The French government is planning to harden counter-terrorism laws, permitting the use of algorithms to detect online extremist activity, amid a growing political row over security in the run up to next year’s presidential race, reports The Guardian.
The president, Emmanuel Macron, is under pressure over a spate of recent terror attacks, often committed by isolated young men armed with knives and unknown to the security services.
The profile of the most recent attackers – including a Tunisian man who killed a police employee in a quiet commuter town west of Paris on Friday – is very different from the major terrorist gun and bomb attacks on Paris in 2015, which were coordinated by people who had previously fought in Syria or Iraq.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said attackers were now “isolated individuals, increasingly younger, unknown to intelligence services, and often without any links to established Islamist groups”.
This was a growing problem for France because they self-radicalised very quickly, within days or weeks. These attackers no longer used text messages or mobile phones to communicate but instead went online or used social media direct messaging, he said.