Program Offers Few Concrete Steps

The 25-point program unveiled at the end of the Paris conference contained few items concrete enough to implement immediately.

The program includes general agreement on stricter border controls, a search for legal ways to track terrorists via the Internet and on investigations of charitable, humanitarian and other organizations that might be used as fronts for terrorism. The ministers did not specify which groups these might be.

Other elements include tighter international standards for bomb detection at airports and standardization of investigative tools that police can use to hunt down bombers.

The eight participating nations also agreed in principle to share research on explosive-detection methods - tracers that can give explosives a unique chemical “signature” - and to step up domestic controls on the manufacture and sale of explosives.

With Britain, the United States leads the world in the development of chemical tracers. But a recent attempt to force U.S. manufacturers to use the technology failed in Congress.