Itongadol.- 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.
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.
Internet companies have been averse to monitoring their own platforms\’ content for material that might flag militants, De Kerchove said.
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.
"That is why I am here," he said regarding 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.