By Cindy Harper – Reclaim The Net
Europol’s deputy executive director, Jürgen Ebner, is urging the European Union to relax its own legal restraints on artificial intelligence, arguing that the rules designed to protect citizens are slowing down police innovation.
He wants a system that allows the agency to skip lengthy rights checks in “emergency” situations and move ahead with new AI tools before the usual data protection reviews are complete.
Ebner told POLITICO that criminals are having “the time of their life” with “their malicious deployment of AI,” while Europol faces months of delay because of required legal assessments.
Those safeguards, which include evaluations under the GDPR and the EU’s AI Act, exist to stop unaccountable automation from taking hold in law enforcement.
Yet Ebner’s comments reveal a growing tendency inside the agency to treat those same checks as obstacles rather than vital protections.
He said the current process can take up to eight months and claimed that speeding it up could save lives.
But an “emergency” fast track for AI surveillance carries an obvious danger. Once such shortcuts are created, the idea of what qualifies as an emergency can expand quickly.
Technologies that monitor, predict, or profile people can then slip beyond their intended use, leaving citizens exposed to automated systems that make judgments about them without transparency or recourse.
Over the past decade, Europol has steadily increased its technical capabilities, investing heavily in large-scale data analysis and decryption tools.
These systems are presented as essential for fighting cross-border crime, yet they also consolidate immense quantities of personal data under centralized control.
Without strong oversight, such tools can move from focused investigation toward widespread data collection and surveillance.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has already promised to double Europol’s workforce and turn it into a central hub for combating organized crime, “navigating constantly between the physical and digital worlds.”
A legislative proposal to strengthen the agency’s powers is planned for 2026, raising questions about how much authority and access to data Europol will ultimately gain.
Ebner, who oversees governance at Europol, said that “almost all investigations” now involve the internet and added that the cost of technology has become a “massive burden on law enforcement agencies.”
He urged stronger collaboration with private technology firms, stating that “artificial intelligence is extremely costly. Legal decryption platforms are costly. The same is to be foreseen already for quantum computing.”
The mindset driving Europol’s push for rapid AI deployment is strikingly similar to that of President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde’s, frustration with democracy’s “drag” on her plan for a digital euro.
In both cases, powerful European institutions are showing open impatience with the checks and balances meant to protect citizens from overreach.
Lagarde’s remarks at the Bank of Finland’s monetary conference, where she lamented that democratic timelines had prevented her from completing the rollout within her term, echo the same tone heard from Europol’s Jürgen Ebner when he complained that legal safeguards are slowing down “innovation” in policing.