EDRI writes:
You don’t have to be a civil rights defender or even an opposition voice to end up on a police list. You don’t even have to commit a crime. And yet in today’s EU, innocent people are being swept up in a police digital dragnet that risks eroding the very basis of democracy.
Police forces around Europe seem hooked on the habit of collecting information on a massive scale and forwarding it to the EU’s police agency, Europol. This undermines privacy, fair trial rights and the presumption of innocence.
Once the police have your data, you may inadvertently become a suspect in an open investigation. In defence of hard-fought freedoms, the public needs to curb police overreach. It shouldn’t be the case, but the national police and the EU’s police agency Europol are having a hard time getting the memo.
At Statewatch, we teamed up with European Digital Rights (EDRi), a Brussels-based network of European network of experts defending human rights in the digital era. Together we published a guide encouraging individuals to request the data held on them by Europol.
Read more at EDRI.
h/t, Joe Cadillic