Al Jazeera speaks to Spencer Ackerman, the national security correspondent for the Washington Independent political news site, on Barack Obama's criticism of the US intelligence agencies for failing to disrupt an attempt to blow up a US-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day.
The US president said agents had sufficient information to stop the attempted attack but "failed to connect the dots", but Ackerman tells Al Jazeera that under current rules, there just was not enough specific information to put the suspect on a "no-fly" list.
He adds that sharing more unspecific information among intelligence agencies and making it easier to put people on the "no-fly" list, may backfire.
