Inspector Sylvie Dias, Portuguese Judiciary Police: “The CounteR Platform Creates Guided Data Filtering Methods – A Huge Help for LEAs”
A special interview with Sylvie Dias, Inspector at the National Counter-Terrorism Unit (UNCT) of the Portuguese Judiciary Police (PJ), for CounteR Project’s Newsletter #9.
Inspector Dias, PJ is an important contributor at the CounteR consortium – a law-enforcement agency (LEA) and an end-user of the Counter Platform. What impact will the platform have on PJ’s operations after its final release?
Let me start by thanking you for this opportunity and by sharing how exciting it has been to collaborate with the CounteR partners within the consortium throughout these three years. Now, by the end of the project, we can really see the practical results that the CounteR Platform will bring to our institution and to the other LEAs across Europe.
PJ is a criminal investigative police force with reserved areas of competence in the field of serious and organised crime, including hate crime, discrimination, violent extremism and terrorism. Given the aforementioned competencies of the PJ, the prevention dimension is a very important aspect, particularly in the online environment, which nowadays has an increasingly intricate connection with the offline world.
The use of the CounteR platform will certainly help by accelerating and making more effective our work of preventing radicalisation and detecting online illegal radical and extremist content, people, and groups.
What is the value of the automation of tasks?
As in other LEAs, PJ’s human and material capacities are not unlimited. This being so, the automation of tasks will render the work of online prevention, detection and monitoring more effective, efficient and adapted to the emerging challenges of preventing and detecting illicit radical and extremist content.
Does the European legislation impose any limitations or slowdowns in the CounteR Platform’s exploitation?
The exploitation of the CounteR Platform should be in line with European legislation on the definition and dissemination of illegal content online, namely on what constitutes “radical content” or “terrorist content”, its detection, flagging and removal.
Both Regulation (EU) 2021/784 on addressing terrorist content online (TCO Regulation) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) are aimed at ensuring security and the defence of European values in the online space, respecting international human rights standards and helping to better protect democracy, equality and the rule of law.
All actions to counter illegal content must be carefully calibrated and accompanied by robust safeguards for freedom of expression and an effective right of redress – to avoid both under-removal and over-removal of content on grounds of illegality.
To the extent that it is not illegal, harmful content should not be treated in the same way as illegal content. The new rules only impose measures to remove or encourage the removal of illegal content, in full respect of the freedom of expression.
What typical challenges do the internet service-providers (ISPs) and LEAs face in detecting radical online content and how does CounteR help for overcoming them?
One of the biggest challenges is precisely the assessment of what constitutes “radical content”. In determining what should be considered “radical content”, particular consideration should be given to the right to freedom of expression and information, including the freedom and pluralism of the media, as well as freedom of the arts and sciences. Any decision regarding the removal of content spread online should always take into account the rules and European Union law that regulate the press or the media. According to the TCO Regulation, the expression of radical, polarised or controversial views in the public debate on sensitive political questions should not be considered to be terrorist content.
In addition to this challenge, there is the immense difficulty, if not near impossibility, to manually search the immensity of online space for violent extremists, potentially violent extremists or even users who post radical content.
In this sense, the CounteR platform will undoubtedly help overcome these difficulties by creating guided data filtering methods, which will replace the laborious manual methods that traditionally have been used to identify relevant information.
How can therefore CounteR help address these difficulties?
It will always be a huge asset for us all to be able to use advanced information technologies, machine learning algorithms and risk assessment tools to identify and counter extremism by collecting and analysing big data, available online. Whether this work involves finding radical users of interest, measuring digital pathways of radicalisation or detecting virtual indicators that may prevent future terrorist attacks, the urgent need to pinpoint radical content online is one of the most significant policy challenges faced by law enforcement agencies and security officials worldwide. CounteR is a very timely project and its results will hopefully be exploited with their full potential.
When will the CounteR Platform be released?
As you know, on 6-8 February 2024, PJ hosted the CounteR Project’s sixth technical meeting and fourth pilot session here in Lisbon. At that event, partners agreed that the system’s third version and its components will be released and deployed both through cloud-based infrastructure and in the premises of the LEAs in April. So we all look forward to the next exciting phase of the project.
At the end, would you please tell us about your personal professional experience and spheres of interest?
Psychology, behaviour, and human interactions are some of my thrilling subjects. In general, I am passionate about knowledge-seeking, and I am currently doing my master’s in Forensic Psychology. My core working areas and fields of expertise include criminal investigations and online monitoring tasks related to serious and organized crime, including firearms trafficking. I also have a genuine interest in hate crimes, radicalisation processes, violent extremism, and terrorism-related activities – including terrorism financing and recruitment to terrorism.
Throughout more than three decades of professional experience, I have represented my country Portugal, and PJ, in a number of national and international Counter-Terrorism cooperation platforms and expert working groups. Just to name a few examples – the National Anti-Terrorism Coordination Unit (UCAT), the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) of both the practitioners level and the policy support, EUROPOL, and the Terrorism Working Party within the Council of the European Union.
Inspector Sylvie Dias
With over 33 years of experience in law enforcement, Sylvie Dias is an Inspector at the National Counter-Terrorism Unit (UNCT) of the Portuguese Judiciary Police (PJ). Sylvie Dias has been engaged, as a LEA and an end-user expert representative, in several European-based and EU-funded projects, related to radicalisation and counter-terrorism expertise, including CounteR, CREST, and DANTE. Most recently, Ms. Dias has contributed with her professional expertise on a national level in domains such as the EU online services regulatory rules and digital safety-related topics, including links with disinformation and Artificial Intelligence (AI).