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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
As we continue to deal with the very real – albeit not existential – threat from Islamist extremism and terrorism we are inundated with analyses and reporting from a variety of institutes, scholars and journalists all extolling on some aspect of the problem. I have worked in this field for the past 15 years as […]
Last week saw the emergence of a very interesting report by the Montreal-based Centre for the Prevention of Radicalisation Leading to Violence (known by its French acronym CPRMV) on the situation at the College de Maisonneuve, from where several young people had left to engage in jihad in Syria. The centre, which was stood up […]
One thing I find fascinating is the science of lie detection. There is a lot of research out there about which tools can pick up on an attempt to avoid the truth, ranging from eye movement (saccades) to vocabulary use. As a former intelligence analyst I had to undergo periodic lie detector tests. They were […]
As we still reel from the foiled terrorist attack last week in Strathroy, Ontario, we can still rest assured that attacks, successful or not, remain a rarity in Canada. In the period since 9/11 we have had no more than 8 such incidents: on average one every two years. When we compare our experiences […]