Intelligence services overwhelmed by scale of radicalisation

A leading French terrorism expert tells Dateline it’s impossible for authorities to keep watch on everyone being radicalised and more information needs to be shared between different countries.

Jean-Charles Brisard speaking to reporter Brett Mason at the Place de la Republique in Paris. Source: SBS Dateline

“The French Intelligence services, as many others in Europe, are overwhelmed by the number of individuals being radicalised,” Jean-Charles Brisard told reporter Brett Mason on last night’s Dateline.

“We have currently 5,000 individuals on our watch list for security reasons, then we have in addition to that 3,800 hundred individuals that we suspect have been radicalised over the last three years.”

“In addition to that again, 2,000 French citizens involved in the jihadi networks, whether in France or in Syria, among which 600 are currently fighting alongside terrorist organisations there.”

The Chairman of the Paris-based Centre for Analysis of Terrorism was speaking to the program following last week’s terrorist attacks.

“It is very difficult for the French Intelligence in general, for European Intelligence, to follow everybody and to put everybody under surveillance, this is just impossible,” he said.

“The second issue here is the lack of European coordination and exchange of information on the regular basis on these individuals and the inability that we have to follow, to trace these individuals when they travel, because there is no collective system of sharing information in Europe.”

Mr Brisard also highlighted the cyber weapons such as encryption being used by jihadis, which Dateline investigated in the Web Warzone story filmed in Paris after January’s attacks there.

“We're seeing that with the Charlie Hebdo bombing attacks where several phones were using encrypted devices,” he said.

“We suspect here that some of them could have used PSP [PlayStation Portable] devices to communicate between each other, because it's very hard for the intelligence to crack down on these devices.”

“They need collaboration of those who make those devices, Sony and others, because they cannot break these encrypted systems without their collaboration. It's just impossible to break.”

Watch Dateline's interview in full: