Belgium-Brussels: SMART 2013/N004 — European capability for situational awareness

The study 'European capability for situational awareness' (ECSA) is aimed at providing to the European Commission the necessary information to evaluate the feasibility of creating a European federation for cyber-censorship and human rights monitoring. As such, the tasks of the study will address the definition of the governance framework and systems infrastructure that should govern and support the operations of a possible federation. In order to translate reality into a cartography of cyber-censorship, the federation would be anchored in a dynamic platform — controlled from a dashboard — where a federated network of partners with Internet and censorship monitoring capabilities will aggregate a variety of clearly defined sets of data (including open data and big data) related to the location and intensity of cyber-censorship and surveillance in non-democratic countries or countries where human rights are most at risk. The data gathering will have 2 tracks, the first one addressing restrictions/disruptions on Internet and ICT infrastructure, access, traffic and content, overlaid with a second track of contextual data of political, social, legal, regulatory, policy, media or human rights nature, related to the Internet or not. The reliable and near real time information mashed up in the dashboard will be presented in a user-friendly manner and in different layers: interactive visualisations through live maps; alarms; subject matter snapshot reports and geographical snapshot reports. This type of capability is expected to enhance the early warning, decision-making and policymaking skills of EU policymakers and strengthen the level of situational awareness of stakeholders such as digital activists or human rights defenders.

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