The director of Portugal’s Security Information Service (SIS) assured this Tuesday that Europe is currently “better prepared” to fight terrorism, but is one step behind events in light of the new technologies used by terrorist groups.
Adélio Neiva da Cruz spoke at the conference “Is Europe More Prepared in the Face of the Terrorist Threat?”, promoted by the Islamic World Observatory (OMI), by the Autónoma Academy, in which the Director of the Judicial Police (PJ), Luís Neves, also participated.
“Yes [está mais bem preparada], as experience has been gained by the intelligence and security services in preventing and combating terrorism. Yes, also because of the awareness of the transnational nature of this threat, which has led to an intensification of international cooperation on these plans,” said Neiva da Cruz.
The Director of SIS stressed that measures have been developed and implemented at both national and European level, even at legislative level, to prevent radicalization towards violent extremism and terrorism, involving civil society and entities responsible for online content were involved.
“But, without wishing to be pessimistic, there are other aspects that lead us to react to the opposite. For example, the exploitation of new technologies and environments is always faster on the part of extremists and terrorists than on the part of the entities that must respond to them, even if the latter have anticipated the potential of these technologies for terrorism “to maintain.
For Neiva da Cruz, entities committed to preventing and combating terrorism are “always dependent on legislative, financial, technological and human resources,” which “have their own ‘timings’.”
“In this context, we now need to be particularly vigilant about the exploitation of the ‘metaverse’ and artificial intelligence tools by terrorist threat agents as they offer broader and more sophisticated opportunities for activity,” he underlined.
On the other hand, he added, the phenomenon of “lone actors,” radicalized or self-radicalized “online,” “continues to pose enormous challenges,” especially “when the matrices of terrorism (Islamic, far-right, anarchist, anti-system , etc.) and exacerbate weaknesses in democracies”.
“There is no doubt that we are facing a clear migration of all conventional threats to the security and defense of states and their citizens into the digital universe,” he argued.
“There crime, terrorism, subversion and espionage co-exist and engage in cooperative dialogue with indigenous threats, fostering the creation of new universes of risk, now confined to primordial quadrants of anonymity, impact and disruption, mostly executed by originally overcoming the historical assumption of physical proximity to the victim,” Neiva da Cruz added.
In turn, the director of the Portuguese PJ stressed the importance of greater interaction between the various security forces to prevent terrorism, and, like Neiva da Cruz, emphasized that today Europe is better prepared to defend itself against acts of terrorism.
For Luís Neves, for example, the exchange of information between Europol and Interpol made it possible to reconstruct, 24 hours later, the steps taken by the perpetrators of the 2005 London terrorist attacks.
The director of the PJ regretted that, despite the sharing of data between the various international security institutions, the authors and/or groups of terrorism also misuse the internet to promote other kinds of actions that contribute to fueling the phenomenon , such as populism, “fake news” and all kinds of hate (racial, religious, etc.).
Source: DN
