Call: Law Enforcement capabilities 2: Detection and analysis of terrorist-related content on the Internet

1. Excellent Science
2. Industrial Leadership
3. Societal Challenges

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models.

Securing the society against disasters is one of the central elements of the functioning of any society. There is barely any societal sector which is not to some extent concerned by disasters and related resilience and security issues. Fighting crime and terrorism requires new technologies and capabilities for fighting and preventing crime (including cyber-crime), illegal trafficking and terrorism (including cyber-terrorism), including understanding and tackling terrorist ideas and beliefs to also avoid aviation-related threats. The protection of the European borders requires the development of systems, equipment, tools, processes, and methods for rapid identification. This includes supply chain security in the context of the EU’s customs policy.

On Digital Security, this Challenge focuses on increasing the security of current applications, services and infrastructures by integrating state-of-the-art security solutions or processes, supporting the creation of lead markets & market incentives in Europe, following an end-user driven approach, including for instance law enforcement agencies, first responders, operators of critical infrastructures, ICT service providers, ICT manufacturers, market operators and citizens.

This Challenge should bring together all security stakeholders: industry - including SMEs, research organisations, universities, as well as public authorities, non-governmental organisations and public and private organisations in the security domain. The active involvement of end-users is of high importance.

The Secure Societies Challenge will contribute to the implementation of the policy goals of the Europe 2020 strategy, the Security Industrial Policy, the Internal Security Strategy and the Cyber Security Strategy.

The ambition of this call is both to avoid an incident and to mitigate its potential consequences. This requires new technologies and capabilities for fighting and preventing crime (including cyber-crime), illegal trafficking and terrorism (including cyber-terrorism), including understanding and tackling terrorist ideas and beliefs to also avoid aviation related threats.

This call is divided in four parts:

• Forensics
• Law enforcement capabilities
• Urban security
• Ethical/societal dimension 

Due to the ease of publishing information on the Internet (Web site, blogs, social networks, newsgroups, forums, etc.), terrorists increasingly exploit the Internet as a communication, intelligence, training, recruitment and propaganda tool where they can safely communicate with their affiliates, coordinate action plans, raise funds, and introduce new supporters or recruits into their networks. In order to cope with the dangers involved in the use of Internet by global terrorist organizations and grassroots terrorist cells, more efficient and effective automated techniques are required. Despite the often explicit (or at least not disguised) content of these web-sites, especially when used for propaganda, the huge amount of somehow related, yet not illegal, sites, represents a major obstacle to the reliable and fast analysis of their contents. Research should therefore develop and apply new and/or improved data and text and multimedia mining methods to detect, categorize, analyse, reason over, and summarize terrorist-generated content group information from several sources that supports same history, and isolate potential sources describing different ideas, that could be intended to generate “disinformation” or fake evidences to distract LEA from real scenarios. Aside this, modes of finding sources of data, capturing and preserving data for forensic analysis, authenticating images and linking videos and conversely proving multimedia data falsification, should be investigated.

Link to the National Contact Point Finder.