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A new secret report, made available by Statewatch, drafted by the "Future Group" of Interior and Justice Ministers from six EU member states (Germany, France, Sweden, Portugal, Slovenia, and Czech Republic) suggests a series of proposals to boost EU integration in policing and intelligence-gathering, including the creation an EU-US Area of cooperation for "freedom, security and justice."

The group's controversial proposals are certain to trigger major disputes, proposing that the EU members states should pool information in a central intelligence unit, creating a network of "anti-terrorist centres", standardising police surveillance techniques and extending the sharing of DNA and fingerprint databases to include CCTV video footage and material gathered by "spy drones".

The report also includes a decision to expand the current European Gendarmerie Force (EGF), which currently only involves France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, into an EU body, that could be used also for paramilitary intervention overseas.

Claiming efficient fight against terrorism, the report suggests an Euro-Atlantic pact of cooperation with the United States. The document needs to be finalized by 2014 at the latest and would not just cover terrorism and passenger data but would cover the whole area of justice and home affairs - policing, immigration, sharing database data and biometrics. The difference in privacy regulation could be a problem in achieving this pact, but the US seems to push hard for this new pact:

"All the evidence from dozens of high-level EU-USA meetings on justice and home affairs since 11 September 2001 shows that it is a one-way street with the EU trying to fend off USA demands. When the EU does not cave in the USA simply negotiates bilateral deals with individual member states. A permanent EU-USA pact would be disastrous for privacy and civil liberties." explains Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor.

Bruno Waterfield, Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph has expressed the way in which security has been escalated to a level that he calls "securocracy". He believes it started at the national and EU level with "interoperability" that allowed a more wildly exchange of the information held on databases. This gave the idea of "availability", that meant "the exchange of any of this information, defined as important for security purposes, was required". And the latest stage is "convergence". "This concept heralds a new era by standardising European police surveillance techniques and creating "tool-pools" of common data gathering systems to be operated at the EU level" says Waterfield.

Future Report: Freedom, Security, Privacy - European Home Affairs in an open world (06.2008)
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2008/jul/eu-futures-jha-report.pdf

Secret EU security draft risks uproar with call to pool policing and give US personal data (7.08.2008)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/07/eu.uksecurity

Secret EU report moots sharing personal data with US (7.08.2008)
http://euobserver.com/22/26585

New European spying proposals 'threaten British security' (7.08.2008)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2512219/New-European-...

EU plan: The rise and rise of the securocrats (7.08.2008)
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/bruno_waterfield/blog/2008/08/07/eu_plan_...