Speeches and Presentations

Appearance by Ward Elcock, Director Canadian Security Intelligence Service at The Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies Conference

Check against Delivery

CASIS Conference, October 16-18, 2003
Vancouver, B.C. - “The John Tait Memorial Lecture”

Introduction

When Tony Campbell first asked me to speak tonight, I was not sure that there was much I could say that would also be of interest, but on further thought, Tony’s invitation gives me the opportunity to make some comments about choices Canadians made 20 years ago and how they have worked out. But before I do that, I would also like to thank Tony for asking me to give the John Tait Memorial Lecture. Many of you around the room will have known John. At the risk of dating myself, John and I joined the Department of Justice in the early ‘70s, and worked together in those early years on a couple of major files. He was a man of enormous intellectual capacity and a superb advisor. It’s a privilege to give the lecture named in his honour, although it would give me far more pleasure to have John here.

To return to CSIS in its 20^th year, I want to make two points this evening about the experience with the Act and the Service throughout this formative period:

1.         The CSIS Act has survived a number of major operational tests over the last two decades and has assured the human rights of Canadians in the process.

2.         CSIS is a vastly different organization over the one that existed in 1984, and at 20 years old, is an experienced, highly disciplined and effective intelligence service.

Let me first review some of the main characteristics of the legislation that was adopted in the summer of 1984 to recap the debate that occurred around each of those characteristics, and then to describe how the legislation dealt with each of them ... and then how each one has weathered the experience of the last 20 years.

After doing that, I would like to talk about how the legislation has enabled CSIS to adjust to new and emerging national security challenges over the same period ... and tell you how the people of CSIS have risen to those challenges.

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20 Years Under the CSIS Act

The design of the CSIS Act responding to two commissions of inquiry and reflecting the recommendations of a special Senate Committee was the sum of the Government’s and Parliament’s best efforts to find the points of consensus among a surplus of views.

Among the options and choices that confronted law-makers and legislators were choices such as:

• law enforcement vs civilian



• “defensive” vs “offensive”



• foreign vs domestic



• individual vs collective rights



• political accountability vs accountability to the Courts



• reason to suspect vs reason to believe



• collection of evidence vs collection of intelligence

There isn’t time here for me to deal with all of these issues, so I am going to begin by discussing what, in my view, were some of the key choices and the Service’s performance in relation to four of them:

• balance between individual and collective rights



• civilianization



• accountability mechanisms



• intelligence collection abroad

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Individual and Collective Rights

The need for collective security to ensure the safety of the state and its institutions from threats of espionage and terrorism ... while protecting individual rights to privacy, to dissent, to be politically active, and to hold and express unpopular or radical opinions ... was perhaps the most important balance that had to be struck in the Act. Tension between collective and individual security required the existence of a directly proportional relationship between these two concepts at every stage in the process of collection, analysis and reporting.

The McDonald Commission put it this way: “Canada must meet both the requirements of security and the requirements of democracy; we must never forget that the fundamental purpose of the former is to secure the latter.”

In its November, 1983 report, The Special Senate Committee said a credible and effective security intelligence agency does need to collect and analyse information in a way that may infringe on the civil liberties of some people. The Committee went on to say ... and I quote ... “But it must also be strictly controlled, and have no more power than is necessary to accomplish its objectives, which must in turn not exceed what is necessary for the protection of the security of Canada.”

Thus,

• Civil liberties considerations were built into the definition of limited threats to the security of Canada.

• They underlay the design of the system of warrants that require a Federal Court judge to review investigative briefs to ensure that no more than the appropriate degree of intrusion is used.

• And they were fundamental to the role of the review agencies that are mandated to monitor and report on CSIS’ investigative activities .

The checks and balances built into the CSIS Act were challenged by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association in 1989, and upheld by the Ontario courts, which ruled that the CSIS Act was not a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed the CCLA’s case in 1998 and the Supreme Court of Canada later refused to grant leave to appeal.

Briefly stated, the CSIS Act created a framework whose ultimate purpose was to protect the liberal democratic ideals that Canada is based upon – a framework in which the onus would be on those of us involved in the protection of those ideals to take every precaution to ensure that individual rights are not unnecessarily infringed. I will deal with how we have done that throughout the rest of my remarks ... but for the moment, let me emphasize that as far as the legislative framework is concerned, its fidelity to democratic ideals has met the highest legal standards.

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Civilianization

The balance between individual and collective rights was reflected in the choices of lawmakers who understood what skill sets and special training are required to do security intelligence-gathering. Both the MacKenzie and the McDonald commissions had recognized that, while there are similarities, there are distinct differences between the orientation of police work and intelligence collection.

Some differences are obvious, while some are less so. To the members of CASIS who have studied these distinctions at length, they may seem obvious. But the highly charged chain of events since September the 11th have obscured some of the reasons that lie behind the choices that were made, and lead me to highlight them.

Law enforcement is generally reactive; it essentially takes place after the commission of a distinct criminal offence. Police officers are results-oriented, in the sense that they seek prosecution of wrong doers. They work on a “closed” system of limits defined by the Criminal Code, other statutes and the courts. Within that framework, they often tend to operate in a highly decentralized mode. Police construct a chain of evidence that is gathered and used to support criminal convictions in trials where witnesses are legally obliged to testify. Trials are public events that receive considerable publicity.

Security intelligence work is, by contrast, preventive and information-oriented. At its best, it occurs before violent events occur, in order to equip police and other authorities to deal with them. Information is gathered from people who are not compelled by law to divulge it. Intelligence officers have a much less clearly defined role, which works best in a highly centralized management structure. They are interested in the linkages and associations of people who may never commit a criminal act – people who consort with others who may be a direct threat to the interests of the state.

CSIS officers make no arrests, but call upon the police of jurisdiction if apprehension is required. Their work environment is an open-ended world of nuance and shades of meaning. Information is not collected as evidence at trial but as input to the decision-making centres of government. Management control is vital in this work so that individual investigators’ insights are frequently cross-checked by others, preventing personal bias from clouding the results. Finally, it is conducted in secret so that peoples’ identities and reputations are protected and in order to protect the policy options of the state.

Because if its open-ended, subtle and confidential nature, security intelligence work requires a close and thorough system of control and accountability in which political responsibility plays a large part.

The Special Senate Committee remarked in 1983 that security work requires a different background than police work ... one that is embodied in a new type of recruit with a different outlook and education, emphasizing analytical and assessment skills. Events that resulted in the creation of the CSIS Act and the Service also led the Committee to conclude that a civilian organization would best assure the necessary political control.

When CSIS was created as a civilian security intelligence organization a year later, more than 80 per cent of its employee base was comprised of former police officers, since the Security Service was the primary source of available intelligence investigators. Today, less than 20 per cent of the organization’s employees are former police officers or civilian employees of police agencies. But it would be wrong to assume that the success of civilianization is inversely related to the number of former RCMP officers in the organization. It is rather the culture of civilianization that is crucial. Even prior to the creation of the Service, the culture of the Security Service had begun to change. The Security Service was the leader in the Force in information management and in sending its people back to university. Officers rarely carried weapons. In other words, change was already there.

It is those who came from the Security Service, together with those who came after 1984, who built a different civilian culture, which has made it possible for CSIS to be the organization it is today. By the turn of the millennium, it could fairly be said that the vision of a security intelligence service had largely been fulfilled.

It has taken the best part of twenty years to achieve the blend of experience with fresh talent and a new attitude that was necessary to do the unique job that is required of the Service. As much as it is humanly possible, the cultural shift is complete. Canada’s democratic principles are honoured in every reasonable respect by a group of people who hold Canadian ideals to be at the core of their everyday working lives.

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Accountability

Both the MacKenzie and McDonald commissions recommended that Canada’s intelligence service be governed by a strict regime of political accountability. Simply put, CSIS exists because the government concluded that the rights of Canadians had not been adequately protected. As it was constituted in the Act, the purpose of CSIS was to protect rights, to work within the law and to be accountable to the elected government.

Accountability took the form of more direct control by the Minister, who is accountable to Parliament, as compared to the police. But, more importantly, it took the form of review agencies, as prescribed in the legislation ... agencies that have access to all employees and all documents except for Cabinet confidences. There is probably no intelligence organization in the world that functions within a law that is so strict and comprehensive and clear, especially about the extent of its accountability regime. Nine of the 29 pages in the Act are devoted to outlining how what CSIS does is to be monitored and reviewed and approved by others.

When we engage in certain intrusive activities such as the interception of communications, as Director I have to be personally satisfied in each case that the use of such techniques is necessary ... that all other avenues have been exhausted and that the use of technology is within the mandate of the Service. But that is not where it stops. The Act also requires me to secure the approval of the Solicitor General. If he approves, the case must then be put to a judge of the Federal Court of Canada for independent assessment.

At the review stage, after activities have been concluded, the Inspector General reviews and reports to the Minister directly. In addition, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which is independent both of CSIS and of the Government, has access to absolutely everything we do and reports to Parliament annually. Their role, as they once described it, is to ensure that, and I quote, “CSIS does things right and does the right things”.

When CSIS was first created, the SIRC found fault with some of what was done. From time to time they still have reason to find fault, which they report to Parliament. But as the committee itself stated in one of its early ‘90s reports:

“In the early years of this committee’s mandate CSIS acted to a great extent as if it were simply a continuation of the (former) Security Service.”

SIRC found that most CSIS targets, policies and procedures were virtually unchanged. It took more than three years for this situation to change significantly, causing the Committee’s 1991-92 report to conclude:

“CSIS is now a virtually new organization, hardly recognizable as the direct descendant of the former Security Service .... The number and type of CSIS targets ... the rigorous justification required before anyone or any group is designated as a target ... the rigour, logic and balance of warrant affidavits submitted to the federal court ... and the tone and content of reports by intelligence officers on targets’ files have all changed significantly for the better.

“We still have criticisms to make ... but our criticisms are no longer based upon strong and fundamental disagreements with the CSIS view of the world.”

CSIS is a better organization because of the Act’s accountability regime, which has resulted in a disciplined and competent service. This regime ensures that our investigators deal with threats in a way that protects the rights of Canadian citizens.

Twenty years of constant review activity have resulted in many recommendations on how we could do things differently, and many of these recommendations have mirrored adjustments that have been made to the Service’s management procedures. SIRC’s comments have extended into the heart of how the organization is run, including matters of source-handling, investigative methods, targeting decisions and other core functions.

Do we always share SIRC’s views? No in some cases, yes in some ... but that is not the point. The point is that the review process remains an ongoing debate on ways to ensure that the principles of the legislation are sustained as we evolve and adopt to new threats. That is what the legislators intended.

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Operating abroad

The previous three categories represent fully developed aspects of the legislation that have proven their validity time and again over the past 20 years. Collection of intelligence from abroad is in a somewhat different category than the previous three because ... while the authority has existed in the legislation, and while CSIS has been conducting operations abroad for many years ... the function that Canada requires to protect its security has evolved over the years.

Canadian efforts to collect information covertly abroad go back at least to Sir John A. Macdonald’s orders to infiltrate Fenian groups in the United States. A hundred years later, the McDonald Commission concluded that “If security intelligence investigations which begin in Canada must cease at the Canadian border, information and sources of information important to Canadian security will be lost.” Ultimately, McDonald recommended that Canada’s new civilian security intelligence agency should be permitted to carry out certain investigations overseas.

As former Solicitor General Robert Kaplan said during debate on the Bill that resulted in the CSIS Act, “There is no statutory requirement that the entire activities of the Security Intelligence Service be performed in Canada. I think that would be unduly inhibiting.”

Secondly – and simply put – the legislation authorizes us to conduct operations abroad. It wasn’t in hindsight that some loophole has been discovered. The Act was designed that way in the first place to protect Canada from threats to its security.

And what has happened since? The center of gravity of threats to the security of Canada has shifted. Foreign sources of threat-related information have become predominant and the pattern of requests from client departments has followed this shift. This emerging challenge needs to be met with the full force of the law, and that is what we are doing. Extremists respect no barriers, either international or moral. This situation calls for an integrated approach to intelligence collection that is not bound by artificial, administrative barriers.

So events have increasingly required us, as was envisaged by those who designed the Act, to operate abroad. As we have done so, the complexity of the operations we have done has evolved and will continue to evolve as we acquire experience and develop new skills. The result is that working covertly abroad has become an integral part of the Service’s operations.

I have touched on only some of the challenges that were faced in designing the Act, but clearly, those elements have stood the test of time in the Service’s first 20 years. As well, many other countries have recognized the value of the framework that Canada has put in place. Many of them have been coming to us to learn not only about our operational methods and procedures, but about that framework. Even nations that can lay no claim to mature democratic systems of government have come to us to learn about the principles that are embedded in our legislation and how they might be applied in their own countries. We offer this assistance because it is in Canada’s interest to help raise the level of professionalism among intelligence agencies in the developing world. At the end of the day, that will raise the calibre of the information we get from abroad.

In the new and intense spotlight that has been cast on the Act and the procedures that have been put in place to administer it, it is also important to remember that these principles have been challenged many times before and have been upheld.

Choices made in relation to each of these questions have held up under the intense scrutiny that accompanied the challenges we have faced as a Service over the last 20 years.

It is easy to forget 20 years on, but it took Canada years of soul-searching to arrive at the balance that it has struck between the national security imperative and the rights of individuals. Events since September 11 have proven once again that the choices Canadian legislators made in the design of the CSIS Act were prudent and appropriate ones. We are continuing to tackle new and emerging global threats according to the same principles that were enshrined in the Act 20 years ago. This is the kind of integrated intelligence process that people are trying to create in other countries.

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CSIS Adjusts to New Imperatives

But it takes more than just the right legislative mandate to be able to answer the global threats that Canada is facing. Today’s security intelligence agency needs to have three characteristics in order to be effective. For the next few minutes, I want to talk about those features and show how the CSIS Act has allowed us to adapt to the challenges of this new age of multi-national terrorism.

The first requirement is the adoption of an intelligence model rather than an enforcement model that is able to understand the world of modern terrorism, and that is equipped to forewarn or prevent terrorist acts. The fundamental difference between law enforcement and intelligence work that led to the creation of CSIS as a separate, civilian security intelligence organization had to be reflected in its makeup, in the composition of its management cadre and its employee base. Legislators wanted to encourage a new management style that would be responsive to political decision-makers, cooperative with review bodies, and disciplined. The employee base should have good analytical skills through higher education and respect for legitimate political dissent.

Moreover, people who do this work have to think like terrorists and be able to understand the societies that spawn them. They have to know the mainstream politics and the insurgencies of nations all over the world in order to know what to make of the information they gather. Instead of studying forensics and the finer points of assembling evidence to support prosecutions under the Criminal Code, they have to understand the Immigration Act and the migratory patterns of populations.

Apart from civilianization, education and cultural orientation, specialized training has helped to ensure that individual rights are respected in the application of the systems and processes that are prescribed in the CSIS Act. Our professional standards require that an intelligence officer be trained to respect civil liberties as well as be trained in the operational ways and means. All inductees receive their basic orientation at a permanent training centre located at our national headquarters in Ottawa. Training programs in management, informatics, and advanced operations are also run out of this centre. In the last fiscal year, approximately 1,500 employees received management and professional development training of some kind at this facility.

This shift merely began with civilianization through the creation of CSIS. It has continued throughout the ‘90s by means of recruitment programs targeted to find people who are experienced and educated in the ways of the world. We have sought out recruits whose travels have acquainted them with foreign languages, cultural norms and geography.

We have assembled a work force that is more representative of the Canadian population than it was in 1984. For example, seven per cent of our intelligence officers were female in 1984, compared to 36 per cent in 2003. In the early days there was pressure on the service to improve the use of both of Canada’s official languages. Today, the first official language of 38 per cent of CSIS employees is French. All new recruits to intelligence officer positions must be bilingual to qualify, and unlike other agencies of government, we offer language training to the ones who need it before they start their formal intelligence officer training .

More to the point, 8.6 per cent of CSIS employees are visible minorities from various ethnic groups representative of the Canadian reality, and 33 per cent of our intelligence officers speak a foreign language. In addition to their travels and their post-graduate work experience, 25 per cent of our intelligence officers have a second or a third university degree.

A change in culture had to occur that involved more than simply leaving behind the law enforcement model. An organization with a different outlook on the world was needed. We set out to establish one and the job is now well under way. The transition from a law-enforcement to a counter-terrorist intelligence-gathering model required a shift of operational resources, which was done late in the 1980s and early 1990s.

We concentrated on the development and strengthening of liaison relationships with 242 agencies in 136 countries around the world, including many countries with an active Sunni extremist presence. By the year 2000, the Service was developing a track record within this network of global intelligence organizations for its world view of this emerging extremist movement. Foreign agencies with their own developing concerns about this movement consulted often with CSIS to share experiences and information on people who were a potential threat.

As a result, CSIS was able to isolate and track the Sunni extremist threat from the early 1990s onward as we began, in particular, to see the consequences of North African terrorist groups responding to pressure from North African and European governments ... and the dispersal of veterans of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Bosnia.

Like agencies of other nations, CSIS had no specific information that could have prevented the attacks on New York and Washington. But September 11, 2001 found the Service with assets that allowed us to make a contribution to the ensuing international manhunt for people who inspired, funded or otherwise supported the September 11 attackers. Requests from U.S. agencies for CSIS information on Sunni Islamic targets increased 300 per cent in the months following September the 11th.

The next requirement of an effective intelligence-gathering organization is real capacity to manage information. In the computer age, this means a unified database. Since the early 1980s, all operational reporting of the Service, no matter from where it is obtained, has been contained in one data base that is available to all intelligence officers with a need to know from coast to coast.

This unified database is now the envy of security and intelligence organizations in other jurisdictions, and very few can match it or have the tools we have to exploit it. It was employed through the late 1990s to identify, monitor and report to government on a series of suspected Sunni extremists and resulted in a number of successes.

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The third element of a fully effective intelligence agency is the centralized organizational structure that can ensure investigations are run in a tightly disciplined manner. Legislators insisted on this form of management to ensure that operations were run according to strictly defined government requirements and clear policy guidelines. Centralized decision-making imposes discipline on the balance between individual and collective rights that is inherent in all of our operations.

But, central control of investigations also encourages consistency between the actions and judgments of investigators who are working together on files that may span the entire country and reach halfway around the world. It also helps to ensure that information moves from the field to those who need it, while it is relevant and useful to them.

The adjustments have continued since the 1990s. A premium was placed by policy-makers on intelligence information sharing after September 11th, so intelligence agencies around the world have been experimenting with ways to make this work.

Information sharing is not a new idea for CSIS. The choices made by Canadian legislators in the CSIS Act made it not only possible but essential to develop liaison relationships with other agencies around the world. In this way, we were prepared from the beginning to deal with the new and more complex trans-boundary sources of terrorist threat. We have relationships with foreign agencies in order to receive information from them. We provide information to selected agencies on carefully chosen aspects of our targeting in order to gain access to foreign-held information that we need. We have protocols, procedures, and there are limits on what we will share in order to nurture the international network.

Since the fall of 2001, we have been examining ways to ensure that what information we share with other government agencies and other levels of government in Canada can be delivered more broadly and in the most effective way possible. A new mechanism has been established at CSIS, called the Integrated National Security Assessment Centre (INSAC), to facilitate this sharing of all-source intelligence. While it is located at CSIS headquarters, the centre draws personnel on loan from other elements of the Canadian intelligence community, including those involved with defence, immigration, transport, communications, customs, critical infrastructure, foreign affairs and law enforcement, to name a few. People work in a collaborative environment, bringing the intelligence insights of their home organizations to the table.

INSAC products are designed to be used by the Government of Canada to warn provincial and territorial partners of current threats, which can sharpen anticipatory and response reflexes at local levels.

On another front, a counter-proliferation responsibility centre has been created within CSIS to answer the growing threat to international peace and security from weapons of mass destruction. More than two dozen countries around the world possess or are in the process of acquiring weapons that are capable of inflicting mass casualties or the systems to deliver them. Beyond that, there has been a growing interest among certain terrorist groups in acquiring these nuclear, biological or chemical weapons systems.

We have refocused our operational priorities to create a more strategic investigative effort against proliferation with the establishment, in July of 2002, of a Counter-Proliferation Branch that combines the skills of counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism. Exchange relationships exist with other federal government departments and agencies, including those involved in foreign affairs, defence, customs, national research and nuclear safety.

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Conclusion

The lawmakers who framed the CSIS Act may not have known how far-sighted they would be. But they clearly anticipated a world of increasing complexity – a world where nations would interact more frequently, where extreme views and violence would be exported around the globe.

Their work has stood the tests of time. Canada has the means to see threats coming and to warn its decision-makers while they can still react. This mechanism is as valid and valuable as it was 20 years ago, when the Service first confronted the challenges of terrorism.

As a result, Canada has an organization in its arsenal of responses to international threats that is better able to answer the challenges than it has ever been.

As for the future, change is the only sure thing. Extremists have proven their determination to exploit the trans-boundary movements of people, of money and of goods. They have used advances in communications and in other technologies to further their cause. Because the ability to adapt to change is a built-in feature of the CSIS Act, we can also adapt – and we will.

Operationally, CSIS continues to evolve to meet these threats, both in North America and abroad, because they are persistent and evolving . If anything, the lessons of recent years lead to the conclusion that they are not going away soon and that we and our allies need, therefore, to retain the focus on these issues that has given all some successes in the fight against terrorism. Now is not the time to declare victory and rest on our laurels.

Date modified: 2005-11-14

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