Tag: eu

Europol Ran Secret Data Platforms on Millions of Innocents

Europol built and operated secret data analysis platforms stuffed with passport photos, phone records, financial transactions, and geolocation data belonging to people never suspected of any crime.
The systems ran for years without the security or data protection safeguards EU law requires, and the agency concealed parts of them from its own privacy regulator.

A joint investigation by CORRECTIV, Solomon, and Computer Weekly, based on leaked emails, internal documents, and whistleblower testimony, reveals that these parallel platforms became the backbone of Europol’s analytical work. “They protect the law while breaking it,” one former senior official said.

The main system, called the Computer Forensic Network (CFN), was set up in 2012 to handle digital evidence. After the 2015 Paris attacks, Europol’s cybercrime unit EC3 repurposed it into a mass analysis platform operating outside IT controls.

By 2019 it held two petabytes of data, roughly 420 times larger than Europol’s official databases. The agency’s own data protection officer found that 99 percent of operational data sat in this unregulated environment, with no adequate logging of who accessed or modified anything.

Alongside the CFN, a second covert system called the “Pressure Cooker” let staff store and analyze operational data without the constraints of EU law. A leaked 2022 email marked “Importance: High” warned that the regulator might discover the “irregular situation with the Pressure Cooker.” Europol claims it was just an internal nickname for a lawful system. Former officials say it was a separate platform hidden from the EU’s data protection watchdog for years.

The EU’s privacy regulator, the EDPS, spent nearly a decade trying to bring Europol into compliance, then closed its monitoring in February 2026 with 15 out of 150 recommendations still unimplemented, including core security safeguards.

British Conservative MP David Davis said the findings, “if true, point to serious failures of oversight, legality and data protection.”

He demanded the UK Home Office explain “whether any personal data of entirely innocent British citizens is being stored in Europol’s systems and, if so, why it is being stored and why the UK government is allowing it to be stored.”

The European Commission is now preparing legislation to double Europol’s budget and expand its mandate. It wants to hand broader surveillance powers to an agency that ran an unaccountable data warehouse for the better part of a decade and still can’t guarantee the personal data of innocent people inside its systems hasn’t been tampered with.

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Europe Wants To Ban VPN Privacy

The European Union is now openly discussing restricting VPN access as part of its expanding online age-verification system, which demonstrates precisely where the entire digital agenda has been heading from the beginning. They always introduce these systems under emotionally untouchable justifications such as child safety or combating terrorism, but once the infrastructure is in place, the scope inevitably expands.

According to a new European Parliament briefing, officials are concerned that users are bypassing online age-verification requirements via VPNs, and the report notes a surge in VPN usage in countries implementing stricter digital controls. The proposal being discussed is to potentially restrict VPN access itself to those above a so-called “digital age of majority.” In other words, they are now targeting the very tools people use to protect their privacy online.

For readers who may not use these services personally, a VPN simply encrypts your internet traffic and masks your location, preventing internet providers, corporations, and governments from monitoring everything you do online. Businesses use them constantly, financial institutions rely on them, journalists use them, and ordinary people use them simply to avoid being tracked across the internet.

The problem from the government’s perspective is that VPNs interfere with surveillance. Europe’s Digital Services Act has already pushed platforms toward mandatory age-verification systems that increasingly require identification documents, facial scans, or biometric verification simply to access online content. Once users began using VPNs to avoid those systems, regulators immediately shifted toward framing the VPN itself as the threat. This is how these systems always evolve, because the objective is never merely regulation, it is compliance and visibility.

What they are building is effectively a digital identity system where access to information requires permission. People fail to understand how dangerous this becomes once connected to the broader European agenda involving CBDCs, centralized digital IDs, online speech regulation, and financial monitoring. These are not isolated policies appearing randomly at the same time. They are interconnected components of a single structural transition toward centralized digital control.

First they regulate speech under the justification of misinformation. Then they regulate platforms under the justification of safety. Then they require identity verification under the justification of protecting children. Finally they target anonymity itself by restricting the tools people use to avoid surveillance.

This fits perfectly within the broader cycle unfolding in Europe, where declining economic confidence and political instability lead governments toward greater centralization and control. Historically, governments facing crisis do not voluntarily reduce authority, they expand surveillance, tighten restrictions, and attempt to maintain control over information and capital flows.

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European Commission Official Touts 17 Investigations as Proof the Digital Services Act “Delivers”

The European Union’s Digital Services Act is a censorship and surveillance law dressed in the language of safety. It gives unelected officials in Brussels the power to decide what hundreds of millions of people are allowed to say online and it is building the infrastructure to verify their identities before they’re permitted to say it.

But at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Week summit in Brussels this month, Renate Nikolay, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General at DG CONNECT, celebrated the law’s growing enforcement record. Seventeen ongoing investigations and one non-compliance decision, she told the audience, prove the DSA “delivers.”

What the DSA delivers is pressure. Pressure on platforms to censor more speech, faster, with fewer questions asked. Pressure to open their algorithms and internal systems to government inspection without a court order. And, increasingly, pressure on individual users to prove who they are before they’re allowed to participate in public discourse online.

Nikolay presented these enforcement numbers as proof of success. They are proof of something but not what she thinks.

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Over 123 Historic Christian Churches In Canada Burned Or Vandalized In Past 5 Years – More Than 220 Burned In Europe

In many of Canada’s small towns sits an architectural wonder. It’s their church. These are the centerpiece of each town. They tower over the residential homes and small businesses. Often, massive structures with intricate designs and steeples, some of which are over 200 years old.

Many of these small towns are “defined by their churches”. Is this the reason they are being torched? Who is benefiting from this systemic removal of Christian churches across Canada and Europe? The respective governments can no longer deny that these fires are a pattern.

All across Canada, churches are being vandalized and burned to the ground. The Canadian government seems to have little interest in learning why or stopping it. A recent study by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute proclaims arson of Canadian churches has doubled since 2021.

The Gateway Pundit recently reported on all the churches that have been burned in Europe over the last few years. Data from Ecclesiastical Insurance, the popular insurer of Christian buildings in Europe, stated that from 2020 to 2024, there were over 200 incidents of arson affecting churches.

Investigators in Canada have only charged people in 4% of the church arsons between 2021 and 2023. Because of this, the “official motives” are unknown in more than 96% of the cases. However, in Europe, local newspapers say the common cause of the arson is mental illness, or “pyromania”, with no particular ideological reason. That’s truly hard to believe.

The most recent Canadian church to burn was in the lake town of Saint-Romain, Quebec. It burned on the evening of April 13th. Their original church was built in 1893.  It’s a very small town of roughly 800 people. The following day of the fire, the founder of Rebel News, Ezra Levant, went to the site and noticed no other news outlets. The major news organizations in Canada have mostly ignored this arson trend. Politicians have been accused of downplaying the attacks.

Even though roughly 45 firefighters from six stations were dispatched, the Church burned completely to the ground. It’s hard to make sense of how this could happen. In 2025, the town built a new $1.7mil Fire Department just 430 ft. from the church (image below). Fire officials said they saved the church bells and the cross from the top of the steeple.

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EU Pushes Meta Toward Digital ID and Age Verification Under DSA, Threatens 6% Revenue Fine

Brussels has decided Meta isn’t monitoring its users hard enough.

The European Commission issued a preliminary finding on April 29 that Facebook and Instagram violate the Digital Services Act because the company can’t reliably stop children under 13 from creating accounts, opening Meta to fines that could reach 6 percent of its global annual turnover, a sum potentially north of $12 billion.

The official complaint is clearly a regulator demanding more identity checks, more verification, more friction at the door.

Meta’s existing approach, which mostly involves asking users to type in their birthday, lets minors lie their way onto the platform. The Commission says the tool available for reporting underage users requires up to seven clicks to access, is not pre-filled with user information, and frequently results in no follow-up action.

The Commission also pointed to evidence that around 10 to 12 per cent of children under 13 were accessing Instagram and/or Facebook, contradicting Meta’s own internal numbers.

What the Commission wants Meta to do instead carries a cost most of the coverage skipped over. Self-declared birthdays are inadequate, so something stronger has to fill the gap.

That means age estimation systems that infer how old you are from how you behave or age verification that links your account to a government-issued document. Either path turns the basic act of opening a social media account into either a behavioral surveillance event or an identity verification event. There is no third option being seriously proposed.

The implications reach well beyond the under-13 question. Once a platform knows who you are with legal certainty, the entire premise of online speech changes.

Anonymity has historically protected dissidents, whistleblowers, abuse survivors, journalists communicating with sources, and ordinary people who simply don’t want their employer reading their political opinions.

Strip that away and you lose the conditions under which a great deal of valuable speech actually happens. People self-censor when they know they are being watched and a verified internet is a watched internet by definition.

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EU Crime Report: Spanish Rape Reports Surge 322% Over Last Decade, EU Sees 150% Increase

New data released by Eurostat on Wednesday reveals a staggering rise in reported sexual crimes across the European Union, with Spain showing an increase far beyond the continental average.

Spain has seen one of the most significant shifts in reporting, according to Spain’s La Razon outlet. In 2024, the country registered “5,222 violations” compared to only “1,239 in 2014.” This represents a “322 percent increase,” a figure that sits “well above the 150 percent average in the EU.”

What Eurostat does not provide is data on who is committing these crimes. However, other sources have explored this issue.

As Remix News reported last year, a CEU-CEFAS Demographic Observatory report titled “Demography of Crime in Spain” showed that foreigners, who make up 31 percent of Spain’s prison population and commit per capita 500 percent more rapes and 414 percent more murders than Spanish citizens.

The highest rates are seen among Arabs and Latinos, with many of them hailing from countries in South America known for their extremely high crime rates.

While the murder numbers are stable in Spain at 300 per year, there has been explosive growth in attempted murders. Over the course of just four years, between 2019 and 2023, attempted murder cases nearly doubled, going from 836 to 1,507.

In just five years, penetrative rape cases also soared 143 percent, going from 2,143 in 2019 to 5,206 in 2024.

As Remix News has reported on in the past, in many Spanish states, the crime statistics show massive overrepresentation of foreigners in serious crimes like sexual assault, including in the Basque region.

In cases of robbery with violence, foreigners are 440 percent more likely to commit such a crime. Many such cases have made headlines in the Spanish media.

The study heads indicated that Spain’s aging population should have led to a decrease in crime rates, but the influx of migrants, amounting to 3.8 million per decade, has led to an “imported crime” problem.

The report confirmed a consistent pattern that violent crime is predominantly committed by young men. Specifically concerning nationality, the study indicates that foreigners have much higher crime rates than Spaniards, particularly for the most serious offenses against persons, such as homicide, rape, and robbery. This overrepresentation is noted to be especially pronounced among individuals of African and Latin American origin.

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EU Going To War With VPNs In Bid To “Save The Children”

Western European governments and EU bureaucrats are advancing tighter regulations on VPNs as part of a broader push for “online age verification” and their ‘Chat Control’ agenda.  Privacy advocates and digital rights groups warn that Europe is drifting towards a surveillance and censorship regime similar to internet restrictions and firewalls used by Russia and China.

Last week European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen suggested that Brussels may need to address the use of VPNs to bypass the EU’s upcoming age-verification systems.  Speaking during a press conference on the EU’s new digital age-verification app, Virkkunen acknowledged that users could circumvent the system with VPNs and stated that preventing such circumvention would be among the ‘next steps’ policymakers need to examine.

Her statements were delivered only two weeks after she shared a stage with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who called for a crackdown on web media companies to “protect children” from dangerous content.  The first stage of their agenda is a government created universal age verification app which web companies will be required to integrate.  Von der Leyen asserts that the new restrictions are designed to “defend children’s rights” (how does restricting access protect rights?).

The Orwellian language of the EU is not coincidental.  “Child vulnerability” is a carefully chosen vehicle to manipulate public approval, opening the door to incremental government management of online content and discourse. 

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EU Targets VPNs in EU Age Verification Push

Brussels has a problem with people trying to stay anonymous online and now it’s eyeing the tools they use to do it.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, told reporters that VPNs sit on the agenda as the EU pushes its age verification app toward member states.

Asked how Brussels intends to stop children from routing around age checks with a VPN, she said “it’s also an important part of next steps also to look at that it shouldn’t be circumvented.”

VPNs are more than a tool for teenagers trying to access Instagram. They are how journalists protect sources, how dissidents talk to family, how ordinary people stop their internet provider from logging every site they visit. Treating circumvention as a problem to be solved at the network level means treating privacy tools as the obstacle, rather than the proportionate response to a system that demands ID for ordinary online activity.

The VPN comment surfaced at a press conference about the Commission’s broader regulatory squeeze.

Brussels provisionally found that Meta likely violated the Digital Services Act by failing to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram, accusing the company of “failing to diligently identify, assess and mitigate the risks of minors under 13 years old accessing their services.”

By the Commission’s own count, roughly 12% of European children below the age limit log into the platforms anyway.

Virkkunen framed the finding as enforcement of existing rules rather than a new mandate. “The DSA requires platforms to enforce their own rules: terms and conditions should not be mere written statements, but rather the basis for concrete action to protect users, including children,” she said.

A Commission spokesperson echoed the line, telling ISMG that the DSA “does not mandate specific mitigation measures,” and pointing to alternatives like better internal review processes.

The denial sits awkwardly next to everything else Brussels is doing. The Commission published guidelines last July recommending age verification. It is now pressing member states to “accelerate the adoption of age verification tools.”

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Europe Explores Wealth Taxes, Capital Taxes, and Exit Taxes

The European Commission has now openly published a two-volume study examining “net wealth taxes,” “capital taxes,” and perhaps most alarming of all, “exit taxes.” They are no longer hiding the agenda behind slogans about “fairness” or “solidarity.” The report openly discusses how to tax wealth, how to monitor ownership, how to close compliance gaps, and how to prevent capital from escaping. This is precisely what I have warned was coming as governments across Europe enter the terminal phase of a sovereign debt crisis.

The study was commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union and examines wealth taxation systems across Europe and beyond, including France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, and Colombia. The report specifically focuses on recurring wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes, and exit taxes designed to capture wealth before individuals relocate outside the jurisdiction.

The timing is everything. Europe’s economy is collapsing into what our Economic Confidence Model has projected would become a prolonged depressionary period into 2028. Manufacturing across Germany has been imploding, energy prices remain structurally elevated because of the self-inflicted sanctions war and Net Zero agenda, and capital has been fleeing Europe into the United States for years. The EU knows this. They see the money leaving. They understand that confidence in European governments is collapsing, and instead of reforming policy, they are moving toward containment.

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EU Pushes Age Verification App for All States

The European Commission wants every member state running age verification by the end of 2026, and it wants them running its own app to do it. A recommendation adopted Wednesday tells the bloc’s twenty-seven governments to accelerate deployment of the EU Age Verification App and have it available to citizens before the year is out, regardless of the unease some capitals have expressed about adopting Brussels’ code over their own.

The push lands months after security researchers tore through the same app the Commission is now urging governments to ship. In April, consultant Paul Moore bypassed the app’s protections in under two minutes, demonstrating that the rate-limiting controls were stored in an editable file, biometric authentication could be turned off with a simple configuration change, and sensitive credentials were accessible without secure hardware protection.

The Commission patched the headline issues. It is now telling governments the app is ready for production.

Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, framed the recommendation as the next step toward shielding minors online. “Effective and privacy-preserving age verification is the next piece of the puzzle that we are getting closer to completing, as we work towards an online space where our children are safe and empowered to use positively and responsibly without restricting the rights of adults,” she said.

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