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By CHRIS DALBY BRUSSELS – Over recent years the internet and social media has become an effective and ever expanding platform for propaganda, radicalisation, and recruitment by terrorist organisations such as the Islamic State (ISIS). Terrorists have exploited the narrative power and the outreach capacity of contemporary information technology and online communications to swell their ranks and publicise their agenda.One of the most worrisome trends about ISIS, according to experts is...

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By CHRIS DALBY, with BROOKS TIGNERBRUSSELS – Europe faces a daunting mix of terrorist threats, from groups to so-called “lone wolf” antagonists acting alone. And as the infamous assault-weapon murder of 69 people in July 2011 by a Norwegian right-winger bloodily demonstrated, lone actor extremist events (LAEEs) can be just as devastating as those planned by larger cells.One group of researchers is looking into the complicated issue of how, once an LAEE starts, to identify...

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By CHRIS DALBY, with BROOKS TIGNERBRUSSELS – It is now a commonplace to see armed soldiers patrolling the streets alongside police detachments in Paris and Brussels since the terrorist attacks against them in November 2015 and March 2016, respectively.This raises a number of questions about the future role of the military today in civil security. Should the military in each EU country do this? If so, how and under what circumstances? And how to work with police forces?Conducting joint counter-terrorist training of national police and military units would be an effective response to terrorist threats, say Dutch, German and other officials. There has been little...

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By EMILY SMITH, with BROOKS TIGNERBRUSSELS – Just over 100 countries and international organisations met here on 4-5 October to pledge more support for Afghanistan during their donors’ conference. Hosted by the EU, the parties pledged EUR 13.6 billion in development aid to Kabul for the next four years.Despite the new money for development, Western leaders continue to insist on the primordial role that security must play“We must not ignore security: it remains the most important component for all the other initiatives. If we are not vigilant the country will slide back into violent extremism,” Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, said as the meeting began. “Security and stability are essential,” said Tusk.Security in Afghanistan may be uppermost on Tusk’s mind, but the more pressing matter for Europe is...

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Euro-View: Martin Howard on EU-NATO co-operationNot much budged BREXIT from the UK media during July. But one exception was the Chilcot report on Britain’s role in the Iraq war. Many headlines were about the decision to go to war, its legality and the intelligence failures that preceded it.But just as important was what the report said about the aftermath. It’s important because that failure not only led to most of the bad news that has come out Iraq, but also because the lessons go beyond that conflict. Looking at Afghanistan and Libya, those lessons seem not to have been learnt.We need to be careful about drawing parallels. But there is a common theme...

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Update on tenders and calls-for-proposals in EU security:1. Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) services in support of the execution of Coast Guard functions This call for tender is to contract European Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) services in the civil maritime surveillance domain in support of executing Coast Guard functions. The contracted RPAS services should have a high level of deployability and availability, which should lead to an increase of the operational Coast Guard capability and provide free of charge additional data streams to users from European Union (EU) Member States, Iceland, Norway, to the European Commission and to EU Agencies. Throughout this document the terms “user” and “Member States (MS)” refer to this given list of users.A scalable service in terms of number of deployments is foreseen with a possibility to have a number of simultaneous RPAS deployments. The deployment should be based on mobile units (Local Ground Control Station - LGCS), which can be relocated as new requests may come over time. The RPAS services should be used as a complementary tool in the overall surveillance chain, including satellite imagery, vessel positioning information and surveillance by manned maritime patrol aircraft and vessels.Three classes of RPAS are foreseen to address the different operational domains in three lots: Medium size RPAS services with “long endurance”, larger size RPAS services with “long endurance” and with a comprehensive set of sensor capabilities, and Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) RPAS. The aircraft and the sensors of the three RPAS classes shall be designed to respond to the user requirements of the three European Agencies covering their Member State requirements in the areas of maritime surveillance activities.The estimated budget available for the contract is EUR 67.100.000 excluding VAT Deadline: 17 October 2016 Contact: European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) Email: Open122016@emsa.europa.eu Call documentation and application forms can be found here

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HORIZON 2020 AWARDED PROJECTS:Eye-O-T - Cyber security system with a high IoT network visibility and fast vulnerability detection for Smart Homes. Today there are around 800 million connected devices in Smart Homes, which forecasted to reach 2 billion devices by 2020 - an uptick of about 250 million new devices per year. Smart Home networks become crowded, difficult to maintain and vulnerable. Today’s Smart Home systems, such as smart TVs, Internet-connected camera systems, alarm sensors, smart light bulbs or thermostats, can be hacked only in few minutes and provide a wealth of data about the way people live, bank information, legal information and etc.Perytons proposes a centralized diagnostic solution for the Smart Home Operators, called Eye-O-T. The Eye-O-T enables the operators to monitor and analyse in real time a large number of IoT networks, distributed over many remote sites and running different local communication protocols. The system is composed by plug & play probes that capture Smart Home IoT edge and gateway traffics and send it to the cloud through the existing broadband infrastructure; and an intuitive real-time dashboard. The Eye-O-T security system not only enables Smart Home owners to minimise their house and privacy vulnerability to security breaches and malicious attacks, but also reduces the Smart Home maintenance cost for operators by 30% and increases the operator’s deployment capacity of at least 10%.The Phase 1 project will allow Perytons to define a minimum viable product, plan a feasible cyber security and centralized monitoring system scale-up, elaborate the business scale up, and size the reachable market and a reliable market share.Within the overall project, Perytons aims to: scale up the solution to be able to support large scale IoT network deployment, ingrate the system with one large cloud service, interface the solution with common Network Management solutions and demonstrate Eye-O-T visibility and security trough a large scale pilot in houses with 300 probes deployed in Germany and the UK together with Smart Home Operators.Start date: 2016-10-01 End date: 2017-02-28 Total cost: EUR 71.429 EU Contribution: EUR 50.000 Project Coordinator: Perytons, Israel

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Events CalendarHere are some upcoming events related to European civil security we think readers should be aware of:Network and Information Security Workshop 17-18 October 2016, Bratislava, SK3rd European Conference on Flood Risk Management 17-21 October 2016, Lyon, FRCyber Security EU Cyber Security Conference (CSE 2016) 18 October 2016, Leeds, UK

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By BROOKS TIGNER BRUSSELS – After several years of two-steps-forward/one-step-backward effort, the European Commission finally unveiled on 7 September its draft regulation to harmonise certification schemes for aviation security screening equipment across the EU member states.It hems in the ways that national authorities have traditionally tweaked their rules to protect their home market, thus forcing foreign suppliers of the equipment to get separation certifications in each country. Once approved, the new measure would put in place a common set of certification norms and thus create mutual recognition between national authorities, thus eliminating duplicative costs for industry.While the European market for aviation screening equipment is not huge, the proposal carries two important implications. One is that it will shore up the European market by creating a recognised international standard to challenge the US certification one that dominates the global market. More important, however, is the second implication: it opens the door for...

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By LAUREN KUHN BRUSSELS – In today’s security climate, migration and border control issues are top priorities for European authorities. Border control agencies such as Frontex, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union, as well as national border control officials, have been overwhelmed by the recent influx of migrants and refugees.One current research project is trying to make life a bit easier for these officials. SNOOPY, a project funded under the EU’s Research and Innovation programme of Horizon 2020, is a handheld sniffer for concealed people discovery that is being developed by researchers coordinated by the Italian Universita degli Studi di Brescia in conjunction with hardware developers at C-TECH Innovation Ltd, a UK research, technology and innovation organisation. This project is nearing the end of its life-cycle, having started in early 2014 and set to end at the beginning of 2017, and an overall budget of EUR 2.6 million.In an interview with SECURITY EUROPE, Giorgio Sberveglieri, the project’s lead and a professor at the University of Brescia, talked about the project’s two main goals.The first is to develop a...

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