EU police agency warns of threats:
The number of people killed in attacks by extremists throughout Europe soared in 2015 from a year earlier, the European Union police agency reported Wednesday as it warned the Islamic State group may “put more emphasis on operations abroad” as a Western military alliance puts it under pressure in Syria and Iraq.
The Europol report under its director Rob Wainwright painted a worrying picture of an EU assailed by Islamic extremist threats that are unlikely to recede any time soon. It warned that Syrian asylum-seekers could be targeted and swiftly radicalized by IS recruiters while a new generation of fighters is being raised in IS territory in Syria and Iraq.
The report also stated that IS appears to favor attacks against soft targets because they “instill more fear in the general public.” That threat was horrifically underscored by the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice, France, that left 84 people dead.
In a move that underscored the swiftly evolving nature of the extremist threat, Europol also issued a separate statement on recent attacks in Nice, Germany and the United States, saying they “highlight the operational difficulties in detecting and disrupting lone actor attacks.”
The report was published on the day that senior government officials from the international coalition against IS were due to meet in Washington, DC, to discuss their campaign.
Compiling data from EU member states, Europol said that in 2015, 151 people died — up from four the previous year — and more than 360 were injured as a result of terrorist attacks in the bloc. All but one of the fatalities was the result of Jihadi attacks, Europol said. (AP)
EU eyes Israeli technologies:
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.
Last week’s truck rampage in France and Monday’s axe attack aboard a train in Germany have raised concern about selfradicalised assailants who have little or no communication with militant groups that could be intercepted by spy agencies.
“How do you capture some signs of someone who has no contact with any organisation, is just inspired and started 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 a intelligence conference in Tel Aviv. Internet companies have begged off when asked to monitor their own platforms’ content for material that might flag militants, De Kerchove said.
He said they had argued that the information was too massive to sift through and put into context, unlike child pornography, for which there were 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.
“That is why I am here,” he said of his visit to Israel. “We know Israel has developed a lot of capability in cyber.”
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.
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. (RTRS)