“The Stockholm Program.” The “Future Group.” The names of the European Union’s surveillance initiatives sound like they come from a spy novel. But this major assault on civil liberties within Europe is no fiction.

“The EU has gone much further than the usa in terms of the legislation it has adopted to place its citizens under surveillance,” the European Civil Liberties Network (ecln) opined in April. “While the Patriot Act has achieved notoriety, the EU has quietly adopted legislation on the mandatory fingerprinting of all EU passport, visa and residence permit-holders and the mandatory retention—for general law enforcement purposes—of all telecommunications data (our telephone, e-mail and Internet usage records) and all air traveler data (on passengers into, out of and across Europe).”

“Under national laws implementing EU legislation, state agencies are beginning to build up a previously unimaginably detailed profile of the private and political lives of their citizens, often in the absence of any data protection standards, judicial or democratic controls,” the ecln warned.

When the Stockholm Program comes online, this situation will get even worse.

The Stockholm Program is the third in a series of five-year plans setting the agenda for justice and home affairs and security policy in Europe. It will go into operation when the Hague Program expires at the end of 2009.

The program was planned by the “Future Group,” a committee also known as the Informal High-Level Advisory Group of the Future of European Home Affairs Policy. The group was organized by the European Justice Commission. The EU nation with the best track record on justice, Britain, had no say in what the committee did—London only had an “observer” on it.

Unlike the previous programs, the Stockholm Program is set to become the EU’s first-ever internal security policy.

Jacques Barrot, European justice and security commissioner, said on June 9 that the program’s aim was to “develop a domestic security strategy for the EU.”

“National frontiers should no longer restrict our activities,” he said.

Mary Ellen Synon, in an article at the Mail Online, describes how the program will work inside the framework of the Lisbon Treaty:

The Lisbon Treaty gives new legal powers to the European institutions over, among other things, cross-border police cooperation, counterterrorism, immigration, asylum and border controls. The Stockholm Program outlines how the Justice Commission will implement these new legal powers for the next five years.

“The commission claims the program covers policy on ‘freedom, security and justice serving the citizen,’” she writes. “Look closer and you will see it actually covers policy for restrictions on the citizen, surveillance by the European state—yes, your fingerprints, credit card charges, e-mail traffic and health records are now going to be available from Galway to Bucharest—and the destruction of British judicial independence by the European institutions.”

The European Justice Commission published its proposals based on the Future Group’s conclusions on June 10, and European justice ministers will hold talks on the program on July 15. After reading their June 10 report, Tony Bunyan of the ecln wrote:

What stands out are the proposals related to the Future Group report …. What is new is the clear aim of creating the surveillance society and the database state. Future generations, for whom this will be a fully developed reality, will look back at this era and rightly ask, Why did you not act to stop it?

The ecln predicts that within the next five years there will be “an EU ID card and population register, ‘remote’ (online) police searches of computer hard drives, Internet surveillance systems, satellite surveillance,” as well as “EU-funded detention centers and refugee camps,” “more power for EU agencies,” and “interlinking of national police systems,” among other things.

The Stockholm Program shows not only a marked shift toward a single European state, but also reveals its authoritarian nature—a trend the Trumpethas followed closely. It is likely to anger some EU nations, especially Britain.

Mark Francois, Britain’s Conservative spokesman on Europe, warned: “These are potentially dangerous proposals which could interfere in Britain’s internal security.”

Brussels is well aware of this fact. An anonymous EU official told the Daily Telegraph, “The British and some others will not like it as it moves policy to the EU. Some of [the] things we want to do will only be realistic with the Lisbon Treaty in place, so we need that too.”

As well as pushing Europe to the right, and civil liberties out the door, the Stockholm Program could push Britain out of Europe.