Summary
September 19, 2009: The European Union is currently funding a five-year program called Project INDECT with the goal of developing software tools which can "automatically detect threats or abnormal behavior" - in other words, people who might commit a crime instead of actual criminals. It plans the
"construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive".
This is intended to model "suspicious behavior" so that such behavior can be automatically detected by CCTV and other surveillance methods. This could be used by SitCen, the "Joint Situation Centre" of the European Union which some critics claim could develop into Europe's CIA.
Source
See Also
EU has secret plan for police to remote stop cars - because someone will inevitably come up with the idea of wiring the two together and "nothing could possibly go wrong".
Game and Story Use
- This kind of technology could ruin the day of any would-be criminal of a Cyberpunk criminal.
- Or that of a dissident in a police state.
- What if SitCen really does become the equivalent of the CIA Twenty Minutes Into The Future?
- Considering the EU's strange ideas of what constitutes a crime and of things like burden of proof and due process, we should all be worried about this.
- This will probably seem quite familiar to Deus Ex fans…