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.
I was listening to CBC’s Writers and Company earlier today while driving down the QEW towards Niagara. This particular programme dealt with Shakespeare’s works and the differences in the plays he wrote during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. The interviewee, James Shapiro, did an amazing job of situating some of his plays in contemporary […]
Two recent attacks in the West have gotten a lot of press attention. A man in Philadelphia shot a police officer in his vehicle before being shot himself and arrested. He claims to have acted on behalf of Islamic state (see story here). Across the “pond”, police in Paris were able to neutralise a man […]
Despite all the legal opinions, academic papers and government policies, we still have a hard time deciding what is terrorism and what isn’t. Was the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks a terrorist act? Was the 2015 attack on an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina? Justin Bourque’s armed rampage in Moncton in […]
I bet some of you are wondering why this blog post is being written, in light of the title. Surely, you are probably saying, there is no contest. Iran meddles in the affairs of other countries, supports terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizballah and is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And then there is that […]
One of the West’s key allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, is in a way an odd choice for a friend. On the plus side, the Al Sauds have provided a modicum of stability to the Arabian Peninsula for decades, served as swing producer of oil (is that a good thing?) and bought enough […]
The better we in Canada get at counter terrorism – and we’re pretty good to start – the more we will have to deal with people that get caught, sentenced to prison and possibly released. I have already blogged on how well we do in general in this country with preventing terrorist inmates from spreading […]
Those who have followed my blog in 2015 or have heard me speak at conferences know that I am not a fan of predictive modeling. I do not own a crystal ball and I don’t know anyone else who does – besides, those that do exist do so as ornaments, not windows on the future. […]
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” According to Google, this famous phrase was uttered either by Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke or former Minnesota governor and ex-WWF wrestler Jesse Ventura. I’ll go with Burke. What is more disconcerting is when we forget our history that happened, say, 4 years ago. Remember the […]
I must admit I am getting tired of seeing nation states repeat the same mistakes they made previously in counter terrorism policy. I suppose the only saving grace is that the officials making these errors are sometimes not the same ones who made the errors initially, but can’t they learn from previous ill-considered policies? […]
As the numbers of those with an interest in terrorism increase – could we say there is a boom in the field? – the number of novel approaches also increases. We have seen studies done on social media postings, attempts at understanding the psychology of extremism and myriad tries at detecting inputs (i.e. aspects of […]