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.
Last week the Canadian Department of Public Safety issued its annual terrorist threat report. You can read the whole thing here but I would like to comment on some of it in the paragraphs to follow. The paper is unclassified and is intended to inform Canadians in a general way what the threat level is […]
The more we study those who have radicalised to violence and joined terrorist groups the more we realise that there are no patterns to those people. There are no commonalities to ethnicity, religious knowledge, education background, profession, family status or psychological profile (that we know of). We also know that radicalisation does not occur in […]
Governments around the world have adopted a number of strategies to deal with their citizens who want to engage in terrorism. At the far end of the scale investigations are carried out, arrests are made, trials are held and guilty parties are put in prison. On the other end of the scale early intervention and […]
In all my time as an intelligence analyst I had some amazing opportunities and worked alongside some truly outstanding men and women. We collectively did our best to gather and analyse intelligence with the constant view to providing the best advice we could to Canadian decision makers. I may be biased but I think we […]
If there is one spy agency in Canada that is poorly understood and about which much of little veracity has been published it has to be CSE – Communications Security Establishment. CSE has a number of roles but the one that gets the most public attention is signals intelligence or SIGINT. This method of intelligence […]
As we continue to deal with the very real – albeit not existential – threat from Islamist extremism and terrorism we are inundated with analyses and reporting from a variety of institutes, scholars and journalists all extolling on some aspect of the problem. I have worked in this field for the past 15 years as […]
I have decided to reread the Sherlock Holmes collection of stories (you can randomly make those kinds of decisions once you have retired). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books and some of the series/movies based (sometimes loosely) on them have always appealed to me (NB I do prefer the Jeremy Brett interpretation over all others) and […]
Last week saw the emergence of a very interesting report by the Montreal-based Centre for the Prevention of Radicalisation Leading to Violence (known by its French acronym CPRMV) on the situation at the College de Maisonneuve, from where several young people had left to engage in jihad in Syria. The centre, which was stood up […]
The public has a complicated relationship with intelligence agencies. On the one hand we love to watch James Bond and Jason Bourne films, despite the fact that the ways these spies work has very little if anything to do with how things really happen. On the other we get frustrated because these agencies tell us […]
The renowned US journal Scientific American put out a fascinating article today in which leading scholars were asked what the top 20 “big questions” facing humanity in the future. The questions posed ranged from space exploration to medicine, but it was the following that caught my eye (reproduced in its entirety: for the complete list […]