A very odd thing happened yesterday in Canada. A poll appeared to show that a majority of my fellow citizens support the screening of potential immigrants by giving them some sort of “values test“, in keeping with a suggestion by a wannabe Conservative leadership candidate, Kellie Leitch. Canada thus appears to be following in the […]
Category: Perspectives
Bill Murray is one of my favourite actors. And one of my favourite Bill Murray films is “The Man who Knew too Little”, a spoof on a Hitchcock film where mistaken identity and the world of spycraft head off in a dangerous direction, except of course that when Bill Murray is involved comedy replaces danger. […]
I like Tariq Ramadan, I really do. I have had the privilege of hearing him talk several times in Ottawa and I find him to be a very well spoken and intelligent man. And I don’t buy the accusation that as the grandson of Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he is […]
It is pretty obvious that for some people immigration is an issue. There are those who think countries like Canada are taking in too many new immigrants (i.e. Syrians) and we have even seen a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party put out a letter calling for prospective immigrants to be vetted for […]
I have been thinking a lot about peace bonds in the wake of the Aaron Driver case. For those who forget, or who reside in a parallel universe, Aaron Driver was the young man from Strathroy, Ontario who radicalised, praised Islamic State, posted a martyrdom video and was gunned down after getting into a cab […]
Categories
Fair stood the wind for jihad
Last week the Canadian Department of Public Safety issued its annual terrorist threat report. You can read the whole thing here but I would like to comment on some of it in the paragraphs to follow. The paper is unclassified and is intended to inform Canadians in a general way what the threat level is […]
Categories
Brothers in arms
The more we study those who have radicalised to violence and joined terrorist groups the more we realise that there are no patterns to those people. There are no commonalities to ethnicity, religious knowledge, education background, profession, family status or psychological profile (that we know of). We also know that radicalisation does not occur in […]
Categories
No fly? No problem!
Governments around the world have adopted a number of strategies to deal with their citizens who want to engage in terrorism. At the far end of the scale investigations are carried out, arrests are made, trials are held and guilty parties are put in prison. On the other end of the scale early intervention and […]
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 […]
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 […]