Counter-terrorism is now a rapidly expanding global business fed by the growing demand and by a rising sophistication in the technological response to it. Some of the new advances were on display at a rather unusual exhibition in London this week on ways of tackling terrorism.

The exhibition offered a brief glimpse of just how widely and rapidly this business is growing. The size of the business globally is near impossible to estimate “but it is in hundreds of billions of dollars,” Jake Deadman, publisher of the digital magazine Counter Terror Business tells CNBC-TV18.

Counter-terrorism is “not just an industry, it involves a number of different sectors, so you have to look at the cyber security industry, you’re looking at different types of aviation security, maritime security, physical security, the training industry that operates within all this.”

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The biggest buyers are the public sector, he says, that in the UK include the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the environment agencies, all of the emergency services that include the police, fire services, the ambulance and the coast guard, as well as all maritime and aviation authorities. And there’s a private sector that supplies into all of those areas.”

“The terrorist threat has evolved from buildings and critical infrastructure,” says Deadman. Since 9/11 the terrorist threat has changed, “so now it is more about random attacks on individuals.” That has driven new kinds of responses.

Robots

Take bomb threats, and defusing of suspect bombs. This is a task that is naturally – and sensibly – being handed over more and more to robots. The Florida-based company L3Harris has devised two robotic systems to handle bomb threats. “So you would send in a robot instead of a person,” Vivek Thanabal, mechanical engineer with the robotics division tells CNBC-TV18.

The larger of those systems is already being used by Britain’s Ministry of Defence. It has been deployed extensively already in response to bomb threats within the UK “and has also been deployed for more military-type needs abroad.”

India, Thanabal says already has extensive bomb disposal units of varying kinds deployed around the country. Robotic systems are becoming more and more the need now, he says.

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Robotic scanning systems have been used in airports around the world for some time but the sophistication of these is being developed in response to growing terrorist threats to override the earlier systems, says Roy Ghastine from Astrophysics.

“We’re going beyond the traditional,” he says. “We’re integrating new technologies to scan more threats. We’ve added special intelligence to the conventional systems and new software for automatic detection. The idea is to make the operator’s job easier.”

That is also making passenger movement faster, he says. “The more you detect things, the less you need a second check, the faster the through-put rather than keeping people queued up for a long time. Like being able to keep laptops in bags, keep bottle in bags, and to detect bottles that could be a threat, detecting knives, guns, gun parts – even if a gun has been dismantled and scattered, you can detect it through our special intelligence.”

Phones

All this movement in technology is seeking to deny terrorists and their means a hiding place. A number of companies are racing to step up detection of phone signals and conversations that could be of particular interest to security agencies. That search begins with the location of the phone or the place of origin of a radio signal.

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The German firm Narda has significant new solutions to offer there. “We specialise in radio frequency monitoring, and direction finding of the radio emission sources,” Jurgen Gehrig from the company tells CNBC-TV18. “For that we have developed a new platform that works on signals from 8 kilohertz to 8 gigahertz.” This platform detects suspicious frequencies and works with antennas that automatically detect direction and distancing.

The technology naturally extends to cellphones. The firm’s technology can grab on to transmission from a suspect sim card, and the particular frequency of transmission and the system is able then to locate the phone – and with it those operating it.

This remains of course an ongoing battle between terrorist groups and the security response. That security response is growing more sophisticated and more efficient by the day. That comes at a cost to citizens, but to a growing number of business developing new technologies, it comes also as an opportunity.

— London Eye is a weekly column by CNBC-TV18’s Sanjay Suri, which gives a peek at business-as-unusual from London and around.

Read his other columns here

(Edited by : Priyanka Deshpande)

First Published:Jun 12, 2022 10:24 AM IST