ENLETS is Working to Support the EU's Security Research Domain - Fostering Community Building and Innovation. 

The EU's Security Research Domain is vast, meaning many great initiatives start and finish, but, unfortunately, some of these can slip by without too much notice.

Naturally, a project's results and outcomes appear towards the end of an initiative when the activities slow and peter out. Thankfully, new entities in the EU can foster a project's results to continue their development. 

EACTDA was established to support this quest. Also, EUROPOL's Tool Repository provides an ideal place to store and circulate free tools that can be useful to law enforcement agencies (LEAs). (contact: Innovation-Lab@europol.europa.eu for details). 

ENLETS also plans to help projects and support the continued development of technologies and outputs created through EU-funded actions. The community is currently working to support several specific actions, but the network is also keen to assist others.

QROC 

The Quick Response for Operational Centres (QROC) had its final event in March with a live exercise in the Netherlands. The event's main goal was to showcase the added value of communication technologies – allowing LEAs to safely and speedily exchange operational data across borders (such as pictures, video footage, messages, etc.). This is extremely important in times of terrorist threats and other major incidents.

During this final QROC event on the 29th and 30th of March 2022, the team conducted the third and last table-top exercise. In this exercise, different technologies that promote cross-border data exchange during the "golden hour" of a major event were tested. 

Thanks to the table-top exercise, practitioners could experience some of the technologies first-hand.

• The players used IMbox for quick and secure communication between national police units and an OC in another country.
• Flitbase allowed for the analysis of images from multiple cameras to recognise particular human behaviour and detect the abnormal ones, such as throwing rocks at march participants.
• BOBeye was used the day before the exercise to do a risk assessment and then during the exercise to constantly update the risk and to create a common operational picture providing a shared situational understanding and facilitating joint decision-making for an OC team.

In the evaluation phase, the players shared their feedback on the technologies which could serve the companies as input for further development - all LEAs acknowledged that all the technologies could improve their daily work. 

Another tool previously checked in the QROC project was the ENLETS Messenger Service (EMS), an encrypted message service for smartphones, computers and tablets.

ENLETS has agreed to provide members of the QROC project with access to the EMS to continue the dialogue and the exchange of information and best practices. Both parties appreciate the need to continue the work started under the QROC and help to transition the knowledge gained into another suitable initiative.

FORMOBILE

Although not directly related to ENLETS, the FORMOBILE (From Mobile Phones to Court) project was supported by ENLETS' Core Group Leader, Patrick Padding. Members of the ENLETS community were able to attend specialist workshops organised under the FORMOBILE project at the Netherlands Forensic Institute.

As a result of the cooperation, ENLETS provides the FORMOBILE project access to the EMS, allowing the stakeholders in the LEA community to continue interactions with tool developers and mobile forensic specialists that worked on the 3-year EU-funded project.

FORMOBILE made a significant impact on mobile forensics within the EU and the results of the project will enable stakeholders from various fields to benefit. To read more about the key outputs and exploitation actions, please read this article.

Other Projects

There are other actions that ENLETS is engaged with and will work to support over the coming months. Significantly, the BroadWay PCP Project will be directly supported through the funding of ENLETS 2.0.

If your project could benefit from cooperation with the European Network of Law Enforcement Technology Services, please contact the Secretariat.