Apple, Google urged to do more on terrorism

Google Inc., Apple Inc. and other U.S. technology companies were urged to do more to root out terrorists after a report into the 2013 murder of a U.K. soldier uncovered an online message where an Islamist extremist contemplated the attack.

A U.K. parliamentary committee said that Michael Adebowale, one of two men convicted of killing Fusilier Lee Rigby in a grisly daylight attack, sent a message saying he wanted to “murder a soldier in the most graphic and emotive manner.” An unidentified Internet company never turned the communication over to police, the committee said.

“It is quite clear that the one party that could have made a difference was the overseas-based Internet company on whose system this exchange took place,” Malcolm Rifkind, the chairman of the Parliament's cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee, said at a press conference following the release of the report. “Internet companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo need to play their part in alerting authorities to people who may be terrorists.”

The report today largely cleared U.K. intelligence agencies of failing to stop the attack on the 25-year-old soldier, even though Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo were the subject of multiple surveillance operations.

Adebolajo was imprisoned for life and Adebowale for 45 years for the assault that transfixed the country. Rigby was attacked just after 2 p.m. on May 22, 2013, outside a military barracks in the Woolwich neighborhood of southeast London. Televised images of the bloodshed were transmitted around the world. Adebolajo and Adebowale ran over Rigby, then got out of their car and almost decapitated the unconscious soldier with knives and cleavers, prosecutors said during the trial.

The U.K. government plans to introduce anti-terrorism legislation this week requiring Internet companies to provide user data to authorities. Under the proposed law, Internet- service providers will have to retain information on Internet protocol addresses -- a number that identifies individual computer devices -- and supply it to security services on request to help them track users' activities.