Intell Officials Face Challenges to Prevent Likely Attacks — CIA’s John Brennan

In remarks Monday to the Center for Strategic and worldwide Studies, Brennan said these “reforms” have made it much harder to identify terrorists.

John Brennan also said while it was “inevitable” that the Islamic State will try to carry out similar attacks, “to me it is not inevitable that they are going to succeed”.

USA intelligence agencies have said online surveillance must be complemented with traditional human intelligence, so FitzGerald says the best way to predict and prevent attacks is to develop more sources in the Muslim community that can warn authorities about potential terrorism.

Asked whether the USA had underestimated the threat, Brennan said, “I don’t think we are underestimating the capability of ISIL”. “We knew that these plans or plotting by ISIL was underway looking at Europe in particular as a venue for carrying out these attacks”.

US and European officials are calling for expanded government surveillance powers in the wake of Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, which have killed at least 129 people.

He also said that the Paris attacks probably did not represent a “one-off event” and that the terrorist group likely has more operations “in the pipeline”.

While most counterterrorism experts believe the United States is safer from jihadi attacks than Europe, Brennan was one of a number of officials and commentators who have cited the Paris attacks as a reason to step up surveillance and other security measures in the United States and Europe. But the documents the former NSA contractor leaked to journalists in 2013 revealed just how much data the US collects on foreigners and Americans alike.

Moreover, he said, European security agencies have been overwhelmed trying to keep track of the thousands of European militants who have traveled to fight in Syria and Iraq and then returned home more radicalized and with combat skills. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility, but it’s still not yet known how the attacks were planned and how they might have been disrupted.

“Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS and al Shabaab are recruiting and radicalizing foreign fighters at an alarming rate”, Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said.

Brennan pointed to “a number of unauthorized disclosures” over the past several years that have made tracking suspected terrorists even more hard. It also revives a major debate over the effectiveness of surveillance laws, months after France approved a controversial expansion of police authority in the wake of attacks against satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

“When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused”. The movement swelled Sunday and Monday, prompting President Barack Obama to push back by urging the United States to “step up and do its part” to help those fleeing war-torn Syria. He attributed the failure to new terrorist tactics, new technology that enables secret communications and several leaks of classified information that he said have hampered governments.