France puts 78,000 security threats on vast police database.... Far more than other EU countries
France puts 78,000 security threats on vast police
database
By LORI HINNANT April 4, 2018
PARIS (AP) — France has flagged more than 78,000 people
as security threats in a database intended to let European police share
information on the continent’s most dangerous residents — more than all other
European countries put together — according to an analysis by The Associated
Press.
A German parliamentarian, Andrej Hunko, was the first to
raise the alarm about potential misuse of the Schengen Information System
database in a question to his country’s Interior Ministry about “discreet
checks” — secret international checks on people considered a threat to national
security or public safety. He questioned whether and why different countries
seemed to apply very different criteria.
“The increase in alerts cannot be explained by the threat
of Islamist terrorism alone. Europol reports a four-digit number of confirmed
foreign fighters, yet the increase of SIS alerts in 2017 is several times
that,” Hunko said in a statement late last month when he released the Interior
Ministry response to his query.
That response included a spreadsheet detailing for the
first time how many people were flagged for checks by each European country
last year — more than 134,000 in all.
“This could mean that families and contacts of these
individuals are also being secretly monitored. It is also possible that the
measure is being used on a large scale for combatting other criminal activity,”
Hunko said.
The number of French entries by police and intelligence
agencies “indicates a misuse” of the system intended to monitor dangerous
criminals, he added.
The overall Schengen database — which is separate to the
Europol database and far more widely used — forms the backbone of European
security, allowing police, judicial authorities and other law enforcement to
immediately check whether a person is wanted or missing, or a car is stolen, or
a firearm is legal, for example. The database was checked 5 billion times in
2017 alone, according to the director of the EU-LISA agency, Krum Garkov.
But a relatively unknown provision in European law allows
countries to flag people for the “discreet checks” — allowing law enforcement
in one country to quietly notify counterparts elsewhere of a person’s location
and activities. Use of the system — intended for individuals who pose a threat
to national security or public safety — has expanded enormously since Islamic
State extremists attacked Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016, from 69,475 in
2015 to 134,662 last year, according to data from EU-LISA and Germany.
If someone is flagged for a check, their name will come
up for any law enforcement official who has stopped them anywhere in Europe —
whether trying to cross an external border or running a red light. In the
entry, the requesting country can ask for a subsequent action, ranging from
simply reporting back their location, vehicle, and traveling companions to
detaining them immediately for arrest.
The checks, unlike arrest warrants, expire after a year,
although Garkov said countries are notified of pending expirations and can
renew them at will.
But vast disparities in its use by individual countries
raise questions about both the effectiveness of the tools and the criteria
countries are using to enter people into the system.
With 78,619 entries by 2017, France makes up 60 percent
of the requests. Britain, with nearly the same population and 16,991 people
flagged, comes in a distant second. Germany, Europe’s most populous country,
had 4,285 people flagged last year, according to the Interior Ministry data.
To put the French number in perspective, the country’s
intelligence chief, Laurent Nunez, said late last year that France had recorded
18,000 people as suspected extremists, and considered 4,000 of those to be
highly dangerous. The Interior Ministry did not respond to requests to comment
about the criteria for discreet checks. CNIL, the government data protection
agency, said the 78,000 entries covered every person that France wanted flagged
for any reason.
Like the U.S. “no fly list,” people can only learn by
inference whether they are flagged for a discreet check.
“People are not informed about the existence of this
alert, which makes sense. But at the same there needs to be a proportionality
assessment,” said Niovi Vavoula, a legal scholar at Queen Mary University of
London who studies the use of the database. “If certain member states are
introducing alerts en masse to the system, this needs to be flagged as a
problem.”
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