The Counter-Terror Marketplace: A Necessity For Lack Of Choice

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The Counter-Terror industry is no small fish nowadays. At $300bn, the industry is now a mammoth with a lot of wares to sell. The latest Security and Counter Terror Expo (SCTX) in London provided the stage for many manufacturers to show off what they’ve been working on.

One of the more exciting pieces of hardware on show was Mobilewatch from England-based Whiterock. Mobilewatch is a nifty phone surveillance tool that detect, locate, and monitor mobile devices in a given area. Whiterock CEO Raili Maripuu says interest in the product is large, partly as a response to the Paris attacks. “With mobile detection systems, you would know where [the terrorists] are.”

The market for counter-terror products, in general, is large and only growing. The growing threat of terror is keeping many up at night, and for good reason. Chris Phillips, former head of Britain’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office, has said the danger is far more menacing than it ever was. “We have a slightly different threat today,” he says. “The IRA [Irish Republican Army] did not want to kill a lot of people but unfortunately Islamist terrorists do.”

Terrorists are not only more willing to kill now, they are more sophisticated, too. They use advanced, readily-available technology, even attacking technological backbones themselves. It is vital to be prepared to ward off this threat. David Thomson, event manager of SCTX, told TIME magazine that a single attack against a passenger plane of a piece of “critical national infrastructure” could be devastating. “Terrorism has a low likelihood but its impact is massive,” he says. “All that money put in helps prevent bigger things from happening.”