Speeches and Presentations
Presentation
by
Jim Judd, Director,
Canadian Security Intelligence Service,
to the YMCA Friday Luncheon Discussion Club
Ottawa, Ontario
February 17, 2006
Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.
I have been Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) for just over a year now and I continue to be surprised by how little is known about the Service or alternatively by how many misconceptions about the organization seem to exist.
As you probably know, organizations such as CSIS have traditionally shunned the light of public engagement or discussion, preferring instead to go about doing their job quietly.
To the extent that they have ventured into the public light in the past, it has normally been as a consequence of problems, alleged scandals or failures of some sort. In sum, the traditional public engagement of organizations such as the Service has been episodic and usually reluctant at best.
That approach is, however, changing for a number of different reasons.
One is the more traditional rationale of having to face accusations of alleged error or misconduct. Certainly in the last few years there has seemingly been no end of these internationally or here in Canada.
Every successful terrorist attack in the recent past – from those of 9/11 to the more recent bombing of the London subway system – has, more often than not, been characterized as a "failure of intelligence". Similarly, the role that intelligence played or not in the decisions to take military action in Iraq has raised another set of questions.
But they have all led to calls for inquiry and change and, on occasion, to a significant realignment of security and intelligence responsibilities.
Here in Canada we have just seen a review, carried out by former Ontario Premier Bob Rae, of the events that surrounded the bombing of the Air India airliner 21 years ago. And here too in this country we await the results of an inquiry into the case of Maher Arar. Both of these issues have, of course, included a substantial re-examination of the roles and activities of my organization
and of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), among others.
A second factor in the growth of public interest and engagement is linked to the growing public concern with some security threats that have become all too common in the last few years, most notably those involving terrorism and especially terrorism directed at non-military targets.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 have been followed by attacks across the world – in London, Madrid, Casablanca, Istanbul, Bali, Amman, and any number of other locations.
We have also seen the arrests of people accused of terrorist conspiracies in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Belgium, Italy and elsewhere.
That concern has been further accentuated by the multilateral military operations currently underway in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
A third factor has been the resurgence of interest – especially in the last five years or so – in whether governments and their security and law enforcement agencies have struck the appropriate balance of national security interests on the one hand and human rights imperatives on the other.
Over the past decade we have seen in most Western countries (and multilaterally in the United Nations and other institutions) an array of legislative and other initiatives designed to respond to the changing threat posed by terrorism.
Most Western governments, Canada included, have changed their legal frameworks and added more resources to security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies in response to the new terrorist threat. But with those changes has come an increased and understandable interest in ensuring that these new laws and measures are properly implemented and that core human rights continue to be protected.
All of these factors have thus thrust organizations such as CSIS more and more into the public light.
That is not a bad thing, in my view. It is, after all, important that citizens should understand these issues and the work of organizations such as CSIS and others in the national security arena.
With all that as a prologue, allow me to explain what CSIS is and what it does – and just as importantly, what it does not do.
The origins of CSIS
CSIS is a very young organization, which was established with its own legislation just 22 years ago.
It originated in the former RCMP Security Service and in the recommendations of the McDonald Royal Commission, which reported in 1981 on its review of the activities of the RCMP Security Service.
Responding to those findings, the government of the day committed itself to establishing a civilian national security intelligence agency separate from the RCMP.
Reflecting the concern of the day, our legislation was drafted to provide both a clear mandate and, secondly, a series of mechanisms to ensure effective control and review of the operations of the organization.
The critical issue uppermost in the minds of the drafters of the legislation was that of balancing the operational mandate of the organization with the rights of Canadians.
The mandate of the Service is essentially centred upon three principal responsibilities:
- the collection of intelligence – whether inside or outside Canada – related to our country's national security;
- the collection of foreign intelligence – that is to say political and economic intelligence related to other countries – but only within Canada; and
- the provision of security assessments on a range of individuals from federal and provincial government employees needing security clearances, to immigrants and refugees, to employees in certain sensitive sectors such as the nuclear industry and others.
Interestingly, our legislation does not define “national security” per se. It does, however, define
threats to national security very specifically. In brief they are:
- espionage or sabotage directed against Canada or its interests;
- foreign-influenced activities within Canada, detrimental to our interests;
- activities or threats related to serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state; and
- activities directed toward undermining by covert unlawful acts or destroying or overthrowing our constitutionally established system of government here.
These are the words used in our legislation. They would roughly approximate more common terms like espionage; foreign interference – and here we are talking generally about, for example, foreign governments attempting to manipulate Canadians, Canadian institutions or émigré groups; terrorism; and subversion. I do emphasize here that there is only a rough correspondence between the legal terminology and the lay terms, but they are close enough for our discussion today.
Our original legislation has been amended only once – in 2001 with the omnibus anti-terrorism legislation - to include the words "religious or ideological" in the third defined threat – terrorism in short.
One important point to clarify here is that CSIS is an intelligence service, not a police or law enforcement agency. We have no powers to detain people and no powers to compel cooperation, and we do not normally collect evidence for use in criminal prosecutions.
We obviously work closely with police services, but we are in a basically different but sometime related line of business.
Accountability
I have said before on a number of occasions that CSIS is the most reviewed intelligence service in the world. Our legislation bears testimony to that as more than two thirds of it is devoted to detailing the roles and responsibilities of the minister, the courts and the two external review mechanisms established for CSIS.
The minister, on behalf of the government, provides direction to the Service annually on its priorities, objectives and operations. Two ministers – ours and the minister of Foreign Affairs – have to agree to our relationships with foreign agencies.
The courts – normally the Federal Court of Canada – have to provide authority to the Service to conduct any intrusive investigative activity – for example, the interception of communications.
In addition to being subject to review by a number of agents of Parliament – from the Auditor General to the Access to Information and Privacy Commissioners – CSIS is also reviewed by two agencies specifically dedicated to that task.
The Inspector General of CSIS reports directly to the Minister on our compliance with operational policies.
The second agency – the Security Intelligence Review Committee, composed of five privy councillors – reviews the performance of our organization and conducts investigations into complaints against the Service in a number of areas, as stipulated in our legislation.
Both of these organizations report annually, in addition to conducting any number of ad hoc reviews and investigations over the course of the year.
The Service’s activities
Let me now move to the organization itself. We conduct our operations – that is to say the collection and analysis of information – through a number of mechanisms.
We recruit human sources to provide us with information on a range of security threats. We collect and use publicly available information – so-called open sources – from around the world through a variety of means.
With the authorization of the Minister and the courts, we also collect information through the interception of communications of all sorts – from phones to the Internet.
Finally, we obtain information from other intelligence services around the world.
The bottom line on all of this though is that the organization rarely, if ever, comes to a conclusion about anyone or anything without multiple independent sources of information that will collectively corroborate any such conclusion.
CSIS is headquartered here in Ottawa and has offices across the country. The largest ones are located in the major metropolitan centres of the country.
We also have employees stationed outside of Canada, although for purposes of personal and operational security we have only publicly acknowledged three of those – Washington, Paris and London. As well, at any given time we will also have Canada-based personnel travelling outside the country on specific operations.
We have today approximately 2400 employees who work as intelligence investigators and analysts, surveillants, information management and technical specialists, security screeners, translators and interpreters. We also have staff filling a number of standard corporate management and support functions.
Our employees have varied educational qualifications, many with multiple university degrees in areas such as law, social and physical sciences, information technology and others.
Our workforce is a diverse one. It is evenly split along gender lines, has about a 60/40 ratio English and French for official languages and includes a higher representation of visible minorities than the federal Public Service average.
Our employees come from across Canada and like many Canadians today, a number of our staff were born outside of this country. Collectively our employees speak more than 85 foreign languages.
New trends
Let me now turn to our operating environment. The national security situation in Canada today is obviously different from what it was at the time CSIS was created.
Twenty-two years ago we were in the midst of the Cold War and that fact determined the focus of our operations. Then, the principal priority of the organization was counter-espionage.
But the security landscape was changing even a year after the establishment of CSIS. In 1985, we saw terrorist attacks here in Ottawa against Turkish diplomats. Later that year an Air India flight was bombed, killing more than 300 people. That constituted the single largest terrorist atrocity in the world until the attacks of 9/11.
With the end of the Cold War 16 years ago, concerns about national security here and in most Western countries diminished. The so-called Cold War peace dividend led most Western governments to downsize their military and security and intelligence establishments in order to devote resources to other national priorities.
The new national security paradigm for the West, however, started to evolve again as we moved into the 1990s. Terrorist attacks – for the most part directed against the United States or its interests – became more and more common through the 1990s.
The first attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, the attacks on American military and diplomatic personnel and assets overseas and others all led to a growing concern with the increasingly global phenomenon of terrorism.
That trend, of course, reached its apex in the attacks of 9/11 in New York city and Washington.
In fact, our own concern with this new terrorism phenomenon was developing throughout the 1990s, despite the absence of any attack on Canada or Canadians.
For us, the turning point came more than a year before the 9/11 attacks with the arrest in Washington state of an individual from Montreal. He was then on his way to bomb the Los Angeles airport. That person was tried and convicted in an American court and is now serving a long prison sentence in the United States.
Today – unlike 22 years ago when CSIS was created – our most significant operational priority is terrorism. We continue, of course, significant operations against foreign espionage, foreign interference, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and, on occasion, transnational organized crime. But the pre-eminent concern remains terrorism.
The national security policy
Two years ago, the Government of Canada publicly articulated a national security policy. It is interesting for several reasons.
To begin with, it was the first ever public government policy on the issue of national security.
Secondly, it approached the issue of national security from what has been called an "all hazards" approach. That is to say it included not just traditionally defined issues of national security such as those CSIS has dealt with, but expanded to cover other significant threats to our security, such as pandemics or national disasters.
Third, it expressed a commitment to pursue three core national security interests:
- protecting Canada and Canadians at home and abroad
- ensuring Canada is not a base for threats to our allies; and
- contributing to international security.
That summarizes quite nicely the ambit of our own operational concerns today. Despite the fact that we have not been the victim on any terrorist attack in Canada since the 1980s, we have felt the impact in any number of ways.
More than two dozen Canadians died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Canadians have also been killed in terrorist attacks in Indonesia. And earlier this year, we saw a terrorist suicide bomber kill Glyn Berry in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Canadian military personnel have been killed and wounded by terrorist attacks while serving in Afghanistan. And we have seen Canadian citizens kidnapped in Iraq, some of whom have yet to be rescued.
Canada remains on Al Qaeda's target list of six countries. And it is the only one not to have been attacked. We live next door to target number one on that list and Canadian military and civilian personnel remain at risk in Afghanistan. For that matter, Canadians in other parts of the world can be subject to terrorist action, as we have seen in the past.
Moreover, Canadians and Canadian residents have been involved in terrorist attacks and conspiracies around the world in the past several years.
A resident of this city will come to trial within a year for his alleged role in a terrorist bombing conspiracy in the United Kingdom. Other Canadians or Canadian residents have been involved in attacks or conspiracies in Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and elsewhere.
All said and done, our operational concerns with terrorism are justifiably global, not just national. That is unlikely to change in the near future given the multitude of factors that drive this terrorist threat and the international mobility of these people.
Looking ahead, I fully expect that we will continue to have to respond to a multi-faceted threat to our security interests – led first and foremost by the threat of terrorism, whether here or elsewhere.
But other current preoccupations – with espionage, foreign interference, proliferation or transnational organized crime – give every appearance of continuing into the future as well.
We will have to continue to change and evolve to meet these threats, now and in the future.
In particular, I would like to highlight a few areas that constitute a particular challenge for us.
One is keeping abreast of the relentless change in technology, especially telecommunications and the Internet, which today play a central role in planning, organizing, recruiting and executing terrorist activities. It is also a key factor for us in responding to other threats.
A second is further enhancing our current international operations to give us a better capacity to detect and deter the threats that come from outside the country. This will also help us better protect Canadians outside our borders, be they military personnel or others.
Thirdly, we need to be able to continue to recruit the kinds of talent and expertise we need to do our business at a time when natural demographics – the passage of the baby boom generation especially – are putting such pressure on us and other employers.
We not only need the right kinds of expertise but the right kinds of people as well – that is to say people who represent the geographic and contemporary demographic diversity of this country.
Finally, we need to continue what we have recently embarked upon in terms of public communications and outreach to Canadians. We need to do this to ensure that Canadians better understand who we are and how we do our business.
We need to ensure that all Canadians understand that:
- we are responsible in what we do and how we carry out our mandate;
- we operate within the law and with all due regard to individual rights; and
- we are not indiscriminate in how we focus our investigations.
I hope that this overview of CSIS and some of the issues that preoccupy us has been helpful.
Thank you
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