Call: Law Enfocement capabilities topic 5: Identity Management

1. Excellent Science
2. Industrial Leadership
3. Societal Challenges

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models.

Securing the society against disasters is one of the central elements of the functioning of any society. There is barely any societal sector which is not to some extent concerned by disasters and related resilience and security issues. Fighting crime and terrorism requires new technologies and capabilities for fighting and preventing crime (including cyber-crime), illegal trafficking and terrorism (including cyber-terrorism), including understanding and tackling terrorist ideas and beliefs to also avoid aviation-related threats. The protection of the European borders requires the development of systems, equipment, tools, processes, and methods for rapid identification. This includes supply chain security in the context of the EU’s customs policy.

On Digital Security, this Challenge focuses on increasing the security of current applications, services and infrastructures by integrating state-of-the-art security solutions or processes, supporting the creation of lead markets & market incentives in Europe, following an end-user driven approach, including for instance law enforcement agencies, first responders, operators of critical infrastructures, ICT service providers, ICT manufacturers, market operators and citizens.

This Challenge should bring together all security stakeholders: industry - including SMEs, research organisations, universities, as well as public authorities, non-governmental organisations and public and private organisations in the security domain. The active involvement of end-users is of high importance.

The Secure Societies Challenge will contribute to the implementation of the policy goals of the Europe 2020 strategy, the Security Industrial Policy, the Internal Security Strategy and the Cyber Security Strategy.

The ambition of this call is both to avoid an incident and to mitigate its potential consequences. This requires new technologies and capabilities for fighting and preventing crime (including cyber-crime), illegal trafficking and terrorism (including cyber-terrorism), including understanding and tackling terrorist ideas and beliefs to also avoid aviation related threats.

This call is divided in four parts:

• Forensics
• Law enforcement capabilities
• Urban security
• Ethical/societal dimension 

New means and technologies of communication the growing interactive usage of the internet, the rise of social media and the internet of things lead to a change in handling identity related data for law enforcement agencies and border management. These circumstances and the general digitalisation of society result in a significant qualitative and quantitative revaluation of the subject identity. As  identity trust and security are central drivers for economic and societal development a framework for a reliable e-identity ecosystem needs to be set up. Such an e-ID ecosystem would safeguard the fundamental parameters of identity management: security – efficiency – user friendliness – trust – privacy and data protection. Enhanced public security and better (digital) privacy protection will become part of the same consistent European identity strategy.     

Identity Management will play a pivotal role in this system.

Identity Management starts with proper breeder documents, other identity documents including their lifecycle and goes to identification and verification for physical and virtual access as well as virtual identities in secure applications and social networks. In all these areas of identification, security is severely endangered, if identity fraud has taken place. It is very well known, that cases of identity fraud and wrong identity are heavily involved in people trafficking and organized crime. Additionally, identity fraud in virtual places leads to theft, misuse of information and cyber-mobbing. Therefore, new processes, technologies and security features needs to be developed to increase or hold the high level of quality of security documents and corresponding processes.

Link to the National Contact Point Finder.