Cyber war on terror needed: analysts

London attack sparks calls for stronger Internet regulation

Chinese analysts said British Prime Minister Theresa May's call to the international community to regulate cyberspace to reign in terrorism after Saturday's attack in London is long overdue.

The experts called for stronger cyberspace regulation, adding that China's counterterrorism efforts have been unfairly labeled in the past as hurting human rights or freedom of speech.

May spoke outside 10 Downing Street and condemned what she said was a single evil ideology of extremism, saying "enough is enough." The Islamic State (IS) group has claimed responsibility for the attack which left seven people dead and dozens injured, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday.

It was the third terrorist attack in the UK since March, with two attacks in London and one in the Manchester Arena two weeks ago. The Manchester suicide bombing killed 22 and injured over 110.

In her statement, May stressed the importance of counterterrorism in cyberspace. She said, "We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the Internet and the big companies that provide Internet-based services provide," May said. "We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace," Reuters reported.

Police were "making significant progress" in identifying the three attackers, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said Sunday, Xinhua reported.

"Work is ongoing to understand more about them, their connections and whether they were assisted or supported by anyone else," Rowley added

Even though the UK has world-class intelligence agencies like MI5 and MI6, the facts prove that these counterterrorism elites cannot fully control the current situation, which shows that an ordinary citizen can suddenly become a terrorist" at anytime, Chu Yin, an associate professor at the University of International Relations, said.

"The UK is not the only victim. Many European countries including France, Germany, and Belgium have already been attacked by terrorists, and the attacks are getting more frequent and becoming a new normal. Europe really needs to consider reforms to their counterterrorism mechanism and policies because its old ways can no longer protect its people effectively," Chu said.

Effective controls

The West should realize that, when they criticize China's counterterrorism mechanism on cyber-counterterrorism as violations of "human rights" or "freedom of speech," the facts show that monitoring and controlling the Internet are effective, Chu said.

May said this ideology had to be confronted both abroad and at home, adding that the Internet and big Internet companies provided the space for such extremism to breed. After the Manchester Arena attack, May urged technology firms to do more to remove harmful content from the Internet, Reuters reported.

She said on May 26 that "Make no mistake, the fight is moving from the battlefield to the Internet," and it was clear that corporations have to do more and take responsibility for harmful content.

"In China, once information related to extremism or terrorism is spotted on the Internet, relevant authorities are allowed to cut its spread and delete the source, and the government even has the authority to temporarily cut off Internet access in a specific region to stop the spread," Chu said.

After Saturday's attack in London, some influential social media firms all expressed their willingness to cooperate on counterterrorism. Facebook said it wants to make its social media platform a "hostile environment" for terrorists. Twitter also said it was working to tackle the spread of militant propaganda, Reuters reported on Monday.

China's first Cyber Security Law took effect on Thursday and Internet regulators launched a nationwide campaign to promote the law, with domestic Internet companies trying to figure out what the new regulations entail.

Censorship and monitoring of suspicious information should not be considered "harmful to human rights or freedom of speech," because this is the government's responsibility to protect society, and if some social media firms use "freedom of speech" as an excuse to resist censorship and let the harmful content flow, then this is irresponsible, Chu said.

Nevertheless, the Internet is not the root of terrorist attacks and we need to seek a solution in the real world rather than only focusing on cyberspace, Li Wei, an anti-terror expert at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said.

"Many terrorist attacks happened before social media surfaced, and cutting extremist ideology and information in cyberspace cannot fundamentally solve the problem. The problem is rooted in Europe's colonial history in the Islamic world, so the West needs to change its attitude towards the Islamic world," Li said.