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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ENTRAP (Enhanced Neutralisation of explosive Threats Reaching Across the Plot)

Teaser

Summary

A significant threat from terrorism to society in Europe and globally emanates from the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), by far the most common means of terrorist attack. An IED can be prepared at low costs using easily available information and materials. The planning of a terrorist attack can be an iterative process where the antagonists discover a need for training and adaption by creating new types of explosive devices or developing novel tactics. Terrorism is a continually evolving and changing threat that forces law enforcement agencies to continuously adapt to it.
The ambition of the work regarding fighting crime and terrorism aims at both, avoiding attacks by preventive actions and mitigating their potential consequences. This will require new technologies and capabilities for fighting, preventing and understanding terrorism. The ENTRAP project works with operational research methods for assessments activities to give decision makers and practitioners increased understanding of emerging and future counter-tool capabilities thus contributing to the societal risk reduction of threats.
The development of techniques that can detect explosives and precursors leading to the early discovery and prevention of explosive threats is of high priority. The FP 7 research programme saw many projects launched to focus on specific parts of the counter-terrorism timeline and Horizon 2020 extends this requirement. Historically, project objectives span the various plot phases for development of counter-measures.
ENTRAP aims to evaluate the technical advancements produced by the research and development efforts conducted on a European level over the last decades. The ENTRAP project has a focus only on IEDs. The overall aim is to understand and evaluate the effectiveness of emerging technical capabilities and to compare them to currently available counter-tools used to detect and prevent IED attacks. This will give a considered estimation on their efficiency, which can be validated and tested against historic cases. The project strives also to identify common nodes in the timeline where a counter-tool effective across multiple different scenarios can be identified and assessed. A following gap analysis will then disclose weaknesses in our current defences. Cost assessments will is an integral part and enables decisions to be made on further development of emerging counter-tools.

Work performed

During the first 18 months (out of a total of 36 months), ENTRAP had its first project meeting in Brussels on May 16-17, 2017 and has continued with project progress meetings each 6 months. The supportive Stakeholder and Practitioners advisory Board (SPB) has been formed and had its first meeting. The meeting outlined the objectives of the SPB where some of them is to identify the key desirables of the SPB members and advice on the applicability of what the project should be looking at.
The ENTRAP project has defined the terrorism timeline and described the key activities for the different phases that terrorists can use. The terrorism timeline breaks down the stages and key activities that any terrorist is likely to undertake, fully or partially. The detailed timeline has been used as a backbone for describing 12 historical plots in detail where most of them were conducted in European countries.
Operational Research (OR) methods are used in the project to collect and structure information and to make assessments. All ENTRAP efforts has to be done in close collaboration with development of OR methods, since the choice of OR method to use in different stages of the project is dependent on what information is available and how it can be used to achieve the specific goals.
A core element in ENTRAP is focussed on inventory of research projects and the related counter-tools they address. This inventory is the foundation for making effectiveness assessments of counter-tools, gap analysis, gap bridging assessments, cost effectiveness assessments and recommendations of future research for the area Security of Explosives.
One main aspect of the assessment activities so far is the design of a multi-level assessment approach. The basic idea is to start with a low amount of detail about many tools, and to use highly detailed information only for a small set of tools. The first direct result of this approach is the methodology named Scenario/Capability-matrix which will produce high-level assessments historical plots.
Gap analysis involves determining the difference between needed and required capabilities to current available capabilities. A methodology is under development to be used in this holistic multi-level gap analysis.
For cost-assessments, the work has so far primarily been focused on development of cost models for counter-tool use.
Recommendations of future research relates to emerging explosive threats and research concerning counter-tools to stop the threat at some point in the timeline before the attack is performed. The identification of the future scenarios will allow the definition of the requirements for a prompt detection of a threat.

Final results

The development of new tools and methods is the foundation on which a step-change can be made when it comes to preventing and fighting crime and terrorism. The foundation and main model for dealing with prevention of terrorism is to work with counter-tools on multiple fronts. To do this, the entire terrorist timeline needs to be addressed in all of the counter-measure phases (prevention, detection, mitigation and reaction). ENTRAP is providing stakeholders with accurate information on counter-tools requirements and emerging capabilities. The project helps governmental bodies to make better threat assessments and to provide accurate guidelines for counter-terrorism practitioners.
ENTRAP is not limited to developments made in previous EU funded research. The start of planning a bomb-attack often occurs outside the borders of Europe. Therefore, ENTRAP actively searches for all types of information where developments at an international level are in the research pipeline. The outputs from the ENTRAP project is shared with practitioners and studies how they are suitable for their needs and comply with their relevant implementation processes which will provides a clear progress beyond state of the art. Ultimately, the practitioner decides if the outputs from the project are to be implemented and comply with their requirements.
ENTRAP checks the compliance of emerging counter-tools against social, ethical, legal and privacy aspects so future research can be appropriately fitted to the European legislative framework and EU directives. The work in this part of the project has provided two public reports; i) Legal Consideration Study and ii) Ethical and Effective Guidelines for development and deployment of counter-tools for prevention.
The ENTRAP website has been set-up where three newsletters at months 6, 12 and 18 have been disseminated. Report templates for ENTRAP has been created including an ENTRAP informative flyer. A data management plan for ENTRAP has also been produced. In addition to this, the ENTRAP partners have been disseminating some of the results produced by ENTRAP so far at various events. During period 2, ENTRAP will deliver a number of reports where the publicly available report on Future needs on enhancing the security of explosive will be shared via the ENTRAP website.