TORONTO -- The G7 security ministers' meeting in Toronto was overshadowed by Monday's deadly van attack, but they stuck to their discussion on fighting the threats lurking in the internet's dark spaces, says Germany's representative.
Gunter Krings, the parliamentary state secretary for Germany's interior ministry, said the attack was similar to one in the German city of Munster three weeks ago that killed two people and wounded dozens more.
"The discussions yesterday afternoon and this morning were overshadowed, of course by the terrible tragic incident here in Toronto," Krings told The Canadian Press Tuesday.
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale was peppered with questions and offers of assistance from his G7 counterparts after Monday's tragedy, in which a rental van barrelled through a crowd of people on a north Toronto sidewalk, killing 10 pedestrians and injuring 15.
Goodale reiterated that no motive for the attack has been found to link it to a national security threat. A man was charged Tuesday with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder, but no terrorism charges were laid.
"We had a similar incident you might say -- at least so far from what we know -- in the city of Munster," said Krings.
"The fear was that it's a terror attack, but it also turned out to be a mentally ill person." Krings stressed he didn't want to leap to any conclusions about the Toronto attack.
The ministers discussed how to guard against ongoing domestic threats. Though nothing has emerged so far to link Monday's events in Toronto to extremism, the use of a vehicle as a weapon against pedestrians is something that Goodale's British, French, American and German counterparts are all too familiar with.
Krings said the incidents show that countries face serious security threats and not just from terrorism. He and several other ministers around the table never lost sight of a key point:
"We might be, on a professional level, relieved that there's no nexus, connection to (a) national security terrorist question. For the people that die, for their family, for the injured people, it really doesn't matter."
Goodale had to delay some events on Monday but Tuesday's final day of talks unfolded largely as planned. A major focus was addressing violent extremism and preventing the internet from being as a tool for training, propaganda and financing.
"It's the insidiousness of the messaging on the web," Goodale said in an interview prior to the talks.
"That's something that all ministers worry about."
Goodale and his fellow G7 leaders called on major internet service providers that are also at this meeting -- Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft -- to do more to prevent their platforms from being exploited.
Goodale said the service providers realize the need to co-operate, and were to discuss options with the G7 ministers. He said they will be urging service providers "to be quick and proficient and quick and persistent in making sure their various services are not any kind of platform for terrorist material or terrorist activity."
"You do not want your platform to be known as a safe harbour for terror or sexual exploitation or human trafficking or political interference."
The internet giants addressed the G7 ministers last fall in Italy, when it held the presidency, and Krings said it was necessary to hear from them again.
In Germany, the government has taken a hard line against internet providers and what they can disseminate and has a network enforcement law that it not popular in some quarters, he said.
"Certainly, the companies didn't like it so much. But it's also clear that the standards of what can be communicated on the internet can't be set by the terms and conditions of private contracts," he said.
"These standards have to be set by democratically elected lawmakers, who decide on what is libel, what is defamation and how far can you go in even an open society."
In Tuesday's opening remarks, Goodale said cybertechnology has become "a disruptive force" with the potential to harm critical infrastructure "and the power to more easily conceal identities."
In the interview, Goodale offered some insight into the closed-door discussion he planned to lead with his counterparts.
"You're looking for the holes. When you're dealing with this technology and you get into the deep, dark web, how much of it is encrypted, how much of it is inaccessible, how much of it is beyond technical capacity to crack into?"
