Civil security policies, research priorities and budgets are expanding quickly across the EU and its 27 member nations, with direct operational and economic implications for public and private stakeholders at all levels of society. Hundreds of million of euros each year will fund these research projects. This effort includes defining and financing the EU’s objectives for industry-driven security research and technology development … a crucial part of the Union’s civil security agenda. But the EU’s civil security policy and research agendas are complex. Whether your organisation currently has or plans to develop technologies for civil security applications, you NEED to be aware of the EU’s:

* Policy debate and decisions

* Research funding opportunities

* Technology & standardisation developments

* Implications for business

Why do you need to know?  Because today’s EU policies and security research projects will create tomorrow’s interoperable standards applicable to all 27 EU nations.

Identifying opportunities in this policy landscape requires time and resources. Tracking and making sense of the EU’s civil security agenda for all the stakeholders - ahead of the opportunities - is the raison d’etre of SecEUR (see ‘our products & services’)

Contact us and put our experience and insider knowledge to work for you.  

Here are some security-related policy developments and events we think readers should be aware of:

RFID standards.  The EU-funded research project known as GRIFS has put together a new online database on the status of international standards for the uses of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, which will include many security applications. A two-year project begun in January 2008, GRIFS seeks global support for RFID standardisation and will hold a kick-off meeting with international players in Washington DC during 30 June-1 July. The database is available at http://grifs-project.eu/db

Free the UAVs. Five of the European Defence Agency’s 26 member countries agreed on 17 June to jointly fund a new programme to enable military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to self-deploy and navigate across Europe’s crowded commercial airspace to distant missions. Known as MIDCAS (“MID-air Collision Avoidance System”) and funded by France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, the EUR 50 million programme will be coordinated by the EDA, whose previous feasibility studies on sense-and-avoid and other UAV-related technologies helped shape the MIDCAS effort. The European Commission has  liaised closely with the agency since the results of MIDCAS will directly benefit autonomous deployment of UAVs for civil security application.

Security research: Mark three. The EU’s next and third annual call for security R&D proposals is expected to be released in late July or early August, according to European Commission sources. With a budget exceeding EUR 200 million, the 50-page call will seek a rich mix of security technologies and capabilities. For the first time, it will support a large-scale “demonstration” project or two with budgets in the EUR 50-60 million range. The call also includes a couple of topics that may be difficult to execute in terms of their technical or political feasibility. SECURITY EUROPE will come back to the details of the call in our next issue.

Summer publication: Readers: This year, in order to cover all policy developments before the EU shuts down in August for its traditional summer recess, SECURITY EUROPE will publish a “July-August” edition at the end of July instead of mid-month.  Publication resumes thereafter in September as usual.

HEADLINES . . .

BRUSSELS – The 27 EU nations must achieve tighter police and judicial cooperation, make better use of information technology (IT) tools to counter terrorism and cyber-crime, and further exploit public-funded security research in Europe to develop civil security capabilities in the coming years, according to the European Commission’s new policy statement to shape the union’s next five-year justice and home affairs (JHA) agenda.

The Commission’s new weighty document places heavy emphasis on achieving integrated databases between the member states and EU agencies to fight terrorism and secure the union’s external borders, for example, but these could be problematic. There are growing doubts among experts about the technical feasibility of To read more, subscribe >>

BRUSSELS – Now that the European Commission has unveiled its views on the challenges facing the EU’s justice and home affairs agenda (see related story in this issue), it now falls to the Swedish government to define the priorities in the union’s next rolling five-year JHA programme. The resulting Stockholm Programme will replace today’s Hague Programme, which expires in late 2009. Sweden takes over the EU’s presidency in July from the Czech Republic.

Aside from the goal of further combating human trafficking and other forms of organised crime, Sweden will pursue stronger operational cooperation among national police and judicial authorities, while pushing for uniform judicial procedural rights for citizens across the EU.

It will also support two forthcoming initiatives, each with sweeping technical implications.

One concerns national forensic laboratories, while the other – even more ambitious – would set out To read more, subscribe >>

BRUSSELS – Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is hindered by researchers’ ignorance of work in the sector by their counterparts across the EU and beyond. This carries a risk of redundant effort and subsequent technical incompatibility between national critical infrastructure networks, researchers agreed at a recent EU-sponsored international workshop on CIP modeling and simulation.

The 4-6 May event – “Workshop on Modelling and Simulation of Critical Infrastructure” –was co-hosted by the EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the US Department of Homeland Security at the centre’s headquarters in Ispra, Italy. Originally intended for a dozen participants, it ended up with an audience of 60, including CIP specialists from the United States, Australia’s National Security Resilience Policy Division and Canada’s defence research authority, as well as officials from the European Commission’s policy units for justice and home affairs, cyber-security, transport & energy and security research.

The crux of the workshop was To read more, subscribe >>

BRUSSELS – Non-lethal (NL) weaponry is a subject few Western governments like to discuss, particularly within European policy circles, yet the changing nature of security threats is forcing officials to at least consider the option.

NL technologies have dual-use application for civil security of course, and some of their ‘softer’ versions are being explored via EU-funded security R&D projects, although EU officials become very circumspect whenever the subject arises.

One area where the application of NL technology appears increasingly likely, however, is To read more, subscribe >>

BRUSSELS – The European Commission will soon launch a six-month consultation period with stakeholders to determine how protection of personal data can be further strengthened.  The timing of the consultation is strategic in that it unfolds just as the 27 member states begin assessing the policy implications of the To read more, subscribe >>

BRUSSELS – How to improve communications for civil protection, including dissemination of information to citizens, is the scope of the EU-funded CHORIST project, which comes to an end soon. Focused on communications for natural hazards and industrial accidents (but not terrorist-related events), the project investigated how to upgrade existing solutions and integrate them according to end-users needs.

Overall, CHORIST reached most of its objectives, according to project participants. However, it could not resolve certain critical aspects in the sector such as To read more, subscribe >>

BRUSSELS – The EU’s interest in open source intelligence (osint) to strengthen Europe’s early-warning capabilities has increased in recent years, as evidenced by the growing use of osint across the European Commission’s various policy units and recent first-time calls for osint technology proposals as the basis for EU-funded security research. Full exploitation of osint for early warning, however, is still hampered by To read more, subscribe >>

BRUSSELS – To uproarious laughter and applause, the Moscow Military District Singers perform a song which mocks the gas dependence of Europe. To the refrain of ‘We’ll cut off gas to Europe,” a man on stage who waves a European flag looks on as a uniformed Russian official turns off a large gas valve.

While this skit – as seen on YouTube – may be hilarious to a Russian audience, energy security is no longer a To read more, subscribe >>

Contract Notices

1. B-Brussels: design, plan, conduct and evaluate exercises for civil protection modules and technical assistance and support teams (3 lots) / Ref: 2009/S 89-127607

Contact: European Commission, Directorate-General for the Environment (DG ENV)

Purpose of the three work lots To read more, subscribe >>

Here are some upcoming events related to European civil security we think readers should be aware of:

TeleStrategies' ISS World – Online WebinarsTo read more, subscribe >>