LION DC: working meeting and General Assembly in Vilnius

Representatives of the LION DC project met on 3-4 October 2019 at the Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius to summarize the first nine months of work, present an action plan for the coming period and discuss current, crucial topics for the consortium.

The results of Work Package 2 (WP2 – Online Drug Crime Phenomena Definition & LEA needs assessment), which defined the phenomenon of online drug crime in the countries of the consortium, were presented. Representatives of the project collected and analyzed the needs and challenges of uniformed services in this area. Furthermore, functional and non-functional requirements of the tools that are necessary to conduct effective investigations in this area were developed. In addition, a database of commercial and free tools was created to provide support in the investigation of cases.

Moreover, two training scenarios based on fictional cases were prepared in cooperation with security services and will be used later in the project. The last stage of the work was to define the expectations of LEA that could increase the effectiveness of handling online drug cases, as well as to indicate success factors for them in the LION DC project. During the meeting, the materials developed within WP2 were discussed with the Partners also in terms of their use in subsequent Work Packages. The Polish Platform for Homeland Security was responsible for the implementation of these tasks and the presentation of results.

The preparations of the practical part of the LION DC project in the form of exercises and trainings with the participation of representatives of security services are currently in progress. Those exercises and trainings will be held within the framework of WP3 (Exercising) and WP4 (Sandbox & Training Development) in the first half of 2020. The action plan was presented during the meeting in Vilnius. This part of the work is carried out by partners from the Netherlands – Dutch Institute for Technology, Safety and Security (DITSS) and Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO).

The General Assembly of the project consortium met on the second day of the meeting, which was dedicated to formal matters. Lion DC is funded under the EU Internal Security Fund Police. Its implementation will last until December 2020. The project consortium includes institutions from Lithuania, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Poland.