Fresh from agreeing a Transatlantic government pay-off to end bribery and corruption investigations, it has emerged that BAE systems
has been awarded a €2.3 million contract to develop a “Strategic crime
and immigration information management system” (SCIIMS) for the
European Union.
[neoconopticon.wordpress.com] The contract has been
awarded by the European Commission under the €1.4 billion EU Security
Research Programme (ESRP), part of the ‘FP7‘
framework programme 2007-2013. The ESRP has been dominated by defence
and IT contractors keen to diversify into the highly lucrative
‘Homeland Security’ market.
The EU contract tasks the SCIIMS consortium with developing:
“new
capabilities improve the ability to search, mine, and fuse information
from National, trans-national, private and other sources, to discover
trends and patterns for increasing shared situational awareness and
improving decision making, within a secure infrastructure to facilitate
the combating of organized crime and in particular people trafficking
to enhance the security of citizens”
Essentially an
international police intelligence system for use by European and
national agencies responsible for combating trafficking in human beings
and organised crime (including EUROPOL and FRONTEX), SCIIMS represents the further outsourcing of EU policy to private contractors under the ESRP.
The stated objectives of
the project are to develop “a secure information infrastructure in
accordance with EU Crime and Immigration Agencies information needs”
along with “tools to assist in decision making in order to predict,
analyze and intervene with likely people trafficking and smuggling
sources, events, and links to organized crime”.
The use of controversial
information technologies such as data mining, profiling and predictive
modelling are explicitly mandated by the EU contract, in spite of
widespread concerns about their legality and effectiveness. Both the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights have recently called on governments to regulate and limit the use of these kind of technologies.
SCIIMS will mine “large
data sets” in the hope of producing useful intelligence for state
agents. This could include EU databases such as the EUROPOL and
Schengen Information Systems, as well as national police and
immigration databases in the member states. Unless these practices are
regulated by national or international law, they will almost certainly
be unlawful. Yet there is no mention whatsoever of data protection
within the EU-BAE contract.
The SCIIMS project is
coordinated by BAE Systems’ Integrated Systems Technologies Ltd. UK.
BAE’s partners in the SCIIMS consortium are:
- Elsag Datamat S.P.A., Italy (a Finmeccanica company)
- Indra Sistemas S.A., Spain
- Denodo Technologies SL, Spain
- Universidade da Coruna, Spain
- Columba Global Systems Ltd. (Ireland)
- The Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Source: http://neoconopticon.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/bae-sciims-project/
