Five years after the attacks of November 13, the fight against terrorism in the digital challenge

Only specialists know it, but it is to a simple cell phone found in a trash can in front of the Bataclan theater in Paris, that we owe the real start of the judicial investigation into the attacks of November 13. , in 2015, which left 130 dead and more than 400 injured. A fluke that turned out to be decisive, when this piece of evidence was crossed with a CCTV image extracted from a camera near the Stade de France (Seine-Saint-Denis), where we could distinguish, in the twilight, one of the suicide bombers making a call just before blowing himself up, around 9 p.m.

While a real race against time is launched in the face of what fiercely resembles a scenario of multiple attacks – of which November 13th would only be a foretaste -, all of the 15,000 calls having been limited to near the stadium that day, between 9:01 p.m. and 9:04 p.m., will thus be passed through the mill. Being crossed with the contents of the Bataclan telephone, they will then validate the most feared hypothesis: from their cell phone, the jihadists activated the same Belgian chip, they were therefore coordinated, and it is undoubtedly across Quiévrain that their chainstay …

Until recently, this investigative secrecy was a textbook case. The example of methods of investigation that the actors of the fight against terrorism could boast of. But, five years later, these are in the process of taking a serious turn of age, to see becoming obsolete. And this, under the accumulation of factors as human as technical: from the evolution of the profiles of the candidates for jihad to the diversification of their communication tools, from the multiplication of the sources of radicalization until the recent reversal of the European law on the storage of telephone and connection data. Explanations.

• Information exchange between services improved but …

Everyone forgot about it, but in November 2015 the main failure of the intelligence services was linked to their lack of “coordination”. It is because there were not sufficiently fluid and good-level exchanges, in particular with the Belgian services, that the French did not see this commando of French-speaking jihadists return from the Iraqi-Syrian zone. which were almost all on file.

Since 2015, successive governments have therefore set about improving these exchanges, in particular with foreign partners. “They have become much faster, more precise and larger in volume”, confirms Laurent Nuñez, new head of the National Coordination of Intelligence and the Fight against Terrorism (CNRLT). To the point of being today in the viewfinder of certain parliamentarians and the National Commission for the Control of Intelligence Techniques (CNCTR) who would like to better control these data.

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