Europe shifts policy in escalating war on terror

PARIS — European leaders are adopting a distinctly American tone as they ramp up their war on terror two weeks after 17 people were killed in attacks by extremists in France.

"The No. 1 priority, the No. 1 requirement, is to further reinforce the human and technical resources of intelligence services," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said this week while unveiling a sweeping anti-terror plan that includes beefed-up police weapons and the hiring of about 3,000 counterterrorism agents and electronic eavesdropping experts.

The shift comes despite widespread European criticism over the USA Patriot Act, the National Security Agency's dragnet of electronic communication and other American measures to combat terrorism. The change is sparking outrage in some and resignation in others.

"How to police … in a democracy is the crucial question recent events have put on the agenda," said Paul De Hert, a law professor at Vrije University in Brussels who specializes in privacy. "I hope there is a best-practices process that prevents us from the totalitarianism of these police forces."

The European Union is likely to require airlines to share information about passengers with security officials, a measure that languished for four years because of data privacy concerns after the United States adopted similar measures following the 9/11 attacks. Germany is considering controversial proposals to store more electronic data to help catch terrorists and confiscate passports of citizens it suspects of planning to travel to the Middle East to fight alongside the Islamic State.

In storming the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7, two Islamic extremist brothers attacked freedom of expression, said Adrienne Charmet of La Quadrature du Net, an Internet rights group in Paris. Officials are cracking down on the same freedoms in a climate of fear, she said. More than 50 people have been arrested on charges of hate speech in France since the attacks, and a French court halted an anti-Islamist demonstration on the grounds it would foment Islamophobia.

"There is a certain hypocrisy in defending the freedom of expression and yet treating forms of expression — reprehensible and considered illegal — with a lot of severity," Charmet said.

Pierre Aidenbaum, mayor of the 3rd Arrondissement in the center of Paris, which includes part of the city's historic Jewish quarter, maintains the latest moves to quell hate that inspires violence don't compromise civil liberties.

"Of course, there is a risk now into falling into excess. There is a risk in identifying all of France's Muslims for terrorists, for anti-Semites," Aidenbaum said. "(But) I don't think there is a drift toward not being able to speak out."

The new measures to crack down on terrorism in Europe come amid heightened concern over attacks by homegrown terror cells with close ties to extremist groups in the Middle East.

A bill adopted this month allows German officials to confiscate national IDs — needed for everything from opening a bank account to getting a cellphone contract — of those deemed potentially dangerous "Islamists" and give them instead a distinctive ID card.

"We are greatly worried by the phenomenon of young people going to Iraq and Syria to fight with terrorists," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. "Because those who return to Germany present the country with a grave danger."

Europol, the European police agency, estimates up to 5,000 European Union residents have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State militants. That number reflects deep recruiting networks in largely immigrant neighborhoods, according to the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalism.

Without wide-ranging authority to listen into people's electronic communication, it would be impossible to track domestic terror cells in those immigrant communities, said Andrew Liepman, a former CIA agent and a senior policy analyst at RAND.

"The number of suspected radicals and militants is huge," Liepman said. "It very much impacts the question of balance between privacy and security. For them to plan something, they have to get together, they have to talk on the phone and e-mail each other. You need to be in their shorts."

There's a big question of whether collecting and storing such data effectively prevents terrorism, said Johannes Caspar, data protection commissioner in Hamburg, Germany.

"It has been established that data retention was already active in France at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attack and did not prevent it," he said.

Failure to prevent attacks isn't an excuse to forgo tracking potential terrorists, Caspar said. Europeans "have to make a risk assessment of who needs to be surveilled and who doesn't," he said.

That's no easy job: Neither American nor European authorities have sufficient manpower to monitor every suspected extremist. "The French have an enormous problem," Liepman said. "They have more suspects than they have investigators."

In Germany, Oliver Malchow, chairman of the national police union, said he wants additional resources for police and counterterrorism officers.

"Currently, we are overwhelmed. Our assignment books are full. We now have even more assignments that deal with fighting terrorism and ensuring safety at demonstrations," he said. "My colleagues carry a heavy load every day and weekend, around the clock."

Contributing: Angela Waters from Berlin.