EU law enforcement agency Europol engaged in “maladministration” when it imposed no restrictions – despite potential conflicts of interest – when one of its officials was hired away by a controversial developer of AI-based software, the European Ombudsman said.
“How the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) dealt with the move of one staff member to the private sector amounted to maladministration,” outgoing EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly concluded in a new decision last week.
O’Reilly asked Europol to report back within six months and describe how it revised its processes to fix shortcomings her office identified in the hiring by Thorn, which produces software to detect online child sexual abuse material.
The EU Ombudsman’s ruling came in response to a complaint brought by former Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer in October 2023.
“When a former Europol employee sells their internal knowledge and contacts for the purpose of lobbying personally known EU Commission staff, this is exactly what must be prevented,” Breyer said.
The European Ombudsman’s decision “does not conclude that conflict of interest occurred,” a Europol spokesperson told Euractiv. The Ombudsman “identified a human mistake in one case regarding the approval of post-Europol employment” and that this error is a “singular instance, thus not of a systemic nature,” the spokesperson said.
Thorn, co-founded in 2012 by US film stars Ashton Kutcher – known to older millennials for movies such as “Dude, Where’s My Car” – and his then-wife Demi Moore, has generated millions in software sales and offers six-figure salaries to multiple employees.
The company had been a leading voice in favour of the Commission’s proposed regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse, also known as ‘chat control.’ Thorn reportedly was closely involved in drafting this proposal.
Chat control would establish permanent EU rules requiring AI-driven content scanning across online platforms. Critics warned that this could compel messaging platforms to deploy flawed technologies to scan users’ private messages, posing risks to privacy. The law would require end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp to weaken their security to meet content screening requirements.
The Ombudsman’s ruling comes as ‘chat control’ recently returned on the EU Council’s agenda. Currently, there is no qualified majority among member states either to abolish digital confidentiality and weaken secure encryption or to remove chat control from the proposal.
“Since the revelation of ‘Chatcontrol-Gate,’ we know that the EU’s chat control proposal is ultimately a product of lobbying by an international surveillance-industrial complex. To ensure this never happens again, the surveillance lobbying swamp must be drained,” Breyer added.
[EPD]
