The details of a presentation made at a February meeting of the Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) of the Council of the European Union were revealed under a Freedom of Information request made by civil liberties group Article 19.
The document comes branded with the Hungarian presidency logo, but came with a warning that said it did not necessarily represent the official line of European regulators.
However, the document Toward the single European cyberspace does show that top-level politicians are discussing working on an EU wide blocking system, extending systems already used by some countries, including Germany.
“We propose a joint solution for the governmental (law enforcement) and non-governmental sectors and NGOs,” said the report, by an author whose name was removed from the documents to protect their privacy.
“The transfer of the illegally published content into the EU can be prevented by a safety net, a virtual 'Schengen-border' set up in cyber space. At the 'virtual access points' of the ISPs of the EU, illicit content can be stopped if it violates EU norms.”
The system would rely on a blacklist that would be imposed on ISPs to enforce, the document proposed. The system would mirror the IWF's child porn blocking efforts in the UK, but could have wider implications.
Although the initial use would be to block the same sort of illegal content, the document suggested the firewall was ripe for function creep once it was established.
"This is only the first step to block paedophile content within the EU – upon the agreement of the member states - it is possible in the future to broaden the cooperation of the blocking process (by involving other types of crime," it read.
This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk
