FBI and MI5 say stopping attacks is harder because of lone actors

The head of the FBI has told a meeting in London that getting intelligence to stop terrorism is becoming harder as attackers are increasingly lone actors.

According to Christopher Wray, the US security services and MI5 are increasingly seeing attacks with crude weapons and little planning or training.

He said it was vital for security services to share intelligence quickly and it was essential to work with MI5 in some cases.

He said there are "very few dots out there" and less time to connect these dots.

"If we're not super lashed-up, we're going to miss the only picture that's out there - and it's got to happen really fast," he said.

Mr Wray said the line between foreign and domestic threats was blurred due to travel and technology and that encryption provided by technology companies was providing "an entirely unfettered space" for criminals and terrorists to operate.

Head of MI5, Ken McCallum said they faced a "very difficult cocktail of risks".

He explained that around one fifth of terror investigations in the UK have links to neo-Nazi, racist ideology or other related extremism and that this rate has remained steady. There is also a growing role for juveniles and an obsessive interest in weaponry.

The two agencies were celebrating 80 years of formal cooperation between the FBI and the UK, during which the FBI director met British intelligence and security officials. The two leaders said that cooperation allowed their agencies to cover a broader range of threats. The two leaders met with business and academic leaders at MI5 headquarters in central London. They had previously made a public appearance to warn of the threat from China. They also discussed Cyber attacks.