Search: “far right”

It is hard to know what the average person thinks about how intelligence services operate.  I suppose it may be a mixture of what people see on TV or in the theatres and the largely negative stories in the press about overreach and shady activities (in all fairness it is not the media’s fault since […]

I know for sure that this blog is going to raise some hackles, especially among my US friends and colleagues.  Why?  Because I am going to argue that the current US counter terrorism architecture is inadequate to deal with the threat and needs a serious overhaul.  The solution I am proposing, however, will go against […]

I have just returned from the 2016 Anti-Terrorism and Active Shooter conference in Niagara Falls where I was honoured to have been asked to open the 2-day event with a talk on Western foreign fighters.  The conference, now in its fourth or fifth year, has rapidly become a go-to event and one of the premier […]

I have just finished watching ‘Eye in the Sky’, a recent film about the use of drones as a counter terrorism tool.  The movie shows an operation where an Al Shabaab cell in Nairobi is located and targeted for killing, before it can carry out suicide attacks, all while shedding some light on the decision-making […]

Living in a liberal democracy is generally a good thing.  Not that there are no problems that arise from time to time, but those who abide by liberal (in the classic sense of the word) values tend to be open to a lot of diversity.  They generally are okay with most things as long as […]

Soon to be former US President Barack Obama once famously said with respect to foreign policy “don’t do stupid shit (or” stuff” depending on your sensitivity to salty language)”.  That maxim could just have easily been applied to domestic policy.  And it is something that incoming president Donald Trump might want to pay attention to. […]

There is an ongoing debate in many societies on how much power security intelligence and law enforcement agencies should be allowed to have and how technology is making catching the bad guys really difficult.  I commented on this during the Apple-FBI tussle some months ago when the law enforcement agency wanted to get the contents […]

Those who know me know I am not a fan of Tom Cruise for all kinds of reasons not relevant to this blog.  But one movie he appeared in is directly germane to today’s topic.  In Minority Report, a film based on a short story by US science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, a man […]

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 […]

If there is one thing we know about terrorism it is that what we do – or what we don’t do – has a real chance of effecting what terrorist groups do.  For terrorist groups are really good at telling the world why they use violence and usually place the blame for their carnage on […]