The plans for a new Europol mandate include doubling its budget to €3 billion, increasing staff numbers twofold and “develop[ing] advanced technological capabilities,” the EU executive said. Some of the agency’s new toys would include a cloud infrastructure to share data in real time for crime-fighting operations, as well as technology and innovation hubs to deploy new tools such as AI.
Europol currently supports cross-border investigations between national police in EU countries — often by facilitating data sharing and helping to analyze that data.
The new mandate proposed on Wednesday needs to be signed off on by EU member countries in the Council and lawmakers in the European Parliament.
The EU executive suggested a “fundamental shift” in how Europol sifts through the data it collects, relaxing current rules that require data to be sorted into different categories before determining if Europol can legally use it. That’s been a “key operational bottleneck,” the Commission said in the text, since Europol deals with high volumes of unstructured data.
The police agency has been asking for more leeway in how it deploys everything from artificial intelligence to decryption technology, which it says is critical to fighting modern-day crime effectively.
But Wednesday’s proposal also set Europol up for another epic fight with privacy authorities and watchdogs, which have clashed with the agency over issues such as retaining data about people without links to criminal activity or data it received from the EU border agency, Frontex.