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. […]
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Now that Alexandre Bissonnette has pleaded guilty to killing six people (and wounding 19 others) at a Quebec City mosque in January 2017 and we are seeing at last some of the evidence mounted against him (largely his 911 call and his jail cell ‘confession’), we are getting a much clearer picture of why he […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 2, 2018 Is it just me or is it strange that an independent, secular democracy cannot make simple decisions on whom it wants to allow to stay in the country? We are speaking here of immigrants, of course, since those lucky enough to have been […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018 Of all the groups that we can describe as extremist in nature, if not necessarily violent extremist, none can be as bizarre as the one that calls itself ‘Freemen on the Land’ (a.k.a. sovereign citizens). This small coterie of Canadians hews to a number […]
Here we go again. Another terrorist attack by someone ‘known to police’, this time in southwestern France. A Moroccan hijacked a car after shooting the driver and a passenger, followed some police officers jogging nearby, shot and wounded one, went to a local supermarket where he took hostages and shot several before a tactical squad […]
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Stop the politicisation of terrorism
This post appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018 Remember Willy Horton? No, not the former Detroit Tigers baseball player, the former convicted murderer. He became famous (infamous?) in 1987 when, after he was released on a prison furlough programme, he raped a white woman and assaulted her fiance (Horton was African […]
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Tech and terrorism – part 1
This past week I had the opportunity to attend a fascinating workshop in Montreal sponsored by Concordia University’s Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies (MIGS) entitled ‘Tech Against Terrorism’. A number of academics, private sector entities and think tanks all came to talk about the challenges behind identifying and removing terrorist content from the Internet and […]
Those of us in the intelligence community would often wonder what it would be like to have an NDP government calling the shots. Generally speaking, we did not see it is a good thing for Canada’s spies. Whether it was uncertainty over the need to have intelligence services at all or some misplaced sense that […]
If there is one thing that people consistently get wrong it is the certain belief that violent crime is on the increase. We are convinced that the situation is getting worse, not better, and the depth of this certainty is probably due, in no small part, to the constant media feed over acts of violence. […]
Is it any surprise that citizens distrust governments in the West? Whether it is the assumption that those in power are only after their own interests or that regimes are really bad at what they do with taxpayers’ money, it is hard to find examples where a country’s population is satisfied with the level of […]