for as long as they could. The only problem was that at the time this was not exactly legal. Politicians would fix that afterwards but questions about the priorities of the agency had emerged and would stay. This is how an investigation into the EU's law enforcement agencies (Europol/Frontex) kick started, trying to understand what the agenda of the institutions in question was and how it shaped their approach to novel technologies introduced into the work of policing. Many complicated things happened since then which brought the spotlight over the effort of the EU border agency to introduce an indiscriminate data retention system for migrants while circumventing basic data protection safeguards, and then also over the formation of an alliance supporting the Commission's CSAM regulation and lately towards the experimentation of Europol with automated aspects of police work. What was common over all these cases was the opacity that clothed developments which made impossible to see the shape of things to come.

The presentation will explain how the investigation has unfolded, the challenges it was met with when attempting to access information, the push-back and impact caused by publications and what are the lessons learned from the experience of attempting to analyse and journalistically scrutinize some of the EU's most introvert institutions.