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Tony Bunyan, of the European Civil Liberties Network (ECLN), has warned that EU security officials are seeking to harness a "digital tsunami" of new information technology without asking "political and moral questions first".
"An increasingly sophisticated internal and external security apparatus is developing under the auspices of the EU," he said.
Mr Bunyan has suggested that existing and new proposals will create an EU ID card register, internet surveillance systems, satellite surveillance, automated exit-entry border systems operated by machines reading biometrics and risk profiling systems.
"In five or 10 years time when we have the surveillance and database state people will look back and ask, 'what were you doing in 2009 to stop this happening?',"
The militarisation of security, the securitisation of everything
The EU is at the centre of a paradigm shift with regard to the way that Europe and the world beyond will be policed. This is the result of a number inter-related historical trends, including the gradual blurring of the boundaries between police and military action and those between internal and external security, the widespread deployment of surveillance technologies and the development of the security-industrial complex, the economic motor for these developments.
We are now witnessing the political ‘securitisation’ of a whole host of complex policy issues, from food and energy supply to complex social and environmental phenomena such as climate change and migration. The result is an increasingly security-militarist approach to protracted social and economic problems. At times of heightened global insecurity, the danger is that the rule of law becomes secondary to the objective of threat neutralisation. Like NATO, the EU is re-positioning itself as a global policing body...