Online Safety and Security for Protection of Public-Facing Professionals and Democratic Resilience Politician, Reporters, Teachers, Emergency services staff and Police officers are public-facing professionals (PFPs). This means they operate in the public eye with at times dramatic repercussions for their private lives (e.g., ‘trial by social media’, unwanted identification, online harassment and threats to themselves or their families). Online attacks are often framed as a way to ‘redress injustices’ or holding public professionals to account. They, however, can have dramatic negative consequences. Therefore, it is important to better understand the challenges faced by PFPs for their participation in online spaces and provide mechanisms to them and their organisations to effectively safeguard, manage and mitigate against these risks. OSPREY will build a knowledge base for PFP-specific risks, harms, protection needs and harm impacts, focusing on mapping shared and profession-specific risk profiles and safeguarding requirements; create a comprehensive knowledge-base on attack vectors and motivations of perpetrators across to understand disparate types/motivations (e.g., personal grievances, ideological driven campaigns, foreign political campaigns) to guide improved protection approaches; co-create advanced AI tools, mechanisms and solutions shaped for PFP-specific challenges empowering secure participation in online spaces; toolkits and trainings to improve knowledge of PFPs, their employing organisations, LEAs and law/policy makers how to prevent, manage and mitigate online harms as well as legislate for better safety of PFPs; improve public awareness on online harm impacts, including practical approaches to allyship and bystander activation.

In order to support the fight against radicalization and thus prevent future terrorist attacks from taking place, the CounteR project will bring data from disperse sources into an analysis and early alert platform for data mining and prediction of critical areas (e.g. communities), aiming to be a frontline community policing tool which looks at the community and its related risk factors rather than targeting and surveilling individuals. This is a key point in ensuring the privacy of citizens and the protection of their personal data, an issue that has been of great concern to policymakers and LEAs alike, who must balance the important work they do with the need to protect innocent individuals. The system will incorporate state of the art NLP technologies combined with expert knowledge into the psychology of radicalization processes to provide a complete solution for LEAs to understand the when, where and why of radicalization in the community to help combat propaganda, fundraising, recruitment and mobilization, networking, information sharing, planning/coordination, data manipulation and misinformation. Information gained by the system will also allow LEAs and other community stakeholders to implement prevention programs and employ counternarratives rather than relying solely on surveillance. The CounteR solution will cover a wide range of information sources, both dynamic (e.g. social media) and offline (e.g. open data sources) and combined with world-renowned expertise in radicalization processes and their psychology. The CounteR solution will allow LEAs to take coordinated action in real-time while also preserving the privacy of citizens, as the system will target “hotspots” of radicalization rather than individuals. In addition, the CounteR solution will support information sharing between European LEAs and foster collaboration between diverse agencies by providing an open platform which prioritizes harmonized information formats.

The objective of FILTER2 (FILtrage negaTif des contEnus de videopRotection 2.0) is to provide the forensics investigators faced with huge digital CCTV files with automatic solutions guiding them in the optimized sequence to use when such files or segments thereof) need to be processed by video analytics. As illustrated by the recent events, the investigators face two types of situations: if dangerous suspects escaped, the vital priority is to concentrate on the pieces of evidence with the highest probability to locate the individual, even if further in depth analysis may be required later in the process; in the formal investigation phase, priority is to extract whatever evidence is available in the file and time is no more the priority. This operational need is a real scientific and technical challenge. It has been identified within the COFIS Video-surveillance Demonstrator VOIE (a government – security industry joint venture), by PTS (the Government investigators) and formalized by Thales. Only option found was to submit it, through the FILTER2 project to three academic teams recognized in field, while taking advantage of the real data available in VOIE. In front of a big mass digital video files, at best time-stamped and with the sources geo-localized, the scientific challenge is to develop an automatic high speed (more than 16 times fast replay) usability indexation tool (with the two use cases in mind) and to build thereon the most effective strategy to conduct the video content analysis. Different agnostic (i.e. without any knowledge of the source) methods will be developed to work in the compressed domain and to be run without any human support at “fast speed”; metadata, typically as defined by ISO 22311, will be analyzed whenever available. Then, using the knowledge of the operational experts, decision trees will be developed, integrated with a human interface and carried on the VOIE Demonstrator. This CoFIS video-surveillance demonstrator has been founded to be kept active by successive projects. The first one is FUI 19 VOIE, stated in June 2015 for 30 months. An ethical committee (where CNIL, the French Privacy Authority sits) is attached to it. The forensic investigation subproject (SP4) is hosted by Police Judiciaire and Prefecture de Police, both being FILTER2 partners. FILTER2 relies on these forensic experts and on research teams of IRIT (Toulouse), of XLIM (Poitiers) and of GREyC (Caen). The coordinator, THALES Communications & Security SA (TCS) takes care of the integration and of the interfacing with VOIE, preparing a quick exploitation of the results obtained. The above partners are complementary, are used to work together and are recognized at the international level: TCS is a world leader in security systems and in cooperative research; it is the coordinator of FUI 19 VOIE and the ISO convener of ISO 22311 standard. IRIT, UMR CNRS 5505 is specialized in information extraction, analysis and modeling (especially in multimedia metadata management). XLIM-SIC, UMR CNRS 5272 is a recognized expert in quality evaluation of color imagery (especially for CCTV, where it collaborates with the UK Home Office and with the Westminster University on London busses). GREyC-IRF, UMR CNRS 6072 is specialized in imagery analysis and biometry (especially with regard to video quality assessment for persons identification and CCTV). The PTS (DCPJ and Identite Judiciaire) will bring their technical and operational knowledge of the requirements and will evaluate the solutions developed.