Mass surveillance: Europol, future European NSA?

By Philippe Laloux (

The Evening

In computing, this is called a “Big data ark”. Understand: an “

” housing gigantic masses of data. That of Europol, the coordination body of national police forces based in The Hague, created in the aftermath of the Paris attacks of 2015, is Babylonian: more than 4 petabytes (if the CD-Rom still existed, it would take more of 6 million). It contains particularly sensitive data, reported for 6 years by the police of the 27 Member States, according to their investigations. They would concern more than 250,000 people, supposed to have a link, past or present, with terrorist activities. But not only…

Europol has also sucked up and stored, massively and illegally, tons of data on people who have not committed any crime.

To the point, worry human rights defenders in Europe, to compare its activities to the mass surveillance program set up by the National Security Agency…

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