March 29, 2016
March 25, 2016
The Guardian‘s Home Affairs Editor Mark Townsend asked Yan St-Pierre about the challenges for European security services “Counter-terrorism is a relentless challenge to spot the critical intelligence“.
Yan St-Pierre, counter-terrorism adviser for the Modern Security Consulting Group, a private intelligence firm with headquarters in Berlin, articulates the scale of the relentless data challenge facing Europe’s security services. In Germany, he said, the federal police alone are bombarded with around 10,000 items of intelligence every day – email, sightings and telephone tipoffs concerning potential criminal suspects. “If you start combining the other agencies, plus the wiretapping, the electronic surveillance, then you are talking about hundreds of thousands of terabytes of information every day on a 24-hour scale,” he says.
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St-Pierre said a lack of manpower had bred an over-reliance on technology, which is unable to decode the constantly evolving language, codes and behaviour of the latest generation of terrorists. “Terrorists adapt,” he says. “We’re missing out on the undercover agent who has infiltrated or the double agent within the cell who is able to analyse the information and feel the more subtle inflections of terrorism, radicalism and preparation. By not having that human component, you end up with a flood of information and not enough people to analyse it. You either oversee information or do not react to it, even if only by a few hours.”
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St-Pierre said the dependence on algorithms meant pressured intelligence officials might miss clues. “A lot of it [intelligence] is filtered through keywords. Five or 10 years ago, you had one person in charge of 10 cases; now, that same person would be in charge of double that and, overworked and overwhelmed, things will be overlooked.”
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St-Pierre said the recurring theme of terror suspects having been previously known to European police forces, often for petty offences, underlined the problems of prioritising individuals who had previously come to the attention of the authorities. “They say: ‘Well, we knew about him but he was a small fish.’ If you had the manpower and resources to pay more attention to that small fish, you would be able to do more effective work. A lot of them are small-time criminals who are dismissed.” St-Pierre recommends that Belgium’s intelligence agency should be increased fivefold to around 3,000, while other analysts believe that the £300m of extra spending to upgrade the country’s security capabilities in the wake of the Paris attacks may need to be increased further.
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