Those who know me know I am not a fan of Tom Cruise for all kinds of reasons not relevant to this blog. But one movie he appeared in is directly germane to today’s topic. In Minority Report, a film based on a short story by US science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, a man […]
A new salvo has been fired in the continual contest that pits national security vs. privacy rights in Canada. A federal court judge has ruled that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) illegally held on to data that was not threat-related for an unnecessary period of time. The judicial decision was announced the same week […]
You have all heard of the butterfly effect, right? The idea that a very small event can have enormous implications well beyond its initial parametres. The official definition, courtesy of Wikipedia, is “the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large […]
In many instances historically amnesties were offered to former combatants in the interests of getting the violence to stop and giving a society a chance to rebuild itself. A really good example where amnesty seemed to work would be in South Africa where it was part of that nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after Apartheid […]
One of the great Canadian novels of the 20th century was Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan. It is the story of the troubles between Canada’s two European founding nations – the French and the English (both had been preceded by the First Nations thousands of years earlier). The phrase “two solitudes” has entered Canadian English […]
Surprisingly, if there is one issue many people differ on it is what constitutes terrorism. There are so many different definitions and in some places, like my country (Canada), it is not even spelled out in law (the Canadian Criminal Code outlines what a terrorist act is, not terrorism per se). You would think that […]
Woodstock, Ontario, a small city just up the road from where I grew up, is having a tough time of it. A nurse has just been accused of killing at least eight elderly patients over a seven-year span by giving them lethal drugs. She is already being called one of Canada’s worst serial killers even […]
In 1866 the Société Linguistique de Paris included in its constitution the notice that it would not entertain any more research on the tricky question of the origin of language. At that time there was a lot of speculation on this issue, much of it iffy at best, and it was decided that linguistic science […]
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Who should do CVE?
The fight against terrorism is multi-faceted. As we are seeing in Mosul as I write, forces from a number of countries, including Canada, are heavily involved in an effort to take back Iraq’s second largest city from Islamic State. Security intelligence agencies such as my former employer, CSIS, play a vital role in carrying out […]
One of the main reasons I like to lecture at universities is that I find young people a breath of fresh air. They are not as jaded as old farts like me and are not afraid to ask questions and challenge assumptions. They may not be that knowledgeable on any given topic but they are […]