Search: “national security”

These past couple of months have not been good for Canada’s spy service.  First, the Federal Court ruled that CSIS has been negligent in informing it of a programme whereby it ‘illegally kept’ data (which it had collected legally under warrant) on Canadians.  Then there is the criticism that the Service shared questions with the […]

I know that I need to stop carping about the proliferation of ‘alternative facts’, otherwise known as lies.  I am obsessing about pointing them out all with the full knowledge that there are far too many and they are coming in too fast and furious to keep up.  I suppose I want to provide an […]

If there is one myth in the ever increasing world of ‘alternative facts’ (i.e. lies) that has otherworldly strength and perseverance it is the whopper that some of the 9/11 hijackers came through Canada.  This inaccurate account of recent history has been repeated by people who should have known better – e.g. former Democratic presidential […]

I think we can all agree – well except maybe some in the new Trump administration – that the US decision to use the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba to hold terrorist suspects extra-judicially was a particularly bad idea.  Not only did the practice sully the US image as the protector of democratic values, it […]

CVE – short for Countering Violent Extremism – gets a bad rap sometimes, and the criticism is not always unwarranted.  The term has come to mean whatever people want it to mean as its remit expands into all kinds of areas of social engineering and capacity building.  Many movements have received funding from governments by […]

A lot of people  in Canada, particularly Muslims and even more narrowly Muslims in Quebec, are frightened today.  The massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre in the provincial capital of la belle province has many worried about their safety and mosques across the country are upping security and receiving special attention from local law enforcement. […]

Well, if there was any doubt about what a Trump presidency means for the US, and by extension for all of us, over the next four years there is little doubt now.  In the first week alone a flurry of executive orders have been signed on a whole bunch of issues that Mr. Trump promised […]

There has been an interesting development in a terrorist court case in Ottawa.  The lawyers for Awso Peshdary, accused of being a terrorism financier and recruiter, have argued that in order to defend their client properly they need all the information that the national spy service, CSIS, has collected on him.  Complicating matters somewhat (but […]

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 […]