US/GERMANY: Berlin's anti-terror fight offers lessons

US/GERMANY: The US-EU summit today in Vienna will seek to establish a more coordinated approach to counter-terrorism. Some US allies, such as Germany, have a longer history of dealing with domestic terrorism than the United States and much more pervasive electronic surveillance networks. However, German officials have had more success arresting terrorists with information gleaned from informants than through intelligence gleaned from eavesdropping systems. Germany's experience suggests that large-scale data mining is much less useful than carefully targeted eavesdropping. Electronic spying can be a powerful weapon in the fight against terrorism, but it appears to be most effective at gathering evidence and ferreting out group members, once informants have identified a terror cell.