Author: Phil Gurski

Living in a liberal democracy is generally a good thing.  Not that there are no problems that arise from time to time, but those who abide by liberal (in the classic sense of the word) values tend to be open to a lot of diversity.  They generally are okay with most things as long as […]

Luc Opdebeeck is a man with boundless energy.  He is the leader and artistic director of Formaat, a participatory theatre group in Rotterdam, an initiative I have had the honour of working alongside a bit over the past few months.  I attended a typical ‘evening’ last night and witnessed the important and groundbreaking work Formaat […]

I have written on many, many occasions that bad data and/or bad analysis usually leads to bad decision making.  Think about it.  If the basic facts are wrong or are misconstrued how can any policy based on those facts be of any value?  Garbage in, garbage out as they say. This axiom was shown to […]

Soon to be former US President Barack Obama once famously said with respect to foreign policy “don’t do stupid shit (or” stuff” depending on your sensitivity to salty language)”.  That maxim could just have easily been applied to domestic policy.  And it is something that incoming president Donald Trump might want to pay attention to. […]

There appears to be a segment of the population that is convinced that counter terrorism is a science.  All our spies and cops have to do is gather oodles of information from multiple sources, apply some algorithm made up by smart guy (or run the data through a “threat assessment model”) and voila!  threat identified […]

There is an ongoing debate in many societies on how much power security intelligence and law enforcement agencies should be allowed to have and how technology is making catching the bad guys really difficult.  I commented on this during the Apple-FBI tussle some months ago when the law enforcement agency wanted to get the contents […]

OK, it’s done.  Donald Trump has become the US’ 45th President, markets have swung wildly, people are panicking, some fear the Apocalypse.  Take a deep breath and calm down.  As the 44th President, Barack Obama, predicted last night, the sun did indeed rise this morning (even if I cannot see it in cloudy Ottawa). A […]

A lot of people are fascinated with technology. Maybe a little too fascinated.  I am not suggesting that the use of technology is bad: after all, I am writing this blog on my Dell laptop and not the manual Smith-Corona typewriter (if you are under 30 look up the word “typewriter” in a dictionary) that […]

As if the recently terminated (and interminable) US Presidential election campaign wasn’t bad enough, right on cue at least two terrorist groups have threatened to carry out attacks to disrupt it.  The first out of the box was apparently Al Qaeda, at least according to US officials, who warned about non-specific plots in New York […]

In the wake of a Canadian Federal Court decision that my former employer – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – illegally retained data that it had collected legally under a court warrant, the fur is really flying.  Every major Canadian media outlet has been all over this story and the reporting has been uniformly […]