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Anchor Katy Clark speaks with Rick Nelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies about the patchwork of international rules for keeping tabs on.

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KATY CLARK: President Obama said today that federal agencies failed to do all they could in the weeks before the attempted bombing of the Detroit bound plane.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been so that this extremist boards a plane with dangerous explosives that could have cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred.  And I consider that totally unacceptable.

CLARK:  It seems that the alleged would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, appeared on some watch lists but not others.  In some countries but not all countries. What’s more, he was denied visas in some places, but granted them in others.  It’s confusing, to say the least.  Rick Nelson specializes in terrorism and security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I asked him what kind of international system is at work here.

RICK NELSON: There’s not a global system or universal system. Certainly, there’s a U.S. system, you know, with a tied database, which is held by the National Counter-Terrorism Center and our law enforcement and our intelligence communities share information as appropriate from different bilateral relationships.  But no there is no universal database.

CLARK: Should there be one?

NELSON: Well, it’s an interesting question. It certainly has a lot of legal and civil liberties considerations that we would have to take into account before we actually did that, that would require sharing not only sensitive law enforcement information, but sharing sensitive intelligence information as well. And the United States is going to have to determine how best to move forward on a case-by-case basis with each of its individual nations.

CLARK: Where do you think the balance should be struck between security and intelligence shared across borders and passenger privacy?

NELSON: Well, this is the crux of the issue that we really need to tackle as a nation, our civil liberties versus the amount of risk we’re going to take vis-à-vis terrorist attacks. Clearly, in a case such as the recent one, you know, full body screening or scanning would have improved the U.S. government’s chance of finding the explosive devices on this individual. However, you know, as we’ve read about and heard, the civil liberties groups are very much against this and see these full body scans as an invasion of privacy. And the United States is going to have to wrestle with this. We’re going to have to determine as a people how much risk we want to assume compared to preserving our civil liberties.  And that’s the question we haven’t come to grips yet that we need to do.

CLARK: Aren’t these, though, just many of the issues that we already have debated as a country right after the events of September 11th?

NELSON: Well, Katy, you’re exactly right. There are still, you know, a number of issues from this 9/11 Commission that are unaddressed.  And the further we get away from 9/11 on some level, there’s a little bit of America carrying on, which his a good thing in that we’re very resilient, and we’ve been able to have moved past these 9/11 attacks. But at the same time, it’s very negative in that there is a lot that still needs to be done, and this threat is still very, very real.  I mean, we as a government and we the people cannot put our guard down because again as we see that there are individuals who still seek to travel to the United States to do our country harm, and to do the citizens of the United States harm.

CLARK: Knowing what you know, Rick, about how the security system works, are you surprised at all that this individual managed to slip through the security net or are you surprised that these things don’t happen more often given the holes in the security?

NELSON: Well, I think the reason why this doesn’t happen is because we have made some significant changes to our security apparatus in September 11th, and I think that’s why we don’t see this more frequently. On the other hand though, I’m a little disappointed that this individual guy was able to access an airplane using some of the techniques and using the same weapon that previous perpetrators have used. For example, his smuggling in of the PETN explosive, the chemical was the same thing that you read the Shoe Bomber used a couple of years ago.

Again, this individual paid cash for an airline ticket. These are all clues that the previous terrorists have left behind.  And again, to have those get through the cracks again is a little disconcerting. If this was a new attack with a new technique that exploited and no previously known vulnerability, then I would be a little bit more surprised and a little bit less concerned about it because it’s something the U.S. would have to evolve. But since this is something that we should have known about and should have been aware of, that makes it a little bit more unsettling for me.

CLARK: Rick Nelson is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks for speaking with us.

NELSON: Thank you, Katy.

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