CHRONICLES OF THE COMING WORLD

An initiative of Eva Joly, Member of the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament

THE EUROPEAN SECURITY INDUSTRY AND DEVELOPMENT

OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGY FOR CIVILIAN USE
by Jon Thorisson, September 2015

In a speech at the 2013 bi-annual MILIPOL FAIR 1for the security

industry, held in Paris, EU Commission Director-General for Enterprise &
Industry, Philippe Brunet praised the tight collaboration between the
defence industry and governments across Europe, in part through the EU
research program HORIZON 2020.
Bruntet said: the security sector has grown from 10 billion Euros in 2001 to
100 billion Euros in 2011.The security industry employs 180.000 thousand
people and has a turnover of 30 billion Euros.
Further Brunet stated the security industry has enormous growth
potential, which we must exploit. It is a promising industry where there is a
synergy between the security of the citizen and the national defence
industry.
The recent attack by an armed man on the Amsterdam/Paris Thalys has fuelled
discussion on the need for tighter security on trains in Europe. Calls have been
made for the airport style security currently employed on the Eurostar to be
implemented on all major train routes on the continent.
An emergency meeting of top officials and ministers of nine EU countries was
held on the 29th of August to discuss the issue.
At the meeting the French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that checks
would be carried out "everywhere it is necessary".
"We are determined to pursue our cooperation to ... prevent, detect and better fight
violent acts that radicalized individuals may want to commit on European Union
soil," said a joint statement read out by Cazeneuve.
The minister also called for a better liaison on intelligence across Europe's
border-free travel zone, and "coordinated simultaneous actions" by security
forces. He said it was "indispensable" to protect those who are traveling by train
within Europe, adding that the officials would likely work with the aviation
industry to improve railway security.
"Our aim is that concrete and ambitious safety and security measures ... are
adopted by the different players at European level," he said.
The number of passengers travelling on European trains on any given day is close
to 40 million and critics have pointed out that it is virtually impossible to screen
and check that number of passengers.

1 http://en.milipol.com/useful-information/Dates-times-venue

In Germany the interior minister Jrg Radeck Radeck, stated that going down a
path of ever-more controls was dangerous, pointing out the dangers more and
more technical measures posed to free civil society.2
According to the Guardian, EU officials were expected to press for the increased
use of CCTV cameras in trains and stations and more metal detectors at
entrances and the European Commission was expected to raise the idea of using
full-body scanners for people who try to board at the last minute. 3

Ben Hayes works for the TRANSNATIONAL INSTITUTE 4, an international

research and advocacy institute committed to building a just, democratic and
sustainable planet.
Hayes, interviewed by Dutch Television at the Milipol Fair, is critical of the work
of the EU commission and claims it is a bit of a contradiction, because they say
their work is about protecting the citizen but Milipol is an arms fair for internal
security policing.
Hays further states, commenting on the companies taking part in the fair, these
guys are here only to make money, they think about shareholder value. When you
throw money at them they start coming up with technological solutions to
terrorism and crime, that frankly, make someone like me, who works for a civil
liberties organization, frightened. It looks like we are at war, but who with? This is
an industry that uses fear to sell its products.
According to Hayes it was said after 9/11 that security is the new defence in a
slogan from one of the largest weapons manufacturers. The weapons industry
saw the opportunity to sell technology developed for military purposes,
redeployed and put to use in a civilian context.
Hayes states that early thinking about the European Security Research Program
was that we need to foster and subsidise this kind of technology.
Hayes names the companies; THALES, EADS-CASSIDIAN and the SAFRAN GROUP
as three of the 5 largest European defence and security contractors and the
biggest players in the European Security Research Program. These companies
have been involved from the beginning in terms of setting the priorities for the
2
http://news.ge/en/news/story/150224-security-on-europes-trains-a-tricky-task-inwake-of-thalys-attack

3 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/29/eu-identity-checks-france-trainattack-bernard-cazeneuve

4 https://www.tni.org/en
3

EU program. At the outset the EU Commission established 3 advisory groups,

one of which was The group of Personalities which included the CEOs of the
biggest arms companies: They came together for a brainstorming about how the
security research program should look and that set the overall parameters for the
program. The two other advisory groups were instrumental in shaping the
program over the next five to seven years. Both were very much dominated by the
industry and thus set in stone the areas in which EU research money would be
invested.
An example of the development of technology originally devised for military
purposes is detailed in a 2014 report from STATEWATCH titled EURODRONES
INC 5
According to the website of the Transnational Institute the report tells the story
of how European citizens are unknowingly subsidising through their taxes a
controversial drone industry yet are systematically excluded from any debates
about their use. Behind empty promises of consultation, EU officials have turned
over much of drone policy development to the European defence and security
corporations, which seek to profit from it.
The current trajectory points in the direction of an increasingly militarised and
repressive use of drones that will have far-reaching implications for the privacy
and human rights for citizens of Europe and beyond.
The report quotes an unnamed industry expert responding at a drone conference
Youre quite right, we dont actually know what the problem is; we just know that
the solution is UAVs. The report further stresses that in many of the scenarios
developed for the EU, drones look more like a solution looking for a problem than
vice versa.
The report recounts how a 70 million budget line aimed at ensuring civilian
drone flight was inserted into new EU legislation as a politically driven priority, in
the words of the European Commission, despite the fact that there has been no
democratic debate on the issue. At least 315 million of EU research funding has
been awarded to drone-based projects, many of which are subsidising Europes
largest defence and security industries and are geared towards the development
and enhancement of tools for border surveillance and law enforcement.
According to the report, because the EU with the exception of the still-fledging
European Defence Agency has been prohibited from funding military R&D, the
European Commission has effectively focused on subsidizing the defence sector, to
the tune of hundreds of millions of euros, to develop drones for homeland security
purposes, such as border surveillance and law enforcement. It further states, that
Given the dual civilian/military use of much of this research, the subsidies are
effectively a blank cheque to Europes military corporations.
In a working paper issued by the European Commission it is stated that
the process supporting the development of civil Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems
applications needs to be transparent and involve the consultation of stakeholders,
5 https://www.tni.org/en/node/1298?content_language=en

for example bodies like the European Group on Ethics, the LIBE Committee of the
European Parliament or the European Agency for Fundamental Rights and Data
Protection Supervisor. But according to the Transnational Institute report none
of these bodies have been involved in developing the current policy nor been
consulted.
Their absence from policy debates means that many of the conversations the EU
should be having about drones such as what they should and should not be
used for, and how to prevent further militarization and the deployment of fully
autonomous weaponised drones have been all but ignored.
Huub Dijstelblom, (Senior Researcher and Project Leader at the Dutch Scientific
Council for Government Policy in The Hague (WRR) and Lecturer in Philosophy
of Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is the author of the book:
Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe, published in 2011.
According to Dijstelbloem the emphasis on boarder surveillance and security is
moving away from boarder control to the control on mobility and thus the
difference between the surveillance of regular citizens and outsiders is diminished.
Dijstelbloem compares the development of the surveillance industry to the idea
of the PANOPTICON, a central surveillance function (as originally developed in
the late 18th century by the English social theorist Jeremy Bentham). The concept
of the opticon is to allow a single person to observe (-opticon) all (pan) inmates of
an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being
watched (Wikepedia).
According to Dijstelbloem we have already reached a new phase in surveillance,
where the centralized observation, Big Brother, has been replaced by a system
that has no center but several surveillance systems that are interconnected:
Small Eyes (also called Little Sisters), systems that log information about
fingerprints, IDs, facial recognition systems, eye scans and other bio metric
information (including mapping of a persons veins). The interconnection of
information also includes the tracking of airline bookings and credit card use and
can now be interlinked to follow the movements of citizens entering Europe and
within Europe.
To go back to Ben Hays, stating that we now seem to be at war, but who with? it
is interesting to note a couple of highlights from another report from the
Transnational Institute titled Building Peace in Permanent War. Terrorist Listing
& Conflict Transformation. 6
The report states: As the global war on terror continues to unfold, a new enemy
even more extreme than Al-Qaida has breathed new life into a legal, political and
military campaign that many people thought, or hoped, would be temporary or
exceptional. Instead, the age of permanent war envisaged by some of its principal
6 https://www.tni.org/en/briefing/building-peace-permanent-war

architects is back with a vengeance. For those interested in peace and the nonviolent resolution of conflict the prognosis is not good...At the heart of this
transformation is the freedom for governments to apply the terrorist label to
groups and individuals on the basis of very broad definitions of what terrorism
entails, or in the absence of any meaningful criteria at all leading to a glut of
terrorist designations. Longstanding armed conflicts between states and non-state
actors have been recast into domestic wars on terror, undermining principles of
international law that govern the legitimate use of violence. Meanwhile,
counterterrorism has been used by repressive governments to systemize state
violence, and as a pretext to repress opposition of every political stripe: from social
and religious, to protest and separatist.
It is hardly original to observe that the events of 9/11 and the implementation of
the Patriot Act in the United States have been followed by similar developments
in countries across the world; every major terrorist act/threat is followed by
calls for more surveillance, stricter boarder controls and limitations on press
freedoms and human rights, the most recent example being Frances new
surveillance laws passed in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
Since 9/11, according to a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting,
police departments across the United States have been amassing stockpiles of
military-style equipment in the name of homeland security, aided by more than $34
billion in federal grants.
According to a news report in the Daily Beast 7: The Center for Investigative
Reporting conducted interviews and reviewed grant spending records obtained
through open records requests in 41 states in the US. The probe found stockpiles of
weaponry and military-style protective equipment worthy of a defence contractors
sales catalogue;
In Montgomery County, Texas, the sheriffs department owns a $300,000 pilotless
surveillance drone, like those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote
tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In Augusta, Maine, with fewer than 20,000 people and where an officer hasnt died
from gunfire in the line of duty in more than 125 years, police bought eight $1,500
tactical vests.
Police in Des Moines, Iowa, bought two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots, while an
Arizona sheriff is now the proud owner of a surplus Army tank.
The flow of money opened to local police after 9/11, but slowed slightly in recent
years. Still, the Department of Homeland Security awarded more than $2 billion in
grants to local police in 2011, and President Obamas 2009 American Recovery and

7 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/20/local-cops-ready-for-war-withhomeland-security-funded-military-weapons.html

Reinvestment Act contributed an additional half-billion dollars. 8

What measures will be taken in Europe, following the Thalys Amsterdam-Paris
incident nobody knows.
Searching and screening 40 million train passengers daily seems a tall order if
implemented in airport security style and practically impossible. Therefore it is
paramount to follow closely what other measures will be taken to increase
security, keeping in mind that security is the new defence and that there are
considerable commercial interests in selling fear as a justification for further
development of military style technology for civilian use.

LINK:
Video
on
THALYS
website.
About
urban
https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/worldwide/security/what-wedo/city/urban-security

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security