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 […]
Category: Perspectives
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 […]
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Terrorism by the numbers
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 […]
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Neutralising the radicalisers
If there is one thing that any serious researcher or professional who has studied radicalisation to violence knows all too well is that the process or path from normalcy to extremism does not happen in a vacuum. And it certainly does not take place on one’s own. The term “self-radicalisation”, all too frequently uttered by […]
One thing I find fascinating is the science of lie detection. There is a lot of research out there about which tools can pick up on an attempt to avoid the truth, ranging from eye movement (saccades) to vocabulary use. As a former intelligence analyst I had to undergo periodic lie detector tests. They were […]
As we still reel from the foiled terrorist attack last week in Strathroy, Ontario, we can still rest assured that attacks, successful or not, remain a rarity in Canada. In the period since 9/11 we have had no more than 8 such incidents: on average one every two years. When we compare our experiences […]