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 […]
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One of the great Canadian novels of the 20th century was Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan. It is the story of the troubles between Canada’s two European founding nations – the French and the English (both had been preceded by the First Nations thousands of years earlier). The phrase “two solitudes” has entered Canadian English […]
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Who should do CVE?
The fight against terrorism is multi-faceted. As we are seeing in Mosul as I write, forces from a number of countries, including Canada, are heavily involved in an effort to take back Iraq’s second largest city from Islamic State. Security intelligence agencies such as my former employer, CSIS, play a vital role in carrying out […]
Big data is everything these days. There is absolutely no question that there is more information out there than ever before and more ways to collect it. Everyone from companies to police forces are getting into the game with a view to earning more money or making their jobs easier and more efficient. Nor is […]
OK, I admit I am a little sensitive when it comes to the term “intelligence failure”. You would be too if the profession you devoted three decades to was constantly criticised in the media for screwing up. The failure to predict 9/11. The failure to predict India’s acquisition of a nuclear weapons capacity. The classic […]
Another set of terrorist attacks in the West, another desperate search for answers or explanations or rationale. A man now in custody, Ahmad Khan Rahami, a naturalised US citizen of Afghan origin, is charged with planting a variety of bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey. The targets selected and venues chosen to hide the explosives […]
If there is one cardinal rule about the study of terrorism that everyone should commit to memory it is this: do not extrapolate unnecessarily and unadvisedly from one region to the other. While there are certainly some fundamental commonalities to violent extremism and to particular groups or brands of terrorism, it is usually a bad […]
If there is one thing I have noticed in my post-intelligence life it is the quality of reporting on terrorism and violent radicalisation. When I worked for CSIS I had access to far more information, not available to the public of course, on these two issues and was thus very well schooled in the who, […]
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National security and Joe Canadian
The new Trudeau government is clearly in a consulting mood. It seems that they want to get Canadians’ views on a whole bunch of things, ranging from climate change to pipelines to refugee policy. And now they are asking what Canadians think on national security. Last week Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale made […]
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 […]