Two hundred and seventy-five people attended the international conference of the Canadian Association of Security and Intelligence Studies last weekend in Calgary. CASIS is more than an ivory-tower organization interested in spies and spy-catching. It brings academics together with think-tankers, cops, soldiers, lawyers and bureaucrats, active and retired. Even Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day, showed up to give a talk. His was by no means the least interesting.
The prize for evasiveness and sheer dullness was shared by uniformed and non-uniformed bureaucrats. Possibly the worst presentation was the group hug by representatives of the RCMP, CSIS and the FBI. To listen to these guys, whatever problems CSIS and the Mounties once might have had, happened long ago and far away, practically in another galaxy. Today, they share things. They have the greatest respect for one another. The FBI, of course, has the greatest respect for both these fine Canadian organizations. All three work hand in hand in a seamlessly co-ordinated and ever-successful struggle against bad guys, protecting civil society and doing endless good works.
The worst of the academic talks piled cliches on top of commonplace observations. The best provided dispassionate analysis of genuine problems.
As an example of the latter, one scholar discussed the sophisticated terrorist strategy for economic war. It is centred on energy disruption and focused on a half dozen Saudi export facilities. If any one of them were destroyed, the result would be an economic recession that not even a major ramp-up in oilsands production could mitigate. This country has no strategic oil reserve. The Americans have a 750-million barrel reserve, but it is in Texas and Louisiana.
There was a thorough discussion of the spread of Islamist radicalism among poor urban teenagers from Morocco to Pakistan. The spread of the ideological appeal of al-Qaeda from a few wealthy western-educated men to many poor kids, and especially to marginalized second-generation European Muslim communities, is new. It promises to have world-wide repercussions.
The most interesting discussion was provoked by a British journalist adept at packaging a message. She gave a forceful and wonderfully politically incorrect account of how the myth of multiculturalism had rendered any questioning of the narrative of universal Muslim victimhood unacceptable in polite government company. Worse, she said, if any Islamist who is not a terrorist is called moderate, then the position of genuine moderate Muslims is undermined within their own religious community.
Westerners may not be able to do much about fanaticism elsewhere, she concluded, but that does not mean we must accept defeat, appeasement and cultural collapse. Democracies have a duty to defend themselves. This was controversial even among hard-nosed intelligence analysts [emphasis added--why the controversy?].
Equally interesting was a discussion by lawyers on the effects on western societies of the growth of electronic surveillance. The old way of intelligence gathering was for agents to trail targets when they had reasons to be suspicious [emphasis added--how long have we had wire taps and SIGINT?]. Metaphorically, surveillance was an inch wide and a mile deep; everything about the suspect was watched. Today, it is a mile wide and an inch deep. It is designed to create leads, not follow up on them. The reason seems to be that security bureaucrats and politicians find it easier to use technology to monitor everybody's cellphones than to point agents in the direction of a few likely threats.
Alas, applying a high-tech fix to problems of political laziness never works. First, technology is at least as unreliable as a human agent; second, it is pursued by governments in an inherently sneaky way so citizen support is undermined; third, human targets can use low-tech countermeasures. A biometric driver's licence is foolproof except for the ease with which a bribe can get you a new one.
Several Americans present compared Canadian post-9/11 security measures favourably to theirs, particularly the U.S. Patriot Act. This reflected more a dislike for tough measures than an informed appraisal of Canadian effectiveness. But the Americans were right about one thing. You never would find open discussion among such a diverse assembly in the U.S [emphasis added--well, in fact you might find one at any number of US congressional hearings]. CASIS has something important to teach security and intelligence communities elsewhere in the world.
Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a Fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.
