Episode 213 – What happens if the bad guys’ communications get too sophisticated to read?
Hollywood loves stories about spies and spycraft, especially when it comes to code-breaking. Think The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch and the incredible successes at the UK’s Bletchley Park in breaking German Enigma codes. But technology has evolved over time and it is getting hard to decrypt messages. Are we reaching a point of no return? A conversation with a former Canadian cryptomathematician.
Ottawa police will return phones to suspect after 175M passcode guesses | Cybernews
The Imitation Game (2014) – IMDb
About my guest
Richard Brisson is a graduate from the University of Ottawa (B.Sc. Math-Physics in 1978 and M.Sc. Systems Science in 1980). Upon graduation, he was hired by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) from which he retired in 2011. His career at CSEC largely involved duties that encompassed various fields of Mathematics and Computer Science – he is also a graduate of NSA’s 3-year Cryptologic Mathematics Program. Over the last 25 years, he has been collecting vintage cryptographic and clandestine artifacts dating up to and including the Cold War.
CANADIAN INTELLIGENCE EH!
In a world of multiple voices and opinions it can be very hard to know where to turn. One choice is to look to those who actually worked in counter-terrorism in the national security world. In these half-hour podcasts, 30-year Canadian intelligence veteran Phil Gurski is joined by a fascinating array of individuals with something meaningful to say about these issues as they provide insight into what they mean and what we need to do about them.
About Phil Gurski
Phil worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) from 2001-2015, specializing in violent Islamist-inspired homegrown terrorism and radicalisation. From 1983 to 2001 he was employed as a senior multilingual analyst at Communications Security Establishment (CSE – Canada’s signals intelligence agency), specialising in the Middle East. He also served as senior special advisor in the National Security Directorate at Public Safety Canada from 2013, focusing on community outreach and training on radicalisation to violence, until his retirement from the civil service in May 2015, and as consultant for the Ontario Provincial Police’s Anti-Terrorism Section (PATS) from May to October 2015.
He was the Director of Security and Intelligence at the SecDev Group from June 2018 to July 2019 and the Director of the National Security Programme at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute from 2020-2022. Mr. Gurski has presented on violent Islamist-inspired and other forms of terrorism and radicalisation across Canada and around the world.
He writes at www.borealisthreatandrisk.com.
He is the author of The Threat from Within: Recognizing Al Qaeda-inspired Radicalization and Terrorism in the West (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), The Lesser Jihads: Taking the Islamist fight to the world (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), An end to the ‘War on Terrorism , When Religion Kills: How Extremist Justify Violence Through Faith (Lynne Rienner 2019) and The Peaceable Kingdom? A history of terrorism in Canada from Confederation to the present (self-published: 2021, republished by Double Dagger in 2022). He regularly blogs and podcasts (Canadian Intelligence Eh!), and tweets (@borealissaves) on terrorism and intelligence matters.
He was an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter Terrorism (ICCT) in the Netherlands and is currently a digital fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies at Concordia University. He is also a visiting fellow at the International Security and Risk Management programme at the University of South Wales
Mr. Gurski is a regular commentator on terrorism and intelligence for a wide variety of Canadian and international media.
