Jacqui Smith, the UK Home Secretary recently stated that the terrorist threat is growing and threatens to overwhelm the ability to police.  These claims come as she is requesting that parliament approve a change to the period for which terrorist suspects can be held without charge from 28 to 42 days.  Currently, in the UK a terrorist subject can be held without bail or indeed acknowledgement that he is being held at all for 28 days. 
This need to hold an individual in custody without charge, highlights two issues.  Firstly, that today the detection of terrorists is a manpower intensive job and the assumption on the part of those policing is that it isn't going to change anytime soon.  Nowhere in the debate concerning the handling of suspects do we see mentioned the role of technology.  Secondly, there is the issue of civil rights.

The need for men on the ground in the detection and monitoring of terrorist suspects will never be eliminated, but technological advances can make the process less manpower intensive.    Today we don't require football fields of people listening for 'interesting' conversations on radio frequencies as they did during World War II.  Today, that and many aspects of similar jobs are automated and handled almost entirely by computers.  The submissions to the annual Global Security Challenge have us convinced that the possibility of reducing the manpower component of security monitoring is promising. 

The second issue is harder to address.   In modern democracies, the issue of taking an individual into custody without charge is fraught with controversy and opens the debate of individuals' rights versus the public safety.   We are all familiar with situations abroad where political opposition is dealt with by imprisonment or worse, and while this doesn't happen in the UK today, no one wants to enact laws that could facilitate this in the future.

So how does a modern democracy balance the threat of terrorism, recognizing that there are situations where arresting an individual can prevent a larger tragedy, even though there isn't a case that can be successfully prosecuted at the time of the arrest?