EU ‘Check the Web’ monitoring
p2pnet.net news:- ‘Check the Web,’ an online monitoring action being created to combat terrorist use of the Net, will be mounted and co-ordinated by EU police agency Europol if a working party proposal is accepted by justice and home affairs ministers this month.
“Terrorists use the Internet to radicalize, recruit and train potential terrorists and to transfer information,” says the draft from the European Union Council.
“So-called terror manuals provide instructions on how to produce weapons, how to carry out attacks, how to take hostages and how to build bombs, among other things. In the face of the global availability of the Internet, this is especially worrying.”
Net pages in various languages have to be monitored and evaluated, requiring enormous technical and human resources, says Check the Web.
Because of the “huge quantity of Internet pages in use, problems arise on a national and international level concerning the quantity and quality of resources, especially with a view to the language skills needed,” it states, going on:
It is hardly possible for one individual member state to cover all suspicious terrorismrelated activities on the Internet. Monitoring and evaluating the Internet should therefore be intensified by sharing this task on a voluntary basis among the Member States, taking advantage of the special language and professional competence of the relevant authorities of the individual Member States. In addition to sharing information via Europol, Member States may also choose to divide labour amongst themselves on a voluntary basis to achieve the most efficient use of resources. However, irrespective of potential distribution of priorities the responsibility of deciding whether to monitor, interrupt or shut down specific websites remains with the Member States.
The Check the Web information portal at Europol, “constitutes an essential tool for cooperation among Member States,” says the draft, saying a number of modules will be created for which member states will provide data and which will be available to them.
These will include:
- Contact persons for strengthening the expert network;
- Lists of links to monitored websites for mutual information;
- Additional information (special language competence in the individual Member States, technical expertise, possibilities of legal action against terrorist websites) that enables the sharing of resources;
- List of announcements by terrorist organizations, to aid in combining resources;
- Evaluation results to avoid duplication of work.
“The establishment of this information portal will facilitate a significantly increased quality of cooperation between the Member States in monitoring and evaluating Islamist terrorist websites,” the document says.
f your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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August 5th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
[...] ministers, ‘Check the Web,’ an online monitoring project being created to combat terrorist use of the Net, will be mounted and co-ordinated by EU police agency [...]