Criminals are early adopters of new technology, while Brussels keeps reacting too late. Paul Radu, co-founder of a leading investigative journalism network, tells EU Perspectives that the EU must anticipate threats to journalists and set up its own office against organised crime.
The EU marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists on 2 November. Yet proposed EU budget cuts are raising concerns about support for independent journalism. Paul Radu, co-founder and head of innovation at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), discussed the impact of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), the evolving threats to journalists, and what Brussels should do to protect them better.
It has been more than a year since most of the EMFA became applicable. What positive changes, if any, have you seen?
I haven’t seen yet any tangible kind of impact, especially because it’s such a short time. These frameworks require time to develop and to make a difference. But at the same time, the issue is that the counterforces, usually coming from outside of Europe, are so strong that they kind of put down everything that’s done in Europe. They are very well thought out in advance. The EU, unfortunately, is very reactive to things.
The EU, the MEPs, the media, everybody, look at the situation and say, well, these are the problems right now; let’s try to find a solution. And by the time that gets put into a legal framework, we’re already confronted with new threats and new risks.
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I think the freedom of the press legislation is great in its intent. But unless you think ahead, unless you take into account all the technological advancements that take place almost weekly, you’re going to be left a bit behind.
I think there’s still hope. The legal framework is there, and it should enable some advancements. It should enable Europe to become a little more autonomous when it comes to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and fighting disinformation.
But I’m seeing all these disjointed efforts. Let’s say you want to fight disinformation. But what do you replace it with? Do you have a strong press that can put out truthful information and really fulfil its public interest? I think the answer is no.
You mentioned counterforces. Who are you referring to?
If you look at Russia, Iran, some political forces in the US, and China as well, you see that these people are very proactive. They’re into future scenario building. They know exactly what they want. They want to have Europe as their backyard. They want to suppress any EU power.
They want to have Europe as their backyard. They want to suppress any EU power. — Paul Radu, co-founder and head of innovation at OCCRP
If you don’t think proactively, if you don’t think where you want Europe and the EU to be in 15 or 20 years from now, and what you should do to get there, then your legal frameworks will unfortunately always be behind.
We should have been thinking about infrastructure as well. I’m the co-founder of the Journalism Cloud Alliance. We’re trying to put together a cloud to serve the journalism industry. But we should have done this 15 years ago. If we had, the game would be different now, and freedom of the press in Europe wouldn’t be subjected to so much external pressure.
The EMFA also aims to protect journalists against surveillance. You were targeted with Pegasus spyware. Would things be different today?
Lots of people at OCCRP have been targeted with all sorts of spyware. Criminals are always very early tech adopters. Now, because the barrier to entry into spyware has lowered considerably, you have more spin-offs. It’s not just NSO Group in Israel. You have a myriad of companies involved in spyware. This is ever-evolving, and obviously it’s enabled by AI agents and all of that.
The framework itself is good for fighting spyware, but it’s going to be a very elusive target. You can’t really pinpoint whether this is a government, a small criminal group, or cooperation between a criminal group and a government.
Can you control it if it comes from North Korea or Russia? You cannot. This is why we need an evolving threat model. We need to understand the threat before it even happens.
I think the EU, together with the media and civil society, should be building future threat scenarios. What will the threat look like in five years? How can we adapt beforehand so that we don’t have to play this catch-up game at all times?
What other threats should Brussels be preparing for?
We can’t see spyware as a singular threat, because it’s part of a larger arsenal of the corrupt and the criminal. We’re seeing, for instance, a proliferation of SLAPPs against journalists. Almost every week we get these threatening letters at OCCRP enabled by agentic AI.
What you have now is companies that come to OCCRP’s website, put their large language models on the content, and say: extract who the people mentioned in OCCRP articles are who have money and who can sue OCCRP. Then they go to those people and say: “Would you like to sue OCCRP? Your name shows up in this context, and we’re here to assist you.” It’s a business model.
And that’s only one side of this. These are vectors that work together. SLAPPs, spyware, and all of that — they come together when it comes to criminals with a lot of resources.
The Irish Council Presidency has proposed cutting funding for AgoraEU, the EU’s future programme for culture, media, and civil society, by around 30 per cent, from €8.6bn to €6bn. What would that mean for independent newsrooms?
Budget cuts are never, ever good. I think there are two questions here.
First of all, how is this money going to be spent? Be it €6bn, be it €8bn, will it be spent on providing for the future, or will it be spent on things that are already in the past?
Secondly, when you look at the money that criminals and others are putting into attacking the media, creating disinformation, and deepfakes, I think even €8bn is not enough.
We’re undermining ourselves through these budget cuts right now. It’s even hard sometimes to convince politicians in the EU of the importance of investigative reporting, or the importance of journalism in general. Europe is the place to innovate in that sense. Media is an industry where Europe has an edge. If we don’t nurture it, if we don’t advance it, we’re going to be left behind, just like we are in technology. And that’s where I hope the AgoraEU budget will come in to help.
We need visionaries in politics. We need visionaries in media. You can’t disconnect media from technology right now. It’s just impossible.
I’ll give you an example. We’re now creating a digital press pass, together with the creators of YubiKeys, Yubico, and the SIROS Foundation. It’s in testing right now. It’s based on the principle of verified anonymity. We have this database called Aleph, an analytical tool for large amounts of data. Through the digital press pass, I could give you access to Aleph without you having to reveal your identity.
We want to get more people to become citizen investigators, including through games. For me, everything needs an ecosystem. This interplay between technology and journalism is critical.
On 2 November, the EU renewed its commitments to protecting journalists. What should Brussels prioritise?
Journalists who have done amazing work, like Daphne Caruana Galizia and Ján Kuciak, were killed. They were assassinated because a lot of interests didn’t want them to perform that work anymore.
They were the ones who understood the power of attacking corrupt systems, the power of attacking criminal systems. These people didn’t just investigate an oligarch here or there. They investigated the system itself. And these types of systems always fight back.
This is why it’s important to protect journalists. The fact that they were assassinated affected the public interest. You didn’t have the same level of investigative reporting in Malta. By silencing Ján Kuciak, you didn’t have the same level of investigative reporting in Slovakia.
And again, you have to understand the system. It’s not just spyware. It’s spyware plus SLAPPs, plus physical threats, plus disinformation campaigns and character assassination campaigns. This is what Daphne Caruana Galizia was subjected to. And those campaigns continued even after she was assassinated.
Daphne was killed at the intersection of organised crime and dirty politics. — Paul Radu
If I were the EU, I would mount huge organised crime investigations at the European level, which we don’t have in that form. We have the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which investigates fraud involving EU funds. But we should have a European office like that against organised crime. Daphne was killed at the intersection of organised crime and dirty politics.
We need an office that investigates these issues, that takes journalistic work that’s published and uses it to advance investigations. We need these task forces, a European office to investigate organised crime and corruption in politics. I think that’s really necessary.
