Europol’s Data Dominance: The Multifaceted Involvement and Impact of Data Analytics Across Sectors

On 1st July 2024, Europol celebrated its 25th anniversary. Evolving from informal police cooperation in the 1970s, the Agency has undergone remarkable changes over the years. Indeed, when the then Europol Drugs Unit commenced its operation in 1999, it seemed difficult to imagine where Europol, as fully-fledged EU Agency, would stand two decades later. Over the years, its capacity to support, coordinate security and even steer cooperation among national authorities through the use of digital technologies transformed Europol into the EU’s primary information hub, developing into a crucial pillar of the EU’s security architecture. With its processing activities, Europol is involved in all areas covered in this Special Section and beyond, from large-scale IT systems, Information Alerts in the Schengen Information System, the processing of PNR data, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and cooperation between Financial Intelligence Units, the Prüm framework, and illegal content online such as terrorist propaganda. Europol plays a pivotal role in all legislative texts and proposals. Often these topics are addressed in silos. Therefore, this article seeks to address this gap in the literature by looking at the areas covered in this Special Section and Europol’s involvement in all of them.