The UK is taking part in a European surveillance program which is designed to gather personal information about suspected “radicals” from across the political spectrum.
Confidential documents reveal how an initiative to gather data on “radicalization and recruitment” in Islamic terrorist groups has been expanded to incorporate other organizations.
Political activists who have no association with terrorism could now find themselves monitored by authorities mandated to discover information about their friends, family, neighbors, political beliefs, use of the Internet and even psychological traits.
Police and security agencies have agreed to monitor “agents” who adhere to ideologies potentially involving violence. The documents define targets for surveillance as people involved in “extreme right/left, Islamist, nationalist, anti-globalization” groups.
Europol, a EU law enforcement agency, has been asked to produce a list of people involved in either promoting such groups, or in trying to recruit members.
The documents, obtained by Statewatch, the EU civil liberties monitoring non-governmental organization, set out a program of “systematic data collection” ostensibly geared toward terrorism, but the inclusion of such a broad array of political interests will add to growing concerns that legitimate protest organizations are being subjected to state surveillance.
In the UK, police have developed a centralized monitoring apparatus to spy on “domestic extremists,” an umbrella term with no legal definition which, in practice, includes law-abiding environmental protesters, anti-war activists and anti-racism campaigners.
The scheme has a central database held by the UK’s national public order intelligence unit, a secretive body funded by the Association of Chief Police Officers. Monitoring of political activists is a task filled by the terrorism and allied matters division of the association.
The advice lists “environmental extremists” alongside far-right activists, dissident Irish republicans, loyalist paramilitaries, and al-Qaeda-inspired extremists, as among those “currently categorized as extremist [that] may include those who have committed serious crime in pursuit of an ideology or cause.”
The UK government has also been criticized over Prevent, a program aimed at stopping Muslims being lured into violent extremism. The initiative was branded a mass surveillance project after it was found it was being used to gather intelligence on innocent people who were not suspected of involvement in terrorism.
Under the new, approved EU scheme, states have acquired a 70-question list on “agents of radicalization” under their watch. Much of the information presumes a high-degree of intrusive monitoring, obtainable only via covert surveillance techniques, such as phone tapping.
It is assumed, for example, that law enforcement agencies will obtain information about a person’s “feelings” about a group that could be “considered as the enemy”. One section asks for information about “oral comments” made by targets, while others ask about religious knowledge, behavior and socio-economic status.
Under “relevant psychological traits,” law enforcement agencies are asked to collate and share information on “psychological disorders, charismatic personality, weak personality, etc.”
This latest data-sharing agreement is the culmination of long-standing attempts to create a pan-European database of individuals who police suspect could cause trouble at large demonstrations.
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