After Paris attacks, E.U. leaders call for more sharing of information, intelligence

By Michael Birnbaum:

There is no European no-fly list, because there is no European data­base of air travelers. People inside a 26-nation zone can speed from the tip of Portugal to the border with Russia without once having their passports scrutinized. Many E.U. citizens enter and exit Europe without ever being checked against police databases.

The gaps can lead to delayed security responses at best and flawed ones at worst, critics say, and attackers have sometimes exploited the issues to their advantage. Now, after the bloody assaults that claimed 17 victims in Paris and after dozens of suspected Islamist militants were rounded up around Europe, European leaders are pushing to fix what they say are flaws in the system.

E.U. nations plan “to share information, intelligence, not only with the European Union but also with other countries around us,” E.U. foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Monday after a meeting on counterterrorism with E.U. foreign ministers and top diplomats from several Middle Eastern nations.

Even as officials have stripped away barriers to free travel among European countries, individual nations have continued to hold sway over their intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and there are relatively few E.U.-wide databases in which information about people is stored. In Belgium, for example, police rely on the honor code when they ask new residents with E.U. citizenship whether they have criminal records in other countries.

The Paris attackers were able to use these gaps to their advantage, counterterrorism officials say. One of them, Amedy Coulibaly, drove his common-law wife and others to the Madrid airport before he embarked on his deadly attacks, allowing them to flee to Turkey without immediately drawing the attention of French authorities, who had been monitoring them domestically.

At least one of the brothers who attacked the offices of a satirical Paris newsweekly had traveled to Yemen for training, authorities say. But without a European database that might have helped track their movements, French officials weren’t easily able to watch their air travel, database advocates say.

Gilles de Kerchove, the E.U.’s counterterrorism coordinator, said he is seeking to require that all passports be checked by computer, which would enable agents to run them against databases and track who enters and exits Europe.

Read more at Washington Post

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