That, he said, means reformulating the concepts that limit the action of the SIS and other security agencies, while stepping up international cooperation.


Passos Coelho was speaking at the inaugural ceremony of Adélio Neiva da Cruz, the new director of the Security Information Service (SIS), Portugal's intelligence agency, at its headquarters in the Ameixoeira fort, near Lisbon.


Given the recent events in France and Belgium, the prime minister said, it is "opportune to press ahead with concrete preventive measures, so avoiding reactive decisions in the view of terrorist threats". The need, he stressed, is to detect threats early so as to reduce risk.


"The capacity of the intelligence services will also depend on a change in mentalities, which brings it closer to civil society, which includes a culture of security, which demystifies habitual taboos around the operational capacity" of the agencies, he said.


Neiva da Cruz's appointment, the prime minister noted, marks the first time that an officer of the SIS is taking over as its director. In his inaugural speech, he stressed the need for a cross-border overview of the problem through cooperation with other national and international agencies.


"We're a country with a relatively low degree of terrorist threat, classed as moderate, but we're active in the detection of the threat and in the identification of its agents, above all in the international terrorist threat with its various stages and agents [that are] geographically close to us," he said.