The EU will fight cybercrime with crowdsourcing

DON YOUR SUPERHERO COSTUME, as the EU wants you to fight cybercrime using a crowdsourcing experiment.

Director of Europol Rob Wainwright thinks he can use anyone using the Internet, so that would be most of us then, to tap into the magical powers of crowdsourcing to fight the evils of cybercrime.

Wainwright made the announcement at a Lords EU sub-committee because he wants the EU to step up its game to beat the increasingly technology-savvy cybercriminals. He is also worried that other serious crimes not traditionally associated with technology, like drugs and people trafficking, are catching up with online fraudsters.

Wainwright's response to the rise in the cybercrime in all illegal quarters is to propose the launch of an "internet crime reporting online system".

Using your average Joe Internet user, the proposed system would "collect all internet crime reported online at a national level, in a harmonised way across the EU," he said.

The initiative is designed to empower people to report crime and help create a unified comprehensive system that could be run out of the EU headquarters. But the system would be designed so it's not just one person reporting one crime to one law agency. It would mean that people would be able to report any potential crime that is happening to any EU agency.

"For the first time the EU will have a comprehensive overview of reported cyber crime from within its own borders and this could even include, in the future, a component of direct engagement with the public," Wainwright said.

Europol's director wants to develop a fuller crowdsourcing plan but it will only go live if a European cyber crime centre gets funding. If it does, it isn't going to go into operation until 2014. µ