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 […]
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Who should our spies spy on?
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]