Borealis Threat & Risk ConsultingPhil Gurski is the President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting Ltd. Phil is a 32-year veteran of CSE and CSIS and the author of six books on terrorism.
It is hard to know what the average person thinks about how intelligence services operate. I suppose it may be a mixture of what people see on TV or in the theatres and the largely negative stories in the press about overreach and shady activities (in all fairness it is not the media’s fault since […]
Years ago when I taught an introductory course in linguistics I included a small section on the brain and how scientists have determined – to an extent – how language is both processed and produced in all that grey matter. Beginning in the 19th century really smart researchers learned that specific parts of our cortex […]
The list of “causes” of violent radicalisation and terrorism never seems to end. First it was “they spring from poverty”, then “they are all mentally ill”, then “they feel alienated and marginalised from society”, then… As if any one driver explained every case of an individual taking up a terrorist banner. You would have thought […]
It makes sense to adapt existing models to handle new phenomena where there are enough commonalities between the existing and emerging issues. I am not so sure it is easy to make that determination but if the costs and downsides of modifying approaches we already know well are low then I suppose no harm is […]
As scarcely a day goes by that we are not accosted with yet another story on a terrorist attack somewhere it is of little surprise that this form of violence has become a topic of conversation everywhere. What was once of interest to a niche market of specialists and confined to articles in little read […]
Thank God for reporters like Stewart Bell of the National Post. Now that I am outside the realm of state secrets I have come to rely on people like him to do the investigative legwork that keeps me informed on what is going on in the world of terrorism, both in Canada and abroad. Just […]
Religion is getting a bad rap these days and it is not that hard to see why. Self-styled protectors or controllers of the faith – i.e. religious extremists – continue to push their narrow views on truth and praxis on everyone else, whether they are co-religionists or not. These arbiters of religion cannot see […]
Earlier this morning the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market attack that killed 12 and wounded dozens more was shot to death by Italian police in Milan. An international manhunt ended successfully with the killing of Anis Amri, a Tunisian refugee who had spent time in Italy before moving on to Germany. He was known to […]
When my kids were young they liked to engage in an activity called “Mad-Lib”. What is a “mad-lib”? Thanks to the ever useful Wikipedia I learned that this “phrasal template word game” (!) was invented in 1953. It is nothing more than a story or narrative in which several key words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) […]
It has been yet another difficult day on the terrorism front. A truck plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Berlin, killing at least nine. The Russian Ambassador to Turkey was killed by an off-duty police officer at an art gallery in Ankara. And three people were shot outside an Islamic Centre in the Swiss […]