HORIZON EUROPE: Travel intelligence to counter terrorism and serious crime

Expected Outcome

Projects’ results are expected to contribute to some or all of the following outcomes:

European security practitioners benefit from better, modern and validated tools and training curricula on the use of travel intelligence to prevent, detect and investigate terrorism and other forms of serious crime (e.g., child sexual exploitation, drugs, human trafficking);
European common approaches are made available to policy-makers and security practitioners for analysing risks/threats, and identifying and deploying relevant security measures while exploiting travel intelligence information, which take into account legal and ethical rules of operation, cost-benefit considerations, as well as fundamental rights such as privacy, protection of personal data and free movement of persons;
Improved support in shaping and tuning of regulation on travel intelligence by security policy-makers;
Improved understanding of the capacity and usefulness of travel intelligence in tackling terrorism and other forms of serious crime, and of the key challenges related to it.

Scope

Travel intelligence is intended here as all the information available in different systems and databases related to travellers. In particular, the research should focus on Passenger Name Record (PNR) and Advance Passenger Information (API) data, but the use of other data available in the context of the interoperability should also be envisaged.

PNR data are unverified information provided by passengers and collected by air carriers to enable the reservations and check-in processes. It may contain, for example, dates of travel, travel itinerary, ticket information, contact details, travel agent, means of payment, seat number and baggage information. As such, PNR is an important law enforcement tool allowing to prevent, detect and investigate terrorism and other forms of serious crime, such as drugs, human trafficking, child sexual exploitation and others.

API is commonly understood as the information of a passenger collected at check-in or at the time of online check-in. API information includes biographic data of the passenger, ideally captured from the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) of their travel documents, as well as some information related to their travel.

Innovation is needed on methods to facilitate the data collection and their quality check as well as to combine different data sets, to sift through (and learn from) vast amounts of data for risk analysis, and to streamline the identity management of passengers, while taking care of the data protection and fundamental rights. Whereas, for instance, the blockchain technology is already being used in the logistics and supply chain management processes with promising results, there is little or no knowledge and/or evidence whether this technology could significantly improve customs/police passenger targeting capacity. The issue of having representative data sets for training and testing should be addressed as well. Namely, proposals should take into account the sensitivity of the travel intelligence data and which competent authorities are entitled to request or receive these data. Some of these authorities, notably Passenger Information Units (PIU), should be actively involved in the consortia. Activities could be conducted utilizing various technological approaches (such as – but not limited to – Artificial Intelligence, neural networks, Big Data analysis, blockchain technology, etc.) as long as the developed solutions deliver the expected improved capabilities. The use of pseudonymisation techniques, rendering personal data unreadable yet searchable, should also be envisaged.

Coordination with successful proposals from topic HORIZON-CL3-2021-FCT-01-04 (on training and testing data issue as well as on pseudonymisation techniques) should be envisaged so as to avoid duplication and to exploit complementarities as well as opportunities for increased impact. Proposed activities that could also link with security research for border management (for example, border checks) would be an asset. The testing and/or piloting of the tools and solutions developed in a real setting with one or more Police Authorities and other relevant authorities is an asset. Applicants should plan to facilitate the uptake and replication across setting and up-scaling of the capabilities – i.e. solutions, tools, processes et al. – to be developed by the project.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.