LONDON — Following the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 that left 130 dead and another 368 injured, it quickly became apparent that the terrorists were able to easily scamper undetected across the border dividing France and Belgium. That’s when European security officials realized they had an intelligence-sharing problem that spanned the continent.
Rob Wainwright, the British head of Europol, the European Union’s intelligence-sharing agency, complained about a “black hole of information” and groused that only half of the EU’s 28 members had contributed to a Europol database set up to track potential jihadists, including the thousands of EU citizens who had traveled to Syria and Iraq to train and fight with terrorist groups.
Since the Paris atrocities, there have been at least 10 other terrorist attacks across Europe, including the June 3 attack at London Bridge in the United Kingdom’s capital city. That attack left eight dead and 48 injured when three men plowed a van into pedestrians then went on a knife-wielding rampage in an area crowded with bars and restaurants.
Efforts to share intelligence about potential jihadists are improving and bolstering Europe’s counterterrorism efforts, experts say, despite some legal and ethical hurdles. Nevertheless, Britain — a key member of Europol that has been jolted by three Islamist terrorist attacks since March — could see its access to the intelligence-sharing databases severely curtailed by its impending exit from the EU.
“There has been a conspicuous uptick in intel-sharing since then (Paris),” says Raffaella Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank.
In May, the Schengen Information System, or SIS, a border-control database operated by the European Commission and accessible to Europol members, was upgraded to include information from five other databases. The database, which contains around 70 million items, including the names of 8,000 putative terrorists, provides a European-wide storehouse of criminal records. New regulations also came into effect last month that are designed to improve Europol’s position as a counterterrorism information hub.
Reforms are underway but “there is still a way to go,” acknowledges Camino Mortera-Martinez, a Brussels-based counterterrorism expert at the Center for European Reform, a U.K. think tank.
Law-enforcement officials want a one-click system that would produce all known information about an individual, Mortera says, but that effort’s been stymied by high costs and legal limitations on how data can be used. Data collected for migration and asylum can’t, for example, be used by police agencies.
Trust also is an issue, Mortera says. Some member states fear intelligence that’s included in a multilateral database could be used in ways they wouldn’t like — such as being relayed to the United States, for instance. “There are many concerns about American data-protection standards that were intensified after the leak in the Manchester attack,” she says, referring to the U.K.’s irritation with U.S. law-enforcement agencies that shared information with American news media about the May 22 terrorist bombing at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena that killed 23 people and wounded 119.
Moreover, Europol which was created in 1999, has no investigative powers and can’t require EU states to work with it, notes Phillips P. O’Brien, a professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews. “It’s nothing like the FBI; it’s a sharing institution.”
Holes remain in the databases, too. Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old Manchester resident who detonated the suicide bomb at the concert, had twice made trips to Libya, crossing through Germany both times, but wasn’t listed in the SIS database.
Nevertheless, experts say that the European databases remain a robust and useful tool in the fight against homegrown terrorism. British police, border and immigration officials tap into SIS a whopping 1.4 million times a day. And Mortera calls Europol “a strong and necessary asset.”
James Black, a security analyst at the RAND Europe research institute in Cambridge, says 40 percent of the input into Europol’s databases comes from Britain, and that all of its senior overseers, including Wainwright, are British. “The U.K. has had a really big influence. There is a real appreciation of the quality of British intelligence.”
The upcoming Brexit, however, jeopardizes Britain’s access to EU databases at a time when Islamist terrorist attacks loom ever greater. Already, U.K. authorities say there are 3,000 potential jihadists at large in Britain and another 20,000 residents are subjects of interest.
Once Britain leaves the EU, it will simultaneously lose membership to Europol. If the two sides can’t agree during the upcoming divorce negotiations on a way to allow it to continue as a full-fledged member, Wainwright has said Britain would be downgraded to a second-tier membership, which would greatly limit its ability to use the databases.
The main sticking point for Britain is with the European Court of Justice, or ECJ, which has legal oversight over Europol. Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May says that if her party wins re-election in the June 8 election — likely despite polls showing a tightening race — she will keep her pledge to remove the U.K. from the ECJ’s jurisdiction.
It would be very difficult for her “to row that back” because of strong pressure from the boisterous, hardcore Brexiters in her party who despise the ECJ, says Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London. That said, he adds, “Even some of the Euroskeptics live in the real world and realize the need to stay plugged into Europol.”
Meanwhile, Pantucci says, Europe values the U.K.’s contributions to its security via Europol, and would want to retain it as a full member. But EU negotiators could also face some political blowback if they agree to a compromise that rewards Britain with full membership while sidestepping ECJ jurisdiction.
So there remains a real threat that Europol access could become a Brexit bargaining chip because of political demands on both sides of the channel. And that would be a shame, Pantucci says. “The U.K.’s security is Europe’s security. We have to work together.”
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Brexit Complicates Intelligence Sharing in Europe originally appeared on usnews.com
