Open Security Data Europe is a public platform aimed at tracking and displaying how the European Union spends money on security-related projects, including on topics related to policing, border control, counter-terrorism and cybersecurity, as well as weapons and other military equiptment. The platform is a tool for journalists, researchers, civil society organizations and others to better understand the growing investments of the European Union in security.

The platform contains data on six different EU budgets:

Three are for projects related to civil security: the Internal Security Fund (2014-27), which provides funding to implement EU policing and border policies, as well as projects by EU member states; the security component of Horizon Europe (2021-27), the EU’s research and innovation program; and its predecessor programs, Horizon 2020 (2014-20) and the Seventh Framework Program for Research and Development (FP7, 2007-13).

And three are for research and development in the military field: the Preparatory action for Defence Research (PADR, 2017-2019) and the European Defence Industry Development Programme (EDIDP, 2019-2020), the precursor programs of the European Defence Fund (EDF, 2021-2027)

This money has been used to develop controversial technologies such as drones, biometrics, and automated behavioural analysis, as well as the development of pan-European police networks and border surveillance systems.

In the military domain EU budgets have focussed on uncrewed and autonomous weapon systems, military applications of artificial intelligence, as well as the development of hypersonic and directed energy weapons.

Our data is all public: either taken from the websites of EU or national institutions or received via freedom of information requests. You can read more about the data sources here.

Open Security Data Europe was created by Caitlin L. Chandler, Chris Jones and Zach Campbell. The data platform was built and is maintained by Simon Wörpel. Support for this project comes from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) Fund.

In 2022 the European Network Against Arms Trade (ENAAT) funded Chandler, Jones, Campbell and Wörpel to update and redesign the data platform, adding new data from the Internal Security Fund and Horizon Europe, as well as expanding the platform to include EU military spending data, specifically adding detailed data on companies and other entities benefiting from the European Defence Fund (EDF) precursor programs in 2017-2020. Additional research was carried out by Mark Akkerman and Shauna Blackmon.