Search: “Terrorists”

For some it might seem a bit odd that a person who spent three decades in intelligence, and half of that  in counter terrorism especially, might think that there is a solution other than investigation and incarceration for terrorists.  After all, terrorism is a real threat and we cannot be naive about it.  How can […]

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, […]

No, you are not watching the US Republican Party propose measures to stop terrorism that each time are more and more draconian and more and more dismissive of basic human rights.  This is the Conservative Party of Canada talking, the holders – until recently – of government in this country.  And yet if you didn’t […]

I like Tariq Ramadan, I really do. I have had the privilege of hearing him talk several times in Ottawa and I find him to be a very well spoken and intelligent man. And I don’t buy the accusation that as the grandson of Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he is […]

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 […]

I have been thinking a lot about peace bonds in the wake of the Aaron Driver case. For those who forget, or who reside in a parallel universe, Aaron Driver  was the young man from Strathroy, Ontario who radicalised, praised Islamic State, posted a martyrdom video and was gunned down after getting into a cab […]

Last week the Canadian Department of Public Safety issued its annual terrorist threat report.  You can read the whole thing here but I would like to comment on some of it in the paragraphs to follow.  The paper is unclassified and is intended to inform Canadians in a general way what the threat level is […]

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 […]

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 […]