Riyadh must be equally realistic about the serious threat it now faces and respond far more effectively -- with better security, tighter monitoring of terrorist finances and an accelerated program of reforms.
This will necessitate closer monitoring of terrorist-linked social media and websites that may inspire such attacks.
We should not hamstring our intelligence agencies in monitoring communications of terrorists abroad.
The intelligence reports related to the Fourth of July have been assembled from multiple sources, among them foreign security services, the electronic monitoring of suspected terrorists and interviews with Al Qaeda operatives arrested overseas in recent days and those in detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Responding to a request by law enforcement officials, the Federal Communications Commission tentatively concluded Wednesday that new Internet-based telephone services should be subject to some of the same laws that enable the government to monitor conversations of terrorists and criminal suspects with relative ease.
Clerics said they would form an umbrella body to monitor institutions involved in radicalisation, and urged the government to recruit more ethnic Somalis to monitor the activities of terrorists.
"Of course there is a dilemma here because the general public and politicians and the technology companies … they want us to be able to monitor the activities of terrorists and other evildoers but they do not want their own activities to be open to any such monitoring.
But the fact that data is leaving the jurisdiction of national courts has worried some governments who fear they may not be able to monitor the communications of terrorists and other criminals, even for reasons of national security.
He said that the agency needed access to the global telecommunications system to monitor the activities of terrorists, traffickers and enemy states.
