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 Yet EU governments are stepping up surveillance of their own
citizens: last month France, smarting from Islamist attacks in
January, passed intrusive laws on the very day it learned U.S.
agents tapped French presidents' phones; this week, the European
Parliament gave ground in a fight to block powers to track and share
air passenger records among member states.
Less well known still is that the 28-nation European Union itself,
as a collective institution, is spending hundreds of millions of
euros developing security technologies that civil liberties
watchdogs say jeopardize rights to privacy.
"Funding these programs is not per se problematic," said Nils
Muiznieks, a Latvian who is human rights commissioner for the
47-state Council of Europe, a rights body that is not part of the
EU. "It is how the new technologies will be used that poses a series
of human rights concerns."
With concerns growing over Islamist violence even before the attacks
in Paris in January, EU spending on security research, at 1.7
billion euros ($1.9 billion) in the bloc's 7-year budget from 2014,
is 20 percent up on the previous period.
EU officials estimate that represents a hefty 40 percent of all such
spending by the bloc's 28 member states, many of which lack capacity
to develop such technology themselves. Among top priorities are
finding ways to focus mass surveillance of the Internet, email,
mobile phones and social networks on suspects.
 "Member states do conduct their own research," said an EU official
familiar with such projects who spoke privately as he was not
authorized to speak. "But a lot of them like to go through us - it
helps keep some of this stuff at arm's length."
Most of the research the EU funds, much of it by private firms
including from non-European states such as the United States and
Israel, is listed in public tender documents, though these are
time-consuming to consult. But about a tenth of the spending is set
aside for work classified as top secret.
LEGAL PROTECTIONS
Asked whether such research might lead to infringing civil
liberties, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, Natasha
Bertaud, said: "Fighting terrorism and keeping citizens safe is all
about staying ahead of the game ... The EU brings together the
industry and practitioners, and provides funding for developing
cutting-edge technologies, in order to help member states better
protect people and infrastructure."
Calling EU privacy standards among the highest in the world, she
noted efforts to ensure companies based elsewhere also abided by
data protection rules in the EU: "There can be no security without
freedom and no freedom without security," she said.
A number of firms which have taken part in EU projects, including
planemaker Airbus and Italy's Wind telecom [WINVFT.UL] declined
comment. So too did Verint Systems Inc., a U.S. company with
operations in Israel. Coordinator of four security projects, Verint
received some four million euros in EU funding from 2007-13,
according to Commission data.
Despite EU insistence that systems are designed to be kept under
strict judicial control, some experts note that, once developed with
EU cash, the software and devices owned by private firms could be
used by any future buyer with fewer scruples.
The Council of Europe's Muiznieks said surveillance tools which have
so far been subject to rigorous checks, may become easier to use as
EU states toughen counter-terrorism measures.
Security technologies developed by EU projects have privacy
protection tools embedded into them, said Francesca Gaudino at U.S.
law firm Baker and McKenzie in Milan. These aim to make it
impossible to use them without having whatever local legal
authorization is required, for example to tap telephones.
Gaudino's firm was partner in a three-year EU-sponsored project
known as CAPER - Collaborative information Acquisition, Processing,
Exploitation and Reporting. Concluded nine months ago, it created a
platform for police and security agencies to share data gathered in
pursuit of organized crime gangs.
Gaudino said that while technologies developed under EU auspices
were in themselves "neutral" - inherently neither good or bad for
civil liberties - there was no guarantee how they might be used once
they were no longer inside EU programs.
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TECHNOLOGY IN DEMAND
Concern over the involvement of non-European companies in EU
research projects was misplaced, however, the EU official said: "Of
course, the Israeli firms get attention. They are getting a lot of
EU money. But the reality is these guys are miles ahead of us in
technology. And they are sharing it with us."
Officials say that among priorities for investment are mass
surveillance technologies that let agencies sweep large amounts of
audio, video and written data to zoom in on suspects.
These include deep packet inspection equipment to intercept online
conversations, digital forensics to remotely access private
computers, IMSI catchers - a mobile device for listening in to phone
calls - social network analysis and data mining to profile people
according to patterns they leave online.
Technologies to decrypt secured messages and to identify anonymised
communications are also being developed.
Such projects trouble the chair of the European Parliament's civil
liberties committee. Claude Moraes, a British Labour EU lawmaker,
sees a "conflict of interest" between the development of these
technologies and EU's frequent outcries at mass surveillance
programs run by its international partners.
The revelations two years ago by fugitive U.S. National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden on U.S. mass surveillance of
private emails and phone data across the world still fuel suspicion
in Europe and poison EU-U.S. relations.
The experience reinforced opposition among EU lawmakers, already
strongly influenced by historic German mistrust of state
surveillance, to proposals to share airline passengers records among
European police forces. After two years of argument, it finally
passed the committee stage in parliament on Wednesday.
That has delayed implementation of a system on which the EU has
already spent several million euros in technology costs.
EU-funded security projects are no strangers to criticism.
One, known as INDECT, which ran for five years until 2014, developed
ways to identify potential criminals using software to collate and
analyze disparate information collected for example from CCTV,
drones, GPS location services on phones.
Critics called it a real-life "Big Brother".
"The shift from identifying offenders to preventing crime implies
that the presumption of innocence is no longer the normal case, but
that all citizens are becoming suspects," argues David Wright,
editor of 'Surveillance in Europe', an overview of the sector
published last year.
The Emergency Support System project, run from 2009-13, was said to
have improved authorities' response to crises but it used fast
analysis based on technologies, such as IMSI catchers, which critics
say are invasive of personal privacy.
The EU official familiar with the research projects said balancing
security and freedoms was a problem: "Personally, of course, some of
this makes me uncomfortable," he said. "But the others are all doing
it and Europe needs to catch up."
On protecting civil liberties, he added: "We make an effort. But in
the end of course once the firms develop this stuff, it's their
proprietary product. They can sell it to who they want."
(Editing by Giles Elgood)
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