Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to speak to Bill C-51.
Almost three years ago, I left CSIS as the assistant director of intelligence. This was after almost three decades of work as an intelligence officer, a manager, and a senior executive of the service.
Over those 30 years, I witnessed first-hand the service's growth and its adaptation to constantly emerging threats during that tumultuous period.
In the earliest of days, after I joined CSIS in 1984, it was really all about the Cold War. It was about hunting spies or looking for alleged subversives. Concomitantly, it also involved homeland-based terrorism, such as that which was represented through the Armenian and Sikh extremism events in the 1980s.
In that first decade, I also witnessed the advent of Shia Hezbollah violence against the west, particularly in places such as Lebanon, and subsequently the emergence of right-wing militia groups in the U.S. and white supremacists in Canada during the 1990s, and of course throughout Europe today. Then, I had a front-row seat for the emergence of a new form of political/religious terror linked to Sunni extremism, that of al Qaeda, with its multiple permutations, be they the AQ, or al Qaeda, affiliates, or the current perversion known now as the Islamic State.
Over the course of my long career in national security—including my role as leader of the main group in charge of counterterrorism at CSIS—I never saw threats of the intensity we are facing globally today. Indeed, we have never faced such diverse, serious and complex threats.
Although I will focus my comments on counterterrorism, I would be remiss if I did not draw to the attention of the committee members the fact that the current threat environment is so much more than al Qaeda and the Islamic State, or homegrown radicalization as such. At the top of mind is cyber, from the substantive impact it continues to have on our future prosperity, through the theft of intellectual property, to the targeting of our critical infrastructure. That, in my estimation, is not yet properly defended.
As we can see with some of the current hot issues—like Ukraine—we also have to deal with the resurgence of a major Soviet-style threat. There is nothing harmless about the low-intensity hybrid warfare the totalitarian Russian regime is waging on the west. I would even go as far as to add that it is probably the most overlooked and underestimated of all the risks we are facing.
The issue of nuclear proliferation is once again a cause for deep concern, as it involves a potential renewed race to acquire weapons in the Middle East to match those of Israel's capability or Iran's aspirations. What of China rising, be its foreign interference, its ongoing military transformation, or its newly declared investments in an aggressive, multi-sector cyber-espionage program?
My point in underlining all of these is to suggest that enhancements proposed in Bill C-51, particularly those affecting the CSIS Act, should not be viewed as just being exclusive benefits to the country's counterterrorism programs.
I don't think the global climate has been this threatening since the years of turmoil leading up to the First World War. Therefore, I feel that now is the perfect time to make significant changes to Canada's security legislation. I am convinced that our country must be able to clearly understand the challenges and to respond effectively on multiple fronts.
Now, allow me to return to the principal matter of the growing threat of terrorism in the 21st century. It will no doubt be a long-term struggle to defeat this new terrorism variant. As a preventative measure, let me say that we must not allow this to be viewed or articulated as a challenge involving a specific religion, as it is not. Based on my professional experience, I can say that it is a struggle against a political/religious ideology that has all the DNA of fascist movements through history that have typically filled a social and economic void. However, it is a battleground where a combination of social investment, diplomacy, law enforcement, intelligence operations, and military capability will be necessary for us to succeed.
However, it is even more important to avoid counterproductive measures and not to let extremists win the public opinion battle by convincing people that we really are in the midst of a war between the west and Islam.
Whereas history and context matter, so do facts. As recently noted in a Department of Homeland Security, DHS, report, between 2007 and 2010 approximately 200 attacks linked to AQ and ISIS occurred worldwide. Available statistics for 2013 from DHS show that 600 such attacks linked to the same organizations have occurred.
Of course, there is nothing encouraging about Al Qaeda-linked attacks tripling in number. The tragic murder of 23 people in Tunis—most of them European tourists—is another striking example of how difficult it is to ensure the security of any society in the face of this kind of blind terror.
While at CSIS during the past decade, I can attest to the fact that we had recognized the age of globalization that applied to terrorism in equal measure to that of communications, manufacturing, and the services industry. You should be aware, therefore, that we had purposely evolved our operational doctrine to meet that reality. The new approach, in essence, was to engage threat wherever it may emerge. This was seen as essential and has proved to be successful in thwarting a number of threats targeting Canadians at home and abroad.
Despite those successes, only rarely could I indirectly provide Canadians with a high level of protection during my time in one the highest positions of responsibility in the fight against international terrorism. You may be wondering why, but the answer is simple. With each passing day, new situations emerge and scenarios take shape that have no precedent; the problems that arise as a result are never easy to resolve. Those posing the threats to us learn and innovate at the same pace as we do.
Similar to biologists struggling to contain drug-resistant bacteria, individuals and entities that cause harm were learning and adapting to this new threat environment. Threat actors went to school, as they say, via trial transcripts, news reports, procedural disclosures, or through stolen tradecraft secrets such as those allegedly delivered to the world by Edward Snowden. The ongoing challenge to secure this country is also due to the strategic shift of most terror organizations, moving from complex plots intended to deliver large scale atrocities to small, often individualized types of attacks, known broadly as lone actors.
As a result, the likelihood of detecting attacks and the window of opportunity between an attack being planned and then launched have decreased steadily over the past five years. The response times are increasingly short, and opportunities for thwarting the assailants' plans are more and more limited.
Finally, while I was with CSIS, I often worried that our tool kit was highly restricted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act.
Disclosure rules of the day thwarted the flow of potential intelligence leads. Other impediments hampered the transfer of CSIS intelligence into viable evidence for the RCMP.
Most importantly, however, was the reality that the 1984 CSIS Act, created for a Cold War-era threat involving investigations that took years of slowly collected detail, was suddenly a living anachronism. Being limited to only "collect, analyze and report" on threats to national security, as set out currently in section 12 of the act, instantly jammed our ability to intercede with creative, low-cost, low-impact interdiction efforts. In other words, threat diminishment activities.
To be able to substantiate your study, you should know that many ideas have been received on how security agencies or organizations from around the world are managing to effectively counter threats to society or to a group of countries that share certain values.
Simply put, I would say that security is as much an art as it is an exact science, and probably more of an art than anything else.
Anti-terrorism is about weighing risks. lt is not, as some may hope, predicting the future. Although with the advent of ever-improving advanced analytics, analysts and enforcement teams are shifting that dynamic. Counterterrorism work is multifaceted. lt is about early detection, the assessment of its potential to strike, the allocation of resources around it, and weighing the many legal and policy considerations that may apply.
In addition, and where the risk management piece really applies in counterterrorism, is that the teams engaged in that area must continuously re-evaluate their targets in a process that constantly challenges their judgments on every case. This is done almost every day of every week.
In my estimation we have been both good and lucky. The former, of course, is almost always the byproduct of hard work and smart action. My fear, however, is that without some radical transformation of the enabling anti-terrorism framework, Canada will fall behind and our luck will run out again.
Critics have so far convinced a substantial segment of the population that our measures are dangerous and useless. I disagree with that point of view and I reject the “slippery slope” argument, as my 30 years of field experience have shown me that core Canadian values—such as the respect for human rights—are much less threatened than our interests, which are exposed to all sorts of malicious acts.
