The CITCO of the Ministry of the Interior manages to remove from the Internet two contents that encouraged terrorist violence

MADRID, 6 May. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO) of the Ministry of the Interior has succeeded in removing two digital files located on the Internet that incited terrorist violence, one of them related to jihadism and the other referring to extreme terrorism right, as reported this Saturday in a press release by the Ministry of the Interior.

To finalize this procedure, CITCO issued the removal orders on April 24, specifically, the first of them was addressed to a service provider located in the United States, which was urged to remove a video edited by a audiovisual media producer linked to the Islamic State.

Specifically, the recording included images of various members of this terrorist organization in combat situations, and its dissemination was intended to incite violence, praise the attacks perpetrated by the Islamic State and pay homage to their perpetrators.

The second order was sent to another service provider based in the British Virgin Islands, which was ordered to delete a file containing a manual in Spanish.

This second document included calls for violent action of a terrorist nature and the exaltation of attacks committed under the protection of violent extreme right-wing ideologies and their perpetrators, who in 'slang' are called "saints".

The withdrawal orders were issued in accordance with the provisions of Regulation (EU) 2021/784 on the fight against the dissemination of terrorist content, which since June 2022 allows national authorities to order the removal of terrorist content immediately and with effects throughout the European Union.

In this sense, both platforms complied with the CITCO requirements and withdrew the files within the maximum period of one hour established in the regulation.

It is the first time that a competent authority for the execution of this European regulation issues direct orders to remove terrorist content from the Internet, which reinforces Spain's position as a benchmark in the European Union in the fight against terrorist content.

Neither of the two required platforms is established in national territory, so it was necessary to resort to cross-border orders sent directly to the contact points designated by both providers.

To avoid duplication, improve coordination and avoid the risk of interference with the investigations of other European States, CITCO previously communicated its initiative to Europol's Online Terrorist Content Removal Unit (EU-IRU), created in 2015. to combat the proliferation of terrorist content on the Internet.

The withdrawal orders introduced last year "represent significant progress in the fight against terrorist content within the framework of the European Union."

However, since 2015 CITCO has been the national contact point for the removal of terrorist content from the Internet and carries out most of its activity with the voluntary collaboration of service providers.

These public-private collaboration exercises aim, in addition to removing illegal content from the Internet, to influence the strengthening of cooperation between Europol, the competent authorities of the Member States and service providers.

In total, in the last year CITCO has contributed to the identification and communication of around 700 URLs that pointed to terrorist content, which represents a significant percentage of all content identified at a European level.