New range of threats and countermeasures

ONCE the shock that a terrorist outrage generates begins to fade, questions start to be asked about whether the security services could have done better in preventing it. Nearly all the perpetrators of recent attacks in the West were people the security services of their various countries already knew about. The Kouachi brothers and Amédy Coulibaly were no exception; the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI), France’s internal security agency, and the police knew them to be radicalised and potentially dangerous. Yet their plot or plots, which probably involved more people and may have been triggered either by al-Qaeda in Yemen or the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria, went undiscovered.

Getting harder

Western security agencies are losing capabilities they used to count on