Anti-terror chiefs want help from social media firms

Washington: As militant attacks are increasingly being carried out by home-grown “lone wolves,” top counter-terror chiefs of four Western powers said they need more support from social media companies to detect threats.

While traditional intelligence methods are foiling large-scale plots from abroad, officials from the United States, Britain, Germany and Canada said that isn’t enough to uncover attacks by self-radicalised individuals like those this year in Britain that have killed dozens.

Paddy McGuinness, the British deputy national security adviser for intelligence, said many countries are still too focused on foreign-derived attacks planned or directed by the Islamic State group or al-Qaeda.

After the four attacks in Britain this year, he said at a Washington intelligence forum, “We are dealing with conspiracies that really do not involve an overseas element.”

Christian Rousseau, head of Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, calls it a shift to “Terrorism 3.0” as the Islamic State group reels from battlefield defeats in Iraq and Syria.

“The terrorism that is now most impactful in Canada is the inspired or enabled terrorism. Those are people who self-radicalise, then decide to launch an attack,” he told the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington.

“We’re in a world that’s even more difficult because not only can we not deter them, but there are no signs to help us deal with this.”

In Germany, too, attacks trend toward self-radicalised, “inspired lone wolves,” according to Friedrich Grommes, head of the international terrorism division of the German Federal Intelligence Service.

But in Germany’s case these have been from recent immigrants, not second-generation immigrants like in Canada, Britain and the United States.

The officials said that shift requires new approaches to detecting threats, with a focus on sources like social media. — AFP