Europe looks to Israel for counter-terror surveillance technology

 

Knowing increased European terror-attacks by Muslims without connections to organized Islamic terror-groups has Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz urging governments work together against radical Islamic terrorism, allowing Israel share intelligence-gathering technologies.

By i24news

 

A concerned Europe is turning to Israeli-developed technology in the search for ways to identify dangerous domestic militants based on online activity, Reuters reports, citing a senior EU security official.

Photo: LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/FILE

The challenge of spotting potential dangers has become increasingly difficult as attacks increase by individuals with no contact to any organizations.

Social media and other internet companies are avoiding having to monitor their platforms for materials that could indicate potential danger, arguing that there was simply too much content to manually inspect and interpret, Reuters quoted EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove as saying.”So maybe a human’s intervention is needed,” De Kerchove told Reuters at a Tel Aviv intelligence conference. “So you cannot just let the machine do it.”

While Israel once relied on metadata, meaning analysis of suspects’ patterns of communications, it is not adding social media to form a larger picture as increasingly young assailants with no links to any groups have attacked Israelis with readily available weapons like knives.

An Israeli military official told Reuters that human intervention is needed to set specific parameters for finding potential suspects.

He explained that Israel filters the population being probed in three stages. All individuals are first labelled “black”, while those believed to warrant further examination are branded “gray”. The “white” individuals are those considered sufficiently suspicious to justify surveillance or arrest.The official said that in terms of proportions, “[i]f the ‘black’ group were to number one million, I would anticipate the ‘grays’ numbering 20,000 and the ‘whites’ between 10 and 15”.

Israel’s Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz – Photo GPO

He emphasized at the conference that Europe’s standards for privacy and other civil rights were hampering intelligence-gathering technologies.

Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz urged at the conference that governments work together with internet providers rather than clamp down on them.

“We will not block these services,” Reuters quoted Katz as saying. “What is needed is an international organization, preferably headed by the United States, where shared (security) concerns need to be defined, characterized.”

 

View original i24news publication at:
http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy-defense/120484-160720-concerned-europe-looks-to-israel-for-terror-surveillance-technology