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Finding Terrorist Needles in the Internet Haystack

(Israel Hayom) Nadav Shragai - Arik Barbing served in the Israel Security Agency for 27 years, serving as head of the cyber division and as head of the Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria district. In his first interview, Barbing lays out his insights, discoveries, information, and memories of the war against terrorism. "About 60% of the unaffiliated individuals who carried out attacks in 2014-2017 were primarily motivated by personal problems, and with women, it was close to 90%," he said. "Sometimes they're the ugly duckling or the black sheep of their family. Sometimes it's disappointed love....For them, the terrorist attack becomes a way to improve their status in Palestinian society....They prefer to die by sacrificing their lives to Islam and their people, bringing honor to their families and the surroundings that currently reject them....Often, we make a point of publicizing these motives to gnaw away at the aspect of heroism." "The young generation of Palestinians are hooked up to all the digital platforms....The potential attackers leave 'digital signatures' online that characterize them: Likes on sites that support or glorify terrorism; repeated visits to sites of martyrs or sites that are heavy on incitement....At one end of this computerized system, there is always an analyst whose job it is to assess how dangerous that same youth is and recommend whether or not he be called in for questioning, or whether his parents should be called." "We need to gather posts, likes, responses, emojis, voice recordings, and technical symbols of places and times, rises and falls in the extent of [online] activity, new contacts, people joining suspect online communities. We comb the Internet and identify aberrant activity. That's how we identify alarms in a sea of information that traditional intelligence does not supply on individual attackers." Barbing recently published, with Capt. Or Glick, an in-depth article in the IDF magazine Between the Poles in which the two discuss deterring lone, unaffiliated terrorists. He thinks that demolishing terrorists' homes has proven to be effective. "There are dozens of cases that I know of personally in which fathers brought their sons to the Palestinian Authority or called the PA and said, 'My son is missing, I realized he's going to commit an attack, and I don't want them to demolish my home.'"
2019-11-15 00:00:00
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