Wouldn’t it be great if the whole were always the sum of its parts? That way, if we could ensure that we have all the ingredients and understand how they go together we could reliably predict what the end state would be. If only life were like math: 2 + 3 + 4 = 9 […]
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One thing that is obvious is that terrorists love social media. They are all over it and are masters at using it to their advantage. This should surprise no one. Terrorists tend to be two things: young and smart. Young smart people know how to get their message out and are adept at modifying what […]
In the Harry Potter novels the villain is known as Lord Voldemort. He is in many ways a terrorist. He is ideologically driven (he wants to take over the wizarding world and force everyone to conform to his way of doing things) and he uses violence to achieve his goals. He recruits followers and tortures […]
The US has suffered through two scary incidents in the past 24 hours. Fortunately, as of the time of writing, no one has died in either event. A man dressed in a security uniform knifed 8 people at a mall in central Minnesota. There are reports he talked of Allah and asked at least one […]
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 […]
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Fair stood the wind for jihad
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 […]
In all my time as an intelligence analyst I had some amazing opportunities and worked alongside some truly outstanding men and women. We collectively did our best to gather and analyse intelligence with the constant view to providing the best advice we could to Canadian decision makers. I may be biased but I think we […]
The renowned US journal Scientific American put out a fascinating article today in which leading scholars were asked what the top 20 “big questions” facing humanity in the future. The questions posed ranged from space exploration to medicine, but it was the following that caught my eye (reproduced in its entirety: for the complete list […]
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 […]