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‘Project Indect’: An A.I. to police all of Europe

By Stephen C. Webster

Published: September 20, 2009
Updated 3 months ago




The European Union is spending tens of millions of euros on an artificial intelligence system known as “Project Indect,” which would draw from multiple data sources, namely public surveillance cameras, in order to detect “threats” and recognize “abnormal behavior” across the whole continent.

According to the project’s Web site, once completed, Project Indect would even be able to track vehicles as a type of support network for EU police officers.

Perhaps more chilling, the project promises “continuous monitoring” of “web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p networks [and] individual computer systems”.

Indect, research for which began in 2009, was the subject of a Sunday morning Telegraph report that has attracted significant attention on the Internet, but none from mainstream media.

The project’s critics are making an increasingly common obvious literary reference, calling Indect “Orwellian” in nature.

But Indect is just one cornerstone of what EU officials are calling Europe’s “justice agenda,” the achievement of which would see European police agencies sharing information on suspects and cooperating on arrest warrants.

The Telegraph added:

According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

“This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them,” he said.

A list of Indect’s partner groups includes:

AGH Univeristy of Science and Technology (Poland) - Project Coordinator http://www.agh.edu.pl/en
Gdansk University of Technology (Poland) http://www.pg.gda.pl
InnoTec DATA G.m.b.H. & Co. KG (Germany) http://www.innotec-data.de
Grenoble INP (France) http://www.grenoble-inp.fr
MSWIA - General Headquarters of Police (Poland) http://www.policja.pl/
Moviquity (Spain) http://www.moviquity.com/webingles/index.htm
PSI Transcom GmbH (Germany) http://www.psi.de/
Police Service of Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) http://www.psni.police.uk/
Poznan University of Technology (Poland) http://www.put.poznan.pl
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) http://www.uc3m.es
Technical University of Sofia (Bulgaria) http://www.tu-sofia.bg
University of Wuppertal (Germany) http://www.uni-wuppertal.de
University of York (Great Britain) http://www.york.ac.uk
Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic) http://www.vsb.cz
Technical University of Kosice (Slovakia) http://www.tuke.sk/tuke?set_language=en&cl=en
X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H. (Austria) http://www.x-art.at
Fachhochschule Technikum Wien (Austria) http://www.technikum-wien.at

Software research ongoing at York University, Telegraph reported, includes “sense induction, entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis [and] sentiment analysis.”

Indect critics told the British paper that data mined by the A.I. system could be funneled to the EU Joint Situation Center, which could effectively turn the little-noticed counter terrorism agency into Europe’s own CIA.





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