Search: “CSIS”

The debate over the links, if any, between mental illness and terrorism never seems to get resolved.  Many people default to the position that anyone who dons a suicide vest or who can wantonly kill innocent men, women and children must suffer from some kind of psychological sickness.  These folks belong to the school that […]

We spend a lot of time worrying about terrorism in this country – disproportionately to the actual threat level in my honest opinion – and the flavour of terrorism that occupies most of our attention is Islamist extremism. This is of course for very good reasons since the vast, vast majority of plots, successful or […]

Hands up anyone who uses Google.  Or FaceBook.  Or Twitter.  Or LinkedIn. Or just about any other social media platform.  Now, hands up anyone who has to pay for the use of those sites.  Not too many I would imagine. Why do you think that these platforms give you access for free?  Is is because […]

There are a few things that hold a place of note in my memory whenever I think back to the start of my career in intelligence in 1983. As a wet-behind-the-ears multilingual analyst fresh out of university I had joined CSE – Canada’s SIGINT agency – with little to no clue as to what intelligence […]

I would like to announce the creation of a fund for Canadian pedophiles.  Not those in prison or getting treatment but those languishing in squalid jails pending trial in southeast Asia after they were caught abusing young children, having traveled intentionally to that part of the world with the sole intention of having sex with […]

Humans like to have neat, obvious lines drawn around everything.  We do not do well with uncertainty or fuzziness.  Something is either black or it’s white.  We don’t like grey.  Once we have made a decision based on this dichotomy we stick to it and it takes a lot to change our minds. We also […]

Finding fault with security intelligence and law enforcement agencies and personnel is a bit of a sport, I find.  Second guessing and armchair quarterbacking seem to appeal to many who latch on to any mistake, real or perceived, to case aspersion on the efforts of those who are supposedly there to keep us safe.  “What […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 22, 2018 If there is one thing we have learned about Joshua Boyle it is that he is an odd duck.  He apparently made over 62,000 edits and contributions to Wikipedia over a 13-year span (if my math is correct that makes 15  a day) on […]

If you want to know what CSIS does and why it does it, a good place to start is the CSIS Act which dates back to the creation of that organisation out of the former RCMP Security Service back in 1984.  The Act has stood up fairly well over its first three decades despite several […]

Years ago when I was still with CSIS I was part of the debriefing of a source we were running on our counter terrorism investigations.  During our chat he said something that struck me as really profound.   We were talking about the radicalisation process and he noted, based on what he had observed, that the […]