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 […]
Category: Perspectives
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 […]
Categories
Data, people and terrorism
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 […]
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 […]