The European Commission is going to propose to the European Parliament and the EU member states to legalize the controversial data storage by the EU police agency Europol.
Last week it became clear that Europol does not delete data about suspects after six months – as is currently prescribed. Moreover, such personal data is still shared with other police forces even after a long time.
The European Commission does not want to reverse this practice but to legalize it. Trilogue negotiations between the European Parliament, the Commission, and the member states about this proposal will start soon.
“The proposal legalizes the current practice of Europol,” confirms Dutch MEP Tineke Strik (GreenLeft). “In addition, Europol will gain even more powers to extract information from databases and to add to those databases.”
Strik expects that especially the EU countries and the Commission will push for an expansion of Europol’s powers. According to her, the Parliament is divided but generally more critical regarding privacy issues of this kind.
Sorting through and cleaning all data will be a major task since Europol is said to hold about 4 petabytes of data, according to the British newspaper The Guardian. That is equivalent to hundreds of billions of printed pages full of information.
Supporters of data protection say that the amount of information on Europol’s systems amounts to mass surveillance and could become a European counterpart to the US National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA’s clandestine online spying was exposed a few years ago by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Dutchman Frank van der Linde is, as far as known, the only person who has been wrongfully registered in Europol’s database and who discovered this himself. According to a later court ruling, he was wrongly classified as an extremist by the Dutch police.
Van der Linde was able to see his file thanks to a court ruling and thus found out that his Dutch data had also been passed on to Europol. The Dutch police initially denied this but later admitted it reluctantly.