The report is essentially an expression of conventional wisdom. It notes that although the UK government has statutory powers under the Terrorism Act 2006 allowing law enforcement agencies to order the removal of unlawful material from the internet, the Committee recommends that ISPs should be more active in monitoring hosted material. The expectation is that agencies will provide the ISPs with appropriate guidance, advice and support. The Government should also work with ISPs to develop a code of practice for removal of material that promotes violent extremism and provide more support to civil society groups that want to challenge on-line extremist material.
The Committee emphasises -
• the need for better liaison and information-sharing between prison authorities, the police, the UK Border Agency and other relevant authorities following the release of prisoners who have been convicted of terrorist offences or who are otherwise considered to be at risk of violent radicalisation.The report was promoted by the Committee chair with the statement that -
• the importance of reviewing the list of proscribed organisations - the prospect of de-proscription could in certain circumstances create an incentive for organisations to renounce their support for violence.
• the threat from the far-right, "which consists mostly of solitary, disaffected individuals rather than organised terrorist units".
The July 7th bombings in London, carried out by four men from West Yorkshire, were a powerful demonstration of the devastating and far-reaching impact of home-grown radicalisation.In discussing universities the report states that -
We remain concerned by the growing support for non-violent extremism and more extreme and violent forms of far-right ideology.
The conviction last week of four men from London and Cardiff radicalised over the internet, for a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange and launch a Mumbai-style atrocity on the streets of London, shows that we cannot let our vigilance slip. More resources need to be directed to these threats and to preventing radicalisation through the internet and in private spaces. These are the fertile breeding grounds for terrorism.
We do not believe universities are “complacent to the risks” of radicalisation as has been suggested. Those engaged in public life must ensure that the language they use reflects the same tone.
Individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds are vulnerable to radicalisation. There is no typical profile or pathway to becoming radicalised. It is a policy of engagement, not alienation that will successfully prevent radicalisation.
In the Prevent Review, the Government drew a link between university education and terrorist activity, but our evidence suggests that there may be a much less direct link than was thought in the past, and a recent Home Office document suggests that individuals involved in violent extremism are little different to others around them in terms of their education. The Prevent Review says this:In discussing the internet and radicalisation the report commented that -
More than 30% of people convicted for Al Qa'ida-associated terrorist offences in the UK between 1999 and 2009 are known to have attended university or a higher education institution. Another 15% studied or achieved a vocational or further education qualification. About 10% of the sample were students at the time when they were charged or the incident for which they were convicted took place. These statistics roughly correspond to classified data about the educational backgrounds of those who have engaged recently in terrorist-related activity in this country: a significant proportion has attended further or higher education.The Henry Jackson Society , whose staff carried out some of the analysis on which this was based, highlighted several specific cases:
We believe there is unambiguous evidence to indicate that some extremist organisations, notably Hizb-ut-Tahrir, target specific universities and colleges (notably those with a large number of Muslim students) with the objective of radicalising and recruiting students.
• at least four individuals involved in acts of terrorism in the UK were senior members of a university Islamic Society (Kafeel Ahmed, Waseem Mughal, Yassin Nassari and Waheed Zaman);However, Universities UK expressed concern that:
• Omar Sharif, a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv in 2003, was radicalised during his first year at King's College London after he attended Hizb-ut-Tahrir meetings on campus;
• Anthony Garcia, convicted for his role in the 2004 'fertiliser' bomb plot, attended religious talks in the late 1990s at the University of East London Islamic Society; and
• Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, convicted for his role in Dhiren Barot's 2004 'dirty bomb' plot, was studying at Brunel University and met Barot in the university's prayer room.
Simplistic linkages have been made between violent radicalisation and the fact an individual has attended university without acknowledgement that the radicalisation process is far more nuanced and difficult to predict ...A Home Office Rapid Evidence Assessment of open source empirical studies published more recently found that individuals involved in Islamist violence "tend to be educated to a similar level ... as the broader population in which they live".
What is not taken into account is that the proportion of young men now participating in higher education stands at 41%, a fact that indicates that attending university may actually reduce the risk of vulnerability to violent radicalisation.
When asked whether attending university meant an individual was more at risk of extremism, Professor Geoff Petts, representing Universities UK replied that universities "acknowledge the threat, but we do not see evidence to support that". Nabil Ahmed, of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, added:
There are various myths surrounding the issue of campus extremism. There is far too much sensationalism and insufficient evidence or expertise in this wider discussion ... There is a notion that campuses are hotbeds of extremism, which is unfounded in the expertise and experience of the sector and the experience of students. There is a notion that, just because these people who have gone on to become terrorists went to university, in some way those two things are connected—the evidence suggests not. There was an independent inquiry, for example, into the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who went to UCL, which showed that he was not actually radicalised at university.Professor Petts argued that the evidence that extremist groups were actively targeting universities was "circumstantial" and Nabil Ahmed said that he had not come across any instances of campus preaching that would be in breach of British law. Other students we met through SOAS, including practicing Muslims, were adamant that they had not encountered anyone on campus who supported terrorism.
Hannah Stuart of the Henry Jackson Society said that she understood why the Federation of Students Islamic Societies felt the need to defend Muslim students against the media focus on them, but pointed out that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a former president of his University's Islamic Society, who had been convicted in the US in October 2011 for a failed bomb attack on an aircraft. She said:
I think it is not just about the admittedly very small number of Muslim students who have gone on to commit terrorist acts but it is about the atmosphere that is created sometimes on campus by Islamic societies or other organisations who consistently invite a certain type of speaker that does not reflect the plurality of Islam in this country.
Charles Farr claimed that the Prevent Review had not stated that terrorists themselves were active recruiters in universities, but rather that the Government was concerned about people "who are speaking regularly against core UK values and whose ideology incidentally is also shared by terrorist organisations" and the fact that this appeared to be going unchallenged. Other witnesses gave examples of such individuals who were allowed to speak on campus, for example Raed Salah, who is banned from entering the UK for his anti-semitic views but was admitted to the country by mistake in June 2011, and Al Qa'ida supporter Anwar Al-Awlaki who, we were told, addressed a UK university by video link.
Professor Neumann undertook a study in 2007 for the European Commission which came to the conclusion that:
Like prisons or like the internet, universities were places of vulnerability ... because you get people of a certain age, often away from home for the first time, often feeling quite lost and often experiencing a sort of crisis of identify and so on. That makes it easy for extremist groups to pick them up.
Many of our witnesses cited the internet as the main forum for radicalisation. Sir Norman Bettison, the Association of Chief Police Officers' lead for Prevent, told us that "the internet does seem to feature in most, if not all, of the routes of radicalisation". It was regarded as particularly dangerous as it was now one of the few unregulated spaces where radicalisation is able to take place. According to the Home Office, the internet "plays a role in terms of sustaining and reinforcing terrorist ideological messages and enabling individuals to find and communicate with like-minded individuals and groups". This seemed to be contradicted by more recent Home Office-commissioned research, which concluded that the internet "does not appear to play a significant role in Al Qa'ida-influenced radicalisation". Even those witnesses who attributed a significant role to the internet tended to support that report's conclusion that some element of face-to-face contact was generally essential to radicalisation taking place, including with regards to the extreme far right, but by definition this does not deal with the issue of self radicalisation which by its very nature takes place in isolation and concerns have been expressed about the impact of 'Sheikh Google' on individuals who may be vulnerable, but have not been identified as starting on a journey of self radicalisation ...
The Home Office launched a Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit in 2010 to investigate internet-based content which might be illegal under UK law and take appropriate action against it, although Sir Norman Bettison described it as "a pebble thrown into the World Wide Web ocean". It had received 2,025 referrals thus far, about 10% of which led to websites or web pages being taken down. Sir Norman believed that the referral site needed greater publicity which would in turn require greater capacity: at the time of our inquiry it consisted of around a dozen officers. Charles Farr told us:
Every internet service provider (ISP) has acceptable behaviour codes for use on their systems. So having that conversation, even where the website is operating in a broadly legal space, is not unusual for them. Governments all around the world have those conversations with ISPs every day, and the public will very often make their own representations to ISPs about particularly unacceptable content that may still be legal on websites around the world.He later clarified that Governments would only make representations if websites were breaching the law.
Under the Terrorism Act 2006, if a law enforcement agency approached a hosting provider in respect of the Act's provisions regarding liability for hosting terrorist content, they would be compelled to take it down and if an internet service provider failed to remove the content upon receipt of a valid notice under section 3 of the Act, it would be committing an offence.[101] The Internet Service Providers' Association argued that:
When section 3 notices of the Act are invoked to remove material then there is no issue; when they're not invoked it becomes more problematic. As in other areas, ISPs are not best placed to determine what constitutes violent extremism and where the line should be drawn. This is particularly true of a sensitive area like radicalisation, with differing views on what may constitute violent extremist.Professor Neumann, who co-authored Countering Online Radicalisation for the International Center for Radicalisation in 2009, told us that the Government had implemented a number of their recommendations:
One of our recommendations was to bring strategic prosecutions—not necessarily taking down websites but to prosecute the people who are producing the content for the websites. That has happened, to some extent. There is also a mechanism that the Government have introduced for deciding what kind of content should be taken down and that has also been done. Most importantly, we believe that there is no technical solution to this problem and that this problem needs to be addressed differently, and the Government have followed us there.However, he considered that more remained to be done:
The most profitable way for any Government to address this problem is to bring political pressure, in some cases, to bear on internet providers-big internet companies who are hosting extremist videos in places like YouTube, Google, Facebook ... They do that to some extent but they could do it more consistently. I believe that, for example, all the measures that have been taken by YouTube to clean up its act have always been in response to political pressure, both from the United States and the United Kingdom ...The Internet Service Providers' Association argued that it would be "impractical" for ISPs to be expected to proactively monitor material, given the sheer volume of content online, as well as undesirable, given the implications for freedom of expression.
This is not about freedom of speech. All these websites, whether it is YouTube or Facebook, have their own rules. They have acceptable behaviours. They all say, "We are against hate speech" and they are very effective in removing sexual content or copyright content. Why can they not be equally effective at removing, for example, extremist Islamist or extremist right-wing content? Primarily, I believe it is because it is not in their commercial interest and that is why it is so important that politicians and Governments bring political pressure to bear.
Assistant Chief Constable John Wright, the National Prevent Coordinator for the police, added that there was a need for greater international cooperation, given that most of the websites are hosted outside the UK's jurisdiction. The Internet Service Providers' Association confirmed that if material was hosted outside of the UK, a UK intermediary would be unable to remove it. They agreed that "to improve this, greater international cooperation could be explored, although what constitutes violent extremist under the law in one country is not necessarily the same elsewhere."
Given the impossibility of comprehensively controlling the internet, it is necessary to employ other methods to tackle the issue. Alyas Karmani argued:
If you are thinking about banning the internet, you have just got to provide a counter-narrative. That is what we do at STREET, so what we do is we identify their narrative and then you have to put an equally effective counter-narrative, because if you ban one site, 10 others emerge, and the sophistication of various ideologues in terms of promoting on the internet and through social media is highly proficient.The Government has been attempting to counter terrorist ideology, this work being led by the Research, Information and Communications Unit at the Home Office; however, Charles Farr admitted that: "Getting that message across ... to a group of people who would rarely read the media that we would normally work with, is very challenging". The Government's focus will be on "increasing the confidence of civil society activists to challenge online extremist material effectively and to provide credible alternatives."
Jamie Bartlett was also concerned that children were not developing the skills that would enable them to sift critically material on the internet:
A lot of the information that looks very trustworthy and accurate—and people tend to go on aesthetics of websites—is absolutely bogus but we are not taught this in schools because it has happened so quickly. People are not being taught in school how to critically evaluate internet-based content and I think that is one of the biggest weaknesses that we face at the moment.The Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit does limited but valuable work in challenging internet service providers to remove violent extremist material where it contravenes the law. We suggest that the Government work with internet service providers in the UK to develop a Code of Conduct committing them to removing violent extremist material, as defined for the purposes of section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2006. Many relevant websites are hosted abroad: the Government should also therefore strive towards greater international cooperation to tackle this issue.
Given the impossibility of completely ridding the internet of violent extremist material, it is important to support defences against it. We support the Government's approach to empowering civil society groups to counter extremist ideology online. The whole area of communications technology and social networking is complex and extremely fast-moving. A form of interaction that is commonly used by thousands or even millions of people at one point in time may only have been developed a matter of months or even weeks earlier. It follows that legislation and regulation struggle to keep up and can provide a blunt instrument at best. Leaders in fields such as education, the law and Parliament also need to be involved. Evidence taken by this committee in regard to the riots in London last August showed that some police forces have identified social networks as providing both challenges and opportunities, with the message from one chief constable that the police recognised that 'we need to be engaged'. In respect of terrorism, as in respect of organised crime, the Government should seek to build on the partnership approach to prevention that has proved successful in the field of child abuse and child protection.
