Borealis Threat & Risk Consulting

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.  Almost a year ago I wrote that the Canadian government would be placed in a difficult position should one of our citizens who chose to travel to Iraq to fight the terrorist group Islamic State alongside Kurdish forces was caught by the […]

Whenever a new year kicks in we always cast a Janus-like glance back to the previous one to get an idea of what we just went through and, hopefully, gain some insight into what we are in for in the coming 12 months.  By all accounts 2016 was not a great year on several fronts, […]

I am a glass half full kind of guy, someone who seeks to find the positive in life.  I am an optimist tinged with realism.  Three decades in intelligence and 15 years in counter terrorism do tend to give one a good look at the less savoury aspects of life on this planet and as […]

Years ago when I first joined CSIS there was a veteran CT (counter terrorism) guy whom I’ll call Mike.  He had been around a fair bit and I had a great deal of respect both for his experience and his insight into Islamist extremism.  In all his time in the trenches he had seen a […]

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 […]