by Emily Johnson

The CONNEXIONs project is an EU Horizon 2020 research project that aims to develop a suite of interconnected tools to assist Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in the fight against crime and terrorism. The full project title is «InterCONnected NEXt-Generation Immersive IoT Platform of Crime and Terrorism DetectiON, PredictiON, InvestigatiON, and PreventiON Services», which is abbreviated to ‘CONNEXIONs’. The project brings together seventeen project partners from law enforcement, industry, and academia/research. There is also an additional ethics expert overseeing and supporting the project with regard to any ethics question.

In utilising all of this expertise, CONNEXIONs aims to develop a suite of tools that provides law enforcement with assistance throughout all stages of fighting crime and terrorism, encompassing the entire lifecycle of law enforcement operations. As such, CONNEXIONs is tailored to the following scenarios:

• pre-occurrence crime prediction and prevention;
• during-occurrence law enforcement agency (LEA) operations; and
• post-occurrence investigation, and crime-scene simulation and 3D reconstruction.

To develop a suite of tools that can appropriately assist LEAs at each of these stages, CONNEXIONs leverages the automated identification, interpretation, and correlation of a range of heterogeneous data sources. This process aims to assist in the management of a range of data inputs. CONNEXIONs also provides immersive solutions using augmented reality and virtual reality technologies, which are particularly useful both for investigation purposes and also for LEA training. Furthermore, CONNEXIONs enables the use of data collection on the Surface Web, including social media platforms, as well as on the Dark Web. This data collection and processing will be workable in seven different languages. All of these inputs aim to facilitate LEAs operations, while also ensuring the provision of a chain of custody for digital evidence.

To test and develop the CONNEXIONs platform and provide overall validity, two iterations of field tests and demonstrations have already taken place, while one more iteration is still underway; these filed tests and demonstration regard the following operational use cases:

• counter-terrorism security in large scale public events;
• human trafficking investigations and mitigation; and
• crime investigation and training through 3D scene reconstruction.

A principle aspect of these use cases is ensuring CONNEXIONs is useable by LEAs and that the developed tools are of a sufficient usefulness and quality to boost their uptake and use.

A guiding feature of the CONNEXIONs project is the adoption of ethics and privacy by design principles as well as legal compliance at an EU level and in relation to national law. It is the role of UNIVIE to provide ethical and legal oversight and guidance. In particular, the focal legislative considerations are on fundamental rights law, data protection law, privacy, and technology specific legislation, such as drone regulation.

While general legal and ethical compliance is maintained throughout the project, there are a number of CONNEXIONs specific points to consider. For example, while the intended use of the CONNEXIONs tools is the assistance of LEAs in the fight against crime and terrorism, during the course of the project the GDPR applies to all processing of personal data as the primary purpose of the processing is for research. Beyond the project in the real-world application of the CONNEXIONs tool by LEAs, Directive 2016/680 would apply to the processing of personal data. While the GDPR and Directive 2016/680 were created in parallel, there are a number of differences, all of which have been acknowledged in the legal deliverables. By recognising these legislative differences, the CONNEXIONs project is legally compliant and so too will the platform be in the post-project use of the developed tools.

An additional project-specific consideration is the rules applicable to social media platform scraping. Early on in the project, a number of social media platforms, such as Twitter, were identified as possible sources of relevant data. As such, UNIVIE provided legal support to ensure partners were compliant with platform privacy policies and terms and conditions, as well as IPR considerations. A focal concern was data protection. In particular, a legal basis was identified and there was an assessment of the necessity of processing to ensure the data minimisation principle was not compromised. Moreover, as personal data was not being collected directly from the data subject and it would have involved disproportionate effort to contact each data subject, it was necessary to ensure information on the processing was made publicly available on the CONNEXIONs website in line with Article 13(5) of the GDPR.

The CONNEXIONS project will run until February 2022 and has a number of sister projects. Further information on the CONNEXIONs project can be found on the project website, Twitter account, and LinkedIn page.