France declares e-war on cyber terrorism

Mahmoud Roushdy

The attack on France’s “Charlie Hebdo” newspaper killed nearly 17 people, which the French people considered it as the French 9/11. At that time, the Elysee Palace and the French people themselves did not believe that the incident of Charlie Hebdo was just the beginning of a series of terrorist attacks launched by the IS, notably the attack in Nice, the Louvre Museum, and Orly Airport.

The French authorities have taken their security and operational measures to counter the attacks of the IS, which relied on the strategy of “individual wolves” to carry out its attacks in Europe.

Individual wolves are a strategy that relies largely on digital technology and Internet sites. It doesn’t need the  transfer of members or crime equipment to the place of the attack. All that the wolf needs is a terrorist trainee – through the Internet – to train him how to make his tools and carry out his operation.
The French authorities focused on the concept of “digital jihad”, which became common with the emergence of the IS organization, who uses social networking sites and the Internet to recruit individuals in Europe to carry out their terrorist operations.
France has moved in two directions to counter terrorism; the fist is “operationally”; by taking security measures to counter any possible attacks in cooperation with other European countries facing the same fate; and other is to counter propaganda promotion of terrorist organizations and to try to prevent French youth from joining them.

Based on the given facts, a committee of the French army was formed by a group of experts specialized in cyberspace terrorism, which enjoyed similar powers of the military, according to Le Figaro newspaper.

The committee is based in Lyon (center of France); it acts to deter terrorist organizations, by responding to their extremism, pursuing recruitment, as well as reaching its followers and sympathizers. The committee recruited psychologists to offer the best psychological methods to prevent French youth from falling into the trap of extremism. Press investigations indicate that the budget allocated for this e-war in the period from 2015 to 2019 has exceeded one billion euros.

From his side, the director of the French Center for Intelligence Research, Alain Rudier, said that the propaganda methods used by the IS reached a high level of professionalism in attracting young people, so the European Union used internet giant experts to fight cyber jihad. The first French initiative is the opening of «Site 4» on 24 January 2016 under the supervision of the French Ministry of the Interior to counter the terrorist propaganda.

“Site 4” provides guidance that can be implemented to rehabilitate and reinstate extremists to the right path after undergoing systematic brainwashing operations by terrorist organizations.

The site also tries to destroy all the IS claims which aims at encouraging and attracting young people to fight in Syria and Iraq. The visitor can visit the site’s many different sections in order to understand the terrorist threat well and decipher the jihadist propaganda. Each section is divided to different branches including dialogues with experts, explanations, historical references and links to other sites related to the issue of terrorism and extremism.

After several meetings between the French Minister of Interior with the families of young people who had moved to Syria and Iraq to join the IS, the Minister discovered that there is a similarity of the circumstances of life that these young people lived before traveling. They spent most of their time in their rooms, watching videos, they didn’t attend meetings with Salafi Jihadist or other militant groups. The majority of young people did not meet their recruiters except on the Turkish border to cross into Syria, while all the previous stages only took place through cyberspace.

To adapt the law to this new situation, the French interior minister presented a counterterrorism plan, approved by the French parliament in mid-September and presented to the Senate earlier this year. Its first objective was to provide the necessary legal tools to prevent young men and women from falling into extremism inside their rooms and in front of the computer screen.

It is noteworthy that the Arab Muslim communities in France are leading the fight against terrorism through cyberspace, for example, the role played by one of the Muslim women of Algerian origin, Anthropologist Dunya Bozar, and her leading Center for Preventing sectarian deviations related to Islam.