And my thanks to Republica for inviting me to speak here today.

I have to admit, being a person that deals in intelligence and the collection of intelligence, I feel a little bit like a wolf that's being fed to the sheepdogs at this conference, given the background or the strong emphasis on privacy. And I think I even confused the young ladies out by the yellow container bin when

they were talking to me about privacy, and I'm like, yes, I agree with privacy. I have Torah on my cell phone, but I had a little grin on my face, and they couldn't quite figure out what the grin was about. So, but as was introduced, I primarily have been doing this work in open source intelligence for approximately six years,

looking at how terrorists use social media to their advantage for recruiting, for propaganda purposes. And how that has changed the way that they've been able to draw in people from all over the world.

So what we see currently with ISIS and their ability to draw in foreign fighters is we've never seen anything like that in our past. So we've never seen 20,000 foreign fighters go to fight for a single cause over a four-year time span. That's never happened before. So what's the explanation for that?

And I think one of the explanations, or at least what I'm arguing, is one of the bigger explanations for that is their use of social media. ISIS is an expert at using social media. So if you look at Facebook or Twitter, sorry, that didn't go in. If you look at Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or WhatsApp or any social media device

or technology, ISIS is using it. They are broadcasting their message in multiple languages. So they are recruiting in German, they're recruiting in English, they're recruiting in Spanish. We don't see that with any other previous terrorist group.

So they've really created a social media strategy around how they are getting individuals to come and join them and fight their cause. And they are also using that strategy around their ideology. So another thing that we saw with ISIS that we've never seen with a group prior

to them is this ability for them to have things ready before they announce it. So when they announced their caliphate last year in June, what most media agencies didn't pick up on was that ISIS had already created their Facebook pages. They had already created their Twitter pages.

They had already created their websites, preparing for the caliphate. So that on the day that they announced that caliphate, if I log or to log on to the internet, because I'm interested in joining, all that material was there for them to go out and seek, right? You didn't have to go searching for it or dig hard for it. It was already on Facebook.

It was already on Twitter. And this is an example of one of the posters that ISIS put out talking about media bombs because they know that their moneymaker, as it is, is social media.

And realistically, they're taking advantage of this idea that we are a social media generation. And I'm confusing the cameraman there going behind this thing. So we're a social media generation. All of us are on all these different platforms. And the other thing about it is we're not very aware of our own privacy.

So for me, from an open source intelligence perspective, this is a great opportunity for me. If you guys leave yourselves open in terms of your data, then that can be collected. If you join ISIS on Twitter or Facebook, chances are somebody has captured your information.

Now that being said, there are hundreds of journalists, hundreds of researchers that are on these same social media pages. But what I'm saying is if you have left all of your content open in that regard, then that has been collected and assessed in some manner or another.

So the question I always got, especially when I first started this work six years ago, is, well, you can't do that on Facebook, right? Who is putting this kind of information on Facebook? And really what we are seeing is that social media has changed the landscape for policing and for intelligence drastically.

We haven't seen anything like this since the advent of using DNA to solve cases, right? So that was the last big revolution in policing and intelligence, right? To solve cases. Now in policing, if I get a case that comes in to me, say for example, a missing person, dad calls me and says, my daughter's missing,

I need you to help me find her. Just seven years ago, I would say, okay, what's all your daughter's friends? What's her cell phone number? I would drive around, I would try and contact her friends and spend hours trying to find his or her daughter. Now with social media, the first question I ask him is, what's her Facebook account?

What's her Twitter account? And 30 seconds later, I found his daughter, right? I hate my dad, I don't wanna talk to him. I don't care, I just need to know that you're okay, right? So it's drastically changed policing in that perspective. But the other thing is, we are living our lives online. And there's more and more research coming out

that's proving that or suggesting that. So the life that we live on social media is a true reflection of our own lives. It may be a little bit more grandiose, but it is still somewhat of a reflection of who we are, right? So here, this comment in the center,

I was drunk, I didn't mean for him to die. Well, this is a homicide case, where somebody's now just given a partial admission to a homicide on their Facebook, right? How many thousands of dollars and police hours did we save by being able to use that social media intelligence to solve that case?

And the same can be said for terrorism. So just as we put our lives, our criminal lives online, we put our social lives online, terrorists and extremists are putting those aspects of their lives online.

And we are also able to use social media for other aspects. So at no other point in history have private organizations or even individuals or crowdsourced groups been able to collect intelligence. So here we have a chemical weapon strike

that was allegedly committed by the Assad regime in Syria. And through open source information, we're able to triangulate where that weapon strike took place. So we can now say, this is where this chlorine attack, chlorine weapon was used. We've got four different YouTube videos

that source the information. And we can put it down to within a couple hundred meters now because of that information. Another example with regards to ISIS. ISIS is very conscientious of the amount of information that they put online.

And part of the reason for that is, again, using Google Earth and other search tools, when they post a picture on their ISIS Facebook or Twitter pages, we can now use that picture to identify where they are. So not necessarily with respect to anything

that we would do, but from a government perspective, for the coalition that's fighting ISIS, if they post a picture saying they're at a grain silo in south of Kobani yesterday, and we have a picture that's just been posted, and we can somehow reference that time source, is that a potential target now for them to use?

So we can track the advancement of ISIS. We can track the withdrawal of ISIS. And we can literally track a war online. I can follow a war on Twitter. I can follow a war on Facebook. And I can do stuff that no individual could have done even 20 years ago.

With respect to individuals, the other aspect that we can do with social media is now we can track that pathway to violent extremism. So with every individual, it's not like you log on to Facebook or Twitter and you go to an ISIS site and you click like,

and now you're instantly an extremist or a terrorist. It doesn't happen that way. The pathway to violent extremism is a process like any other process. It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in days. It doesn't happen in hours. It's a process of decisions and internalization

and digesting that ideology and making it your own. So imagine if we could take a person and look at them the first time they click on an ISIS webpage. Now again, does that mean that they are an extremist or a terrorist? No, because I'm frequently on ISIS webpages and that doesn't make me an extremist or a terrorist

because I'm there for research purposes. If I then go and start publishing photos that are anti-Israeli, anti-US, anti-West, or I start joining pages or making comments, or I start to seek to try and go to Syria, now that assessment of me as an individual online

is starting to change. So the question for law enforcement and society really is how do we stop an individual from turning on their country from going to Syria

and essentially what this gentleman, I'll say gentleman is doing, he's burning his passport and then shooting it with an AK-47. So it's the ultimate suggestion that he has turned face on his country, which is Canada in this case,

and he now is fully committed to the cause. In this case, he's involved with Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. So this is something that al-Qaeda and ISIS commonly do with foreign recruits when they come over there is they will get the recruits to burn their passports as a sign of their commitment.

Regardless of whether they commit or not, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra are not going to allow them to leave. Any fighters that typically try and leave ISIS are shot in the back or shot trying to escape. And we've seen that time and time again. And it reflects that ruthlessness

that is ISIS. So you can see after almost 30 minutes of a little bit of gasoline, maybe this reflects the quality of the gasoline in Syria at the time, he's trying to burn his passport. He's that committed that he's going through with this process. And now he's just setting it up on this sill

where he's then going to shoot it. We don't need to go into that. So one of the things that we were tasked with early on at the University of Liverpool that I'm doing my doctorate with is this idea of how can we identify people early in that radicalization process?

So after the 7-7 bombings, one of the realizations that happened in the UK was how did this get bias? How did we have all these young men radicalize so drastically and commit terrorist attacks and we didn't have any clue about it?

How can we stop this process? How can we prevent this process? And so when they came to us at the University of Liverpool, we were essentially tasked with that idea of how do we identify people early in that process so we can interdict with them.

This diagram that was put out by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization in King's College London also reflects that idea of the spread or the number and size of the problem when it comes to foreign fighters.

So what you see here is the roughly 20,000 fighters that have been coming to Syria and Iraq from all over the world to join ISIS. And in fact, Germany has had a substantial problem as has Canada and many other European countries with foreign fighters being drawn to this cause.

240 at this time and I'm sure the number is probably over 300 by now. So what do you do with all of these individuals? If they've already gone over and they've fought with ISIS, well in many countries now that's a criminal act because they've supported the terrorist group.

They've fought with the terrorist group. They've received terror training. So how do you deal with them if they're not killed in Syria or Iraq and now they're coming back to your border to say, I'm all done in Syria. I'm home now. How are you going to deal with those individuals, right? So the key there is if you can prevent them from going in the first place,

now you can reduce some of the problem because with a lot of these individuals that are currently in the Islamic State, the portions of Syria and Iraq, they're already highly radicalized and they're only becoming more radicalized as the ideology is being pushed on them by ISIS.

So the key with us when we started doing the work for the UK government was we said to them, if we only focus on one group, then you're creating a problem in and of itself. Because if we only create a system for identifying people on the path to violent extremism that just targets Islamic extremists,

then when it's a different group tomorrow, a different terror group that starts up tomorrow, you're going to have to create a new tool and a new tool and a new tool, right? There will always be terrorism. There will always be a new terrorist group. We've seen that through history. We've seen that in the last 20 years, right? So what we said early days is we wanted to create a tool

that was inclusive or capable of identifying people across a gamut of terror groups across the spectrum of extremism. So the first thing that we did in terms of our sample is we didn't just look at Islamic extremists and terrorists, we looked at all terrorists.

So in our sample, you will see Tamil Tigers, you will see the IRA, you will see the Babur Khalsa, which is also active here in Germany, a Sikh extremist group, Al-Shabaab, all the different groups we put into the sample with the idea of looking at what were the criteria that were common amongst all of them.

No small task. And what we came up with out of that analysis was 16 different criteria that were common amongst all those groups. So here, again, it's an ideologically neutral tool in the sense that we can use it on the IRA the same as we can on ISIS members,

as we can on Al-Qaeda or the Tamil Tigers. Its main goal is prevention, not criminalization. If you create a tool that's strictly designed for criminalization, you're going to receive a lot of pushback by the communities that you're looking to examine, right? And lastly, you're going to have false positives.

The same as any tool. If you look at any medical prevention model, whether it's cancer screening, you're going to have false positives. But what do you do when you get that false positive? You test again, you look again, you dig a little deeper, right? So that's not necessarily an issue. I had an example of a young man who on Facebook had joined himself to Al-Shabaab.

And we had spoken with a law enforcement agency and that agency went by his house and spoke to this young man and his parents. And he said to the officers that showed up there, he goes, well, we just had a class on extremism and we're talking about Al-Shabaab

and I left my Facebook open and my best friend jumped on my Facebook and joined me to Al-Shabaab, a former best friend. And so it was an example of a false positive, but it was still a good opportunity for a conversation. And that's what we do in policing, that's what we do in law enforcement. Intelligence agencies are more about screening

and the use of data to try and identify things. But in terms of law enforcement, we get allegations all the day, so-and-so assaulted me, so-and-so committed whatever type of crime. Well, we don't just take it on its word. What we do is we investigate and the same is true of extremism. When you get an allegation that somebody is on a violent path or an extremist path,

then you look to dig a little deeper. So out of those 16 criteria, the first set or the first subset that we have in yellow there is what are our passive factors that can push or pull a person towards extremism. So we see a lot of this

in terms of the foreign fighters, both here in Germany and in Canada and all over Europe. These are factors that are a common thread amongst all of these individuals. So things like cultural or religious isolation. A lot of cases where people will, they know that they are taking in an ideology that is not in tune with what their culture believes

or what their parents believe, so they will isolate themselves from their family or from their community in terms of their expression of that knowledge or ideology. A sudden change in religious practice. And again, taking on a religion

doesn't necessarily mean anything, right? If I tomorrow join or start to take on Islam or any particular religious doctrine, it doesn't mean anything. I was baptized Baptist, go to a Protestant church and went to a Catholic school.

So you tell me what I am, right? It's only when you start expressing ideations of a alternate version of that religion that has a danger to the public that all of a sudden some warning bell should go off. Violent rhetoric. If I'm starting to talk about how I hate the West

or I hate the things that the West are doing, now that may be something that is an indicator that I'm moving down that path. The largest determinant of a person going to Syria or joining a terrorist group are their peers. So whether you look at Germany or Norway or the UK or Canada,

it's usually never a lone wolf, right? A single individual being radicalized by themselves. It's usually individuals that are in a group of individuals of like-minded friends. So that's why you see three or four individuals from one apartment house going to Syria to fight.

Or that are in their own little study group relative to their expression or their interest in ISIS, all joining a group to go over and fight. Again, political activism doesn't necessarily mean anything.

We need political activism. It's a necessary part of our society. But when that political activism is in the cause of that extremist group, so say for example something like Sharia for Belgium, right? We have a very large case that just went on in Belgium and in the Netherlands relating to that group because they had a strong interest in supporting ISIS.

And in fact, many of their members went over and joined ISIS. Basic paramilitary training or travel or residence abroad. Again, having a house in Pakistan doesn't mean that you're an extremist. But if you are going over there and you have no explanation for the reason

for why you're going and you have all these other factors, everything is measured on a case-by-case basis. That's rhetoric. If I say I'm going to go and bomb the US Embassy, if I say that I'm going to kill members of a particular group,

now you're talking about aspects that are trying to, that are essentially criminal in nature. So now we're talking about characteristics that are attributes that we potentially would be looking to launch an investigation on. Being a member of an extremist group, so if I actually join ISIS online, sorry, if I actually join ISIS online or if I join Jabhat al-Nusra or if I join al-Shabaab,

if I have contact with members of that extremist group, the Fort Hood massacre with Major Nandal Hassan, right? He was in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, direct contact by email. And that influenced his decision to carry out that attack.

Advanced paramilitary training, a lot of the fighters that have gone over to Syria, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, you name any of those different causes, have come back with advanced paramilitary training in weapons, IEDs, explosives.

So that causes a significant risk to us in terms of what that person can do when they arrive home if they still have that radical ideology that they want to use. And then obviously overseas combat. We know from looking at the Paris example, those fighters with skills in fighting

can do dramatic damage. So two cases that we were able to primarily look at using this assessment tool or this assessment criteria, here we have two individuals that have gone over to Syria. And the unique thing about this case,

from an open source intelligence perspective, is both of them left their geotagged information on. So I know you're kind of laughing, but I'll show how that's not necessarily a hard thing to do in a second here. So here they have gone over to Syria. The first case here, Mark Taylor. So he's a New Zealand resident.

Again, takes on the ideology of ISIS and goes over to Syria. And initially, like many people that have gone to fight in Syria, his goal, I think, was one of fighting the Assad regime. But what we have found is a lot of the fighters

that went over early on in the process over this four-year war found that groups like the Free Syrian Army were not in a position that they could take on the Assad regime. So they had essentially two choices, come home, right? Or fight with the groups that could. And who were the two groups that could?

Well, one was ISIS, again, a terrorist group. And the other was Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. So many fighters like Mark Taylor here joined one of those two groups and continued to fight in Syria. Now, Mark Taylor's gone on to make threats

against Australia and the West and was very upset about us publishing the ability to track him in Syria. Thus, while I'm not going to Syria anytime soon. The second one here is the case of Toronto Jane. So everybody likes to think of the foreign fighters

that are going over to Syria as being mostly male. But the truth of the matter is between 8 and 15% of all the recruits being drawn over to Syria are female. So why is that? What's the difference between ISIS and al-Qaeda in that respect? Well, al-Qaeda only ever wanted fighters, right?

They wanted people that could do things that could destroy things that could be in their army. And women, essentially, are never utilized in that respect under the rule of Islam. So the difference with ISIS is that they've created a caliphate. They've created a country. The Islamic State, right? So the only way you're going to grow that state

is by having the capacity to have that next generation growing within that country. So in that regard, you need females there to do that. And the other reason is, is if you have 20,000 male foreign fighters that have gone over to ISIS to fight,

how long are they gonna be celibate in Syria? Right? A year? Two years, right? So from the perspective of maintaining those fighters and keeping those fighters in country, this was the other reason why they needed to entice females. And they have, in fact, done a very good job of recruiting females over to fight.

So in the case of Toronto Jane here, what we see is, again, she's left her geo-coded information open and on from the moment that she left Toronto and arrived in Syria. So literally, we can track her across the ocean. And in fact, when we were scanning

all of the different fighters that left their geo-coded information on in Syria, what we saw is several of those geo-coded tags went back to foreign countries in Europe, in Canada, in the Middle East. So as I'm running out of time here, the last thing I will just mention to you

is what is your trail? I'm not against privacy. I agree with privacy. But if you wanna leave your information open to me, especially if you're an extremist, I would very much appreciate that, right? But from the perspective of your day-to-day business, people and companies are collecting your information

on an everyday basis. There are at least six companies that I know of that collect geo-coded information or can be used by the public to collect geo-coded information at any given time. So my eight-year-old, because he knows how to do this, when he wants to track Dad and see where in the world it is that I'm talking,

he can go on and he will literally track me down on my breadcrumbs and my geo-tag tweets. So obviously, this is Berlin. And this here is Republica. And this is one day of geo-coded tweets

and Flickr messages that was put out by people at this conference, right? Every one of those individuals, my background is in geographic profiling, as you leave those breadcrumbs, I can start to identify things like where you shop, where you go to school, where your house is.

If I know where your house is and you go to Republica and broadcast, I'm at Republica, well then I know your house is empty, right? Bad people can do bad things with this information potentially. So I'm not saying don't use geo-coded information, but think about how you're using it

and the types of information that you're putting out there. If you're tweeting from home and that's geo-coded and then you go away from home and that's still geo-coded, I know when you're home and when you're not. I know your travel patterns, I know where you broadcast from, right? So again here we just see a couple of the Flickr messages

and of the Twitter messages, and not only does it tell me who broadcast the message, but what platform they were using. So were they using an iPhone? Were they using an Android device? Were they using Foursquare? This is the type of information that is out there that you need to consider from a privacy perspective.

So I'm all for privacy and people always mistake that given the fact that my business is about open source intelligence. But just like I tell my eight year old, it is on you, right? It is on you to control that information. So that's me. If you have any questions, I'm open.

I don't know how much time we have for questions. Otherwise I can speak to you after the talk.