After a massive explosion in beirut killed almost 200 people and left 300,000 homeless. Rescuers are continuing to search in the rubble for possible survivors after some signs of life were heard on thursday. Theres been condemnation of the appointment of the former australian Prime Minister tony abbott as an advisor to the new uk board of trade. He has previously been accused of homophobia and misogyny. Downing street said that he negotiated a number of trade agreements while pm. Now on bbc news, its click. This week the largest cache of terrorist content ever discovered online. But why is it so hard to take down . Unfurling the latest phone. And, stand up comedy in lockdown
its no laughing matter. Hey, welcome back. I hope you are doing 0k. We are still here for you, and we always will be. Until we get the memo, at least. Hey lara, how are you . How was your time off . Do you feel refreshed . Oh, i certainly do, but its going to be back at work, even though that does just involve going to a quiet corner of my house and, of course, putting the click sign back up. How has your break been . It was quiet, to be honest. I managed to fill it doing all the things i have not had time to do in the last six months. Is that a break . I am not sure whether it is, really. I dont know, but it does feel like the start of a new chapter. Yeah, it does, it does. September has always been an important month for me end of summer, back to school and so on. But 19 years ago, one terrible event defined one particular day in september like none other. I am, of course, talking about 9 11. It is easy to forget that the horrific september 11 attacks on the us happened before social media, before youtube, before it became easier to spread hate online and recruit people to your cause. These days, extremist and terrorist content keeps emerging on the internet, and it always seems to be one step ahead of the authorities who are trying to clamp down on it. And now, one researcher has discovered one of the largest living and growing collections of online jihadist material belonging to Islamic State group. Technology author carl miller met with the institute of Strategic Dialogue who were behind this crucial find. Al baghdadi is dead. It was the early hours of the morning. Extremism specialist Moustafa Ayad was getting alarmed. Following the death of the extremist leader, the digitaljihad was raising a dirge to baghdadi on twitter. Flitting from account to pro is account, ayad noticed something strange. Some of them had short, discrete links, not within their tweets, but nestled in their biographies. He clicked. It was a powerpoint. In a folder dubbed the mujahids bag and that taught you how to hijack planes. In that folder is everything you need to know how to build your own bombs,
create your own chemicals, plan an attack, co ordinate an attack, kidnapping operations, stabbing operations. Things that teach you how to be a better terrorist, essentially. When moustafa told me his story, i was completely astonished. There, just a click away, was folder after folder, file after file, just this vast multi ethnic, multilingual expanse of terrorist content, bigger than any of us had ever heard of before. For moustafa, though, his story was just beginning. This one is much clearer. This is higher resolution. To his knowledge, this was the largest cache of is material ever discovered more than 90,000 pieces of content in all. And although he did not know it then, it was also the first time it was being pushed into the outside world. And, to his horror, this was no document dump,
no static thing of the past. The contents of the cache were changing and growing. Someone was editing the cache live. That is not good. What it proved was that despite concerted attempts to clear extremist and terror content from the internet, and claims by various agencies that they had been largely successful in doing so, isis is not defeated. It is still there, alive online. Voiceover this is alkhilafa, in all its glory, remaining and expanding. So moustafa alerted the counterterrorism prosecutors in new york, as well as the met police and home office in london towards the end of last year. Ten months on, he is yet to hear back. There are thousands of schools for our cubs. Getting it removed became a passion for moustafa and his team. They understand how not just to game platforms,
they understand the power of the content that is contained within the caliphate cache. While the documents remain up, the traffic going to them can be monitored. According to the researchers, access to the cache is largely from young people, mainly 18 to 24 year old males based in the arab world. Almost half of the traffic comes from popular social media sites, and most of those clicks come from youtube. There are also the twitter accounts featuring links to the cache in their bios, sometimes even embedded in images. These accounts are lucky to survive for a day in the face of twitters enforcements, so is hijacks accounts and tries to automatically create new ones constantly and at scale. A hijacked Justin Bieber fan page was used to host the links. As was an England RugbyTeam Supporters account which was then unwittingly followed by the team itself. It is important to recognise here that not all of the caches contents are violent. There were a lot of other ways of trying to entice people to Islamic State, and the food and lifestyle, even the healthcare or at least heavily propagandise versions of them were all used as a way to try and entice people in. Someone who knows from her student days how young people could be enticed is hadiya masieh. She now helps women who may be in danger of falling victim to online radicalisation and tells me it is often the lure of a particular lifestyle that pulls people in. Yeah, so this is like having a fun party, and they are saying they have all the ice cream that they want there, it like is not, again, a war zone, it is a land of plenty. It is what advertising is, so they are good
at advertising. I have watched beheading videos. I have been in conflict zones. I have had people close to me die at the hands of terrorist groups. The fact that they are able to operate in such an extended operation is not only frustrating to be on a professional level, but it is personally demoralising. The threat of the caliphate cache extends beyond just propaganda on the internet. It is a means by which people become activated to do harm. The type of platform on which this caliphate cache sits makes it particularly tricky to pull out. No way, we are willing to lay down our blood on the soil. Mina al lami is a specialist in this area. The Biggest Development injihadist use of technology this year has
been their exploitation of decentralised websites, decentralised platforms. Decentralisation software allows users to store and share content across the web at multiple locations. The servers used are owned by people rather than one company. The developers of these decentralised platforms have no way of acting against content that is stored on user operated servers, or content that is shared across a dispersed network of users. It is really all about privacy, freedom, encryption. It is really the control, the full control that they promise to give to users. That is what attracts jihadists to these platforms. And despite moustafas team having alerted the authorities in both america and the uk, the cache is still online. In fact, it has even got bigger. So we as a programme approached the authorities once again. Londons met police acknowledged receiving the disclosure last year, and said the Us Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of new york declined to comment. The thing is multiplying. And it will continue to multiply, unless we take some sort of action. Fascinating yet terrifying report there. Carljoins me now. Carl, hi. Why do you think it was so difficult for the authorities to be able to police this content . What the police have is a nightmare. Youve got the perpetrators in one country, youve got the victims in another, youve got evidence sprayed all over the world, and it is unbelievably difficult if you are any police force, anywhere in the world, to reach across all those borders and bring them all back into anything that looks like an investigation, let alone a court case. Because what we did see in the film was that counterterrorism authorities in the us and the uk had been contacted, but that didnt seem to amount to a great deal. The problem is that it is kind of everyones problem and therefore nobodys problem. We might want to blame the police or the tech giants but there is a whole new kind of player in this game which is decentralisation. So suddenly, there is not even really a tech giant or a police force to pick up
the phone and yell at. How do you think this content can never be stopped . How do you think this content can ever be stopped . I think very clearly coming out of this, we are learning that information is basically indestructible. You cannot destroy it, you cant kill it, it is very difficult to get rid of. And that means that invariably, the kind of territory which so called is has managed to carve out online is going to be much, much more difficult to ever fully kind of invade or defeat than any of the territory which they once held in the physical world. Hello and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week that uber enjoyed selfie tech in north america to make sure passengers wear face masks. It was the week that uber introduced selfie tech in north america to make sure passengers wear face masks. Amazons prime air fleet has been given permission to lift off by us regulators. And tesla showed off its model 3 Production Centre in china. We know face masks help stop the spread of coronavirus, and now a new device from lg comes with air purifying tech as well. The puricare mask feeds filtered air to the wearer
and uses sensors to adapt fan speeds to help make breathing feel more normal. Spot the four legged robot has been deployed to take patients vitals in the us hospital. The boston dynamics machine carries a tablet so doctors can ask patients questions. Four cameras measure skin temperature, breathing, pulse rate and blood oxygen levels from up to two metres away. Artificially intelligent cctv cameras are being rolled out to detect violence on sydneys rail network. Its part of an intiative to improve safety for women travelling on public transport at night. And finally, with some galleries struggling to reopen, how about this entirely Virtual Art Museum . Voma, the virtual 0nline museum of art, claims to be the first completely imagined gallery to showcase art loaned from world leading institutions. Find art on display, a cafe for catching up and even a garden for some tranquillity. This is samsungs third attempt at a folding phone and honestly, what a difference a year makes. Compared to the original galaxy fold, almost everything has been improved, apart from the name this is the Samsung Galaxy galaxy z fold 2 5g. This is the Samsung Galaxy z fold 2 5g. Chuckles. When the original galaxy fold went on sale in september 2019, it had a tiny screen on the outside, a huge camera notch on the inside and a metal finish that was a total fingerprint magnet. This time, the outside screen is a sensible 2. 6 inches, 6. 2 inches, the inside bezzles are reduced to a sliver and the back is pleasant matte finish. Everything is so much more refined, it makes last years galaxy fold seem like
prototype, and thats why people say its not always a good idea to be an early adopter. But what is the use . Evidently it combines the convenience of the phone with a screen the size of a tablet, and some apps support flex mode, which splits the folding display in two, so you can watch youtube videos like this, and in the camera, you can take photos like this, although im not exactly sure why you would want to. Although with the external display, you can use the phone as its own stand for video calls, which is quite useful. I think it would be quite nice if you could keep it on your desk sideways to see notifications and calendar events, although the lock screen is vertical only so its not really optimised for this, and you get that feeling for a lot of apps. Samsung acknowledges it needs more developers to modify their apps for this format and, in time, it will improve, but this disconnect extends to the operating system