Attack in Germany
Photo: Reuters
EU eyes Israeli technologies for spotting militants online
With lone wolf attacks in both Germany and France within days of each other, European officials are in Israel to learn how to use the cyber tools the Jewish state uses to defend itself against Palestinian lone wolf terrorists.
European powers are looking to Israeli-developed technology to develop better means for spotting "lone-wolf" militants based on their online activity, a senior EU security official said on Tuesday.
Internet companies have been averse to monitoring their own platforms' content for material that might flag militants, De Kerchove said.
"That is why I am here," he said regarding his visit to Israel. "We know Israel has developed a lot of capability in cyber."
Last week's truck rampage in France and Monday's axe attack aboard a train in Germany have raised concerns about self-radicalised assailants who have little or no communication with militant groups that could be intercepted by spy agencies.
"How do you capture signs of someone who has no contact with any organisation, is just inspired and starts expressing some kind of allegiance? I don't know. It's a challenge," EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told Reuters on the sidelines of an intelligence conference in Tel Aviv.
The EU is turning to Israel for tech to prevent against lone wolf attacks (Photo: EPA)
He said they argued that the information was too massive to sift through and put into context, unlike child pornography, for which there are automatic detectors.
"So maybe a human's intervention is needed. So you cannot just let the machine do it," De Kerchove said. But he said he hoped "we will soon find ways to be much more automated" in sifting through social networks.
A soldier patrols the boardwalk in Nice (Photo: AP)
Israeli security agencies once focused on "meta data", or information regarding suspects' communications patterns. Now, beset by Palestinian street attacks, often by young assailants using rudimentary weapons and without links to armed factions, they have refocused on social media as a complementary means of gaining advance warnings from private posts.
TARGETED MONITORING
An Israeli military official who administers these methods said human intervention is required to set parametres such as age, religiosity, socio-economic background or links to known militants for the population being monitored. With the pool of potential suspects thus narrowed, the system can flag social media messages that may spell an imminent attack."We reassess our database daily, based on the changing security needs and what we have learned from terrorist attacks that took place or from captured terrorists," said the official, who monitors Palestinians in the West Bank and requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the technologies.
The Israeli system distills the population being scrutinised through three stages, the official said. All are labelled "black" initially; those who match enough of the parametres to warrant extra attention are "gray"; and, of those, the ones whose conduct is deemed suspicious enough to trigger individual surveillance or a police arrest and interrogation are "white".
"If the 'black' group were to number one million, I would anticipate the 'grays' numbering 20,000 and the 'whites' between 10 and 15," the official said, giving hypothetical figures to convey the scale of the Israeli system's data filtration.
Can lone wolf attacks in Europe be prevented is Israeli technology was used? (Photo: AFP)
As De Kerchove was at pains to make clear to the conference, European standards of civil rights, such as privacy, make the introduction of intrusive intelligence-gathering technologies in the public sphere and aggressive police follow-ups difficult.
Israel's emergency laws give security services more leeway, but its intelligence minister, Yisrael Katz, called for cooperation with Internet providers rather than state crackdowns. He cited, for example, the encryption provided by messaging platform WhatsApp which, he said, could be a new way for militants to communicate and evade detection.
"We will not block these services," Katz told the conference. "What is needed is an international organisation, preferably headed by the United States, where shared (security) concerns need to be defined, characterised."
