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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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Earlier this morning the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market attack that killed 12 and wounded dozens more was shot to death by Italian police in Milan. An international manhunt ended successfully with the killing of Anis Amri, a Tunisian refugee who had spent time in Italy before moving on to Germany. He was known to […]
I have just finished watching a very interesting film, the 2012 drama The Company You Keep. Starring Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBoeuf and Julie Christie and based on a novel by Lem Dobbs, it tells the story of the Weather Underground (WU), a violent left wing group that came out the Students for a […]
What should we do with returning “foreign fighters”? A number of recent terrorist attacks were committed by young men and women who had radicalized, went to train with IS in the Middle East, then returned to their home country to commit acts of violence. In this text, Phil Gurski examines why some people decide to […]
In the wake of news out of Quebec that police in that province were given court warrants to intercept the communications of journalists, it turns out that CSIS cannot rule out the possibility that sometime over its 30+ year history that it too listened in on some members of the fifth estate. In a session […]
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 […]
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 […]