Last week’s truck rampage in France and Monday’s axe attack aboard a train in Germany have raised European concern about self-radicalized 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 organization, 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 contextualize, unlike pedophile 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."