Shortly after I joined CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) in January 2001 I attended a presentation by a friend who was working at the Canadian embassy in Kenya in the late 1990s. He related that he was at home on August 7, 1998 when a massive blast took him and a colleague off their feet […]
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This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 4, 2018 Carrying out a terrorism investigation is not easy. The stakes are high since many (erroneously) see terrorism as an existential, pervasive threat and no one is willing to accept failure as an option: dead bodies in our streets are not something anyone wants to […]
Do you get emails offering you massive amounts of money in exchange for a little personal information – say your bank account number? I do, every day. My spam folder is full of messages from Nigerian princes who have chosen me to share their wealth with. I am flattered by their generosity but I politely […]
A common refrain to many issues is ‘follow the money’. Whether we are talking about organised crime or campaign irregularities or other social ills it is believed that if you can establish who is paying who you can devise ways to interdict that cash flow and hamper the activities that it is supporting. If successful, […]
This piece was published in The Hill Times on May 14, 2018. I must confess that I hesitated quite a bit before putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) on this topic. I was sitting in a Maple Leaf lounge at LaGuardia Airport in New York when CNN broadcast its ‘breaking news’ coverage of US […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on May 7, 2018 Pop quiz! What is Canada’s ‘national game’? Duh it’s hockey of course (or ‘ice hockey’ as the rest of the world knows it as if it needed to be distinguished from ‘field hockey’). What with the NHL playoffs on and one Canadian team still […]
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All in the family – terrorism style
We have just celebrated Mother’s Day in Canada, a chance for children to recognise and give thanks for their mothers. Mothers are, after all, often the bedrock of families. It is they who give birth to the next generation, nurture their sons and daughters through the early years of life and usually act as confidantes […]
The news is full, every single day, of reports of violence from a number of actors: murders, sexual assaults, shootings, etc. Occasionally we read of a terrorist attack somewhere in the world – depending on where you live the frequency of this particular form of violence will vary. Not surprisingly, if you live in Somalia […]
One of the most difficult challenges for governments around the world is what to do with their citizens who left to join Islamic State (IS) or other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq from 2013ish to 2017. As we all know, IS is a shadow of its former self. It has lost swaths of territory. […]
Look, I get it. I know why defence lawyers try to get their clients’ cases thrown out on technicalities or by feigning outrage that anyone could harbour any suspicion that the individual they represent could possibly in a million years be guilty of the offences alleged by the Crown. That is, after all, why we […]