Chapters forthcoming

Over the past couple of years I have been invited to write chapters on CSE for two different books, and both are now scheduled for publication in December of this year.

One of the books is Top Secret Canada: Understanding the Canadian Intelligence and National Security Community, edited by Stephanie Carvin, Thomas Juneau, and Craig Forcese. Published by the University of Toronto Press, Top Secret Canada will be "the first book to offer a comprehensive study of the Canadian intelligence community, its different parts and how it functions as a whole. In taking up this important task, the editors and contributors aim to identify the key players, explain their mandates and functions, and assess how they interact with each other."

"Featuring essays by the country’s foremost experts on law, intelligence, and national security"—and, er, also me—"it will be a go-to resource for those seeking to understand Canada’s intelligence community and the challenges it faces both now and into the future."

I think people will find this book a highly useful resource.

Available for pre-order now.

The other book is Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence: The Canadian Case, edited by David Lyon and David Murakami Wood. Published by UBC Press, this book looks at "the profound shift to “big data” practices that security agencies have made in recent years, as the increasing volume of information from social media and open sources challenges traditional ways of gathering intelligence."

My contribution is a bit of an outlier since CSE is not actually a security intelligence agency (although of course it does work closely with CSIS) and my chapter, "From 1967 to 2017: CSE's Transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age," is much more a "history of the present"—how CSE got where it is today—than a discussion of its current Big Data activities. However, I think it does serve as a reasonable lead-in to another chapter in the book, written by Scott Thompson and David Lyon, that does look at CSE and Big Data.

My brief contribution is in no way a substitute for the comprehensive history of CSE that I think the agency should be contracting with someone other than me to write, but it does contain what I think are some pretty interesting details that haven't been published previously.

Also available for pre-order.