Israel Matzav

#BDSFail Desperate Europeans look to Zionist entity to help monitor online hate

It's come to this: Europeans, desperate to stop 'lone wolf' terrorists, are turning to the Zionist entity for help in monitoring social media.

Last week's truck rampage in France and Monday's axe attack aboard a train in Germany have raised European concern about self-radicalised assailants who have little or no communications 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 asked to monitor their own platforms' content for material that might flag militants had begged off, De Kerchove said.

He said they had argued that the information was too massive to sift through and contextualise, unlike paedophile 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."

Here's hoping that everyone who does this is located in Judea and Samaria - probably too much to wish for. But it seems to be the only alternative.  Everyone else is waiting for the United States to take the lead, and that seems unlikely to happen.

While Israel's emergency laws give security services more leeway, 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."

If the Obama administration ever started an organization like that, it would probably include Turkey (and Iran) and exclude Israel.  Remember this? Maybe someone could ask Hillary Clinton about it.

Labels: counterterrorism, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, Islamic terrorism, Twitter

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:23 PM