Reviews

Unpacking the CSE’s 2021-2022 Annual Report

/ Christopher Parsons
black binocular on round device
Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) released its 2021-2022 Annual report on June 28, 2022.1 The CSE is Canada’s leading foreign signals intelligence and cryptologic agency. It is specifically tasked with collecting foreign intelligence, defending government of Canada networks as well as private networks and systems deemed of importance by the government, providing assistance to federal partners, and conducting active and defensive cyber operations.2 The CSE operates as a Canadian equivalent to the United Kingdom’s GCHQ.

Five things stood out to me in the annual report:

  1. It provides more details about the kinds of active and defensive cyber operations that the CSE has undertaken while also clarifying when such operations might take place. This information is important given the potentially deleterious or unintended impacts of the CSE exercising these capabilities. It is, however, worth recognizing that the CSE is casting these activities as preventative in nature and does not include a legal discussion about these kinds of operations.
  2. The report extensively discusses threats to critical infrastructure and the activities that the CSE is undertaking to defend against, mitigate, or remediate such threats. Many of the currently voluntary engagements between the CSE and industry partners could become compulsory (or, at a minimum, less voluntary), in the future, should Canada’s recently tabled infrastructure security legislation be passed into law.
  3. We generally see a significant focus on the defensive side of the CSE’s activities, vis-a-vis the Cyber Centre. This obscures the fact that the majority of the agency’s budget is allocated towards supporting the CSE’s foreign intelligence and active/defensive cyber operations teams. The report, thus, is selectively revelatory.
  4. No real discussion takes place to make clear to readers how aspects of the CSE’s foreign intelligence, cybersecurity/information assurance, assistance, or active or defensive cyber operations authorities may interoperate with one another. The result is that readers are left uncertain about how combinations of authorities might enable broader operations than are otherwise self-apparent.
  5. As I raise at several points when analyzing the annual report there are a number of situations where information in the annual report risks concealing the broader range(s) of actions that the CSE may undertake. Readers of the annual report are thus advised to critically assess the annual report and read what it specifically says instead of what it may imply.

In this post, I proceed in the order of the report and adopt the headlines it used to structure content. After summarizing some of the highlight elements in a given section I proceed with a short discussion of the relevant section. The post concludes with a broader assessment of the annual report, what was learned, and where more information is desirable in the future.

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Review: The Bridge in the Parks-The Five Eyes and Cold War Counter-Intelligence

/ Christopher Parsons

There are innumerable books, movies, podcasts, and TV shows that discuss and dramatize the roles of intelligence services during the Cold War. Comparatively few of those media, however, discuss Canada’s role during the same period. Molinaro’s edited volume, The Bridge in the Parks: The Five Eyes and Cold War Counter-Intelligence, goes a way to correcting this deficiency by including five chapters on Canada,1 as well as post-script, in a nine chapter book about Cold War counter-intelligence practices.

The Bridge in the Parks is written by historians who have used archival research and access to information laws to unearth information about a variety of Five Eye security services. The aim of the text as a whole is to “add nuance to what has often been a polarizing historical field in which scholars are forced to choose between focusing on abuses and the overreach of intelligence agencies in the Cold War or discussing successfully prosecuted individuals cases of counter-intelligence. This volume thus seeks to add complexity to this history, more in line with the “grey” world in which counter-intelligence has often existed” (8). On the whole, the book is successful in achieving this aim.

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Unpacking NSIRA’s 2020 Annual Report

/ Christopher Parsons
black and white typewriter on table
Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

On December 13, 2021, the National Security Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) released its 2020 Annual Report. NSIRA is responsible for conducting national security reviews of Canadian federal agencies, and their annual report summarizes activities that have been undertaken in 2020 and also indicates NSIRA’s plans for future work.

I want to highlight three points that emerge from my reading of report:

  1. NSIRA has generally been able to obtain the information it required to carry out its reviews. The exception to this, however, is that NSIRA has experienced challenges obtaining information from the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). It is not entirely clear why this has been the case.
  2. While most of NSIRA’s reviews have been completed in spite of the pandemic, this is not the case with CSE reviews where several remain outstanding.
  3. NSIRA has spent time in the annual report laying out tripwires that, if activated, will alert Canadians and their elected officials to problems that the review agency may be experiencing in fulfilling its mandate. It is imperative that observers pay close attention to these tripwires in future reviews. However, while these tripwires are likely meant to demonstrate the robustness of NSIRA reviews they run the risk of undermining review conclusions if not carefully managed.

In this post, I proceed in the order of the annual review and highlight key items that stood out. The headings used in this post, save for analysis headings, are correlated with the headings of the same name in the annual report itself.

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Reflections on “Foreign Interference: Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process”

/ Christopher Parsons
crop hacker typing on laptop with data on screen
Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

It is widely expected that Canadians will be going to the polls in the next few months. In advance of the election the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has published an unclassified report entitled, “Foreign Interference: Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process.”1 

In this post I briefly discuss some of the highlights of the report and offer some productive criticism concerning who the report and its guidance is directed at, and the ability for individuals to act on the provided guidance. The report ultimately represents a valuable contribution to efforts to increase the awareness of national security issues in Canada and, on that basis alone, I hope that CSIS and other members of Canada’s intelligence and security community continue to publish these kinds of reports.

Summary

The report generally outlines a series of foreign interference-related threats that face Canada, and Canadians. Foreign interference includes, “attempts to covertly influence, intimidate, manipulate, interfere, corrupt or discredit individuals, organizations and governments to further the interests of a foreign country” and are, “carried out by both state and non-state actors” towards, “Canadian entities both inside and outside of Canada, and directly threaten national security” (Page 5). The report is divided into sections which explain why Canada and Canadians are targets of foreign interference, the types of foreign states’ goals, who might be targeted, and the techniques that might be adopted to apply foreign interference and how to detect and avoid such interference. The report concludes by discussing some of the election-specific mechanisms that have been adopted by the Government of Canada to mitigate the effects and effectiveness of foreign interference operations.

On the whole this is a pretty good overview document. It makes a good academic teaching resource, insofar as it provides a high-level overview of what foreign interference can entail and would probably serve as a nice kick off to discuss the topic of foreign interference more broadly.2

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Review: Top Secret Canada-Understanding the Canadian Intelligence and National Security Community

/ Christopher Parsons

Canadian students of national security have historically suffered in ways that their British and American colleagues have not. Whereas our Anglo-cousins enjoy a robust literature that, amongst other things, maps out what parts of their governments are involved in what elements of national security, Canadians have not had similar comprehensive maps. The result has been that scholars have been left to depend on personal connections, engagements with government insiders, leaked and redacted government documents, and a raft of supposition and logical inferences. Top Secret Canada: Understanding the Canadian Intelligence and National Security Community aspires to correct some of this asymmetry and is largely successful.

The book is divided into chapters about central agencies, core collection and advisory agencies, operations and enforcement and community engagement agencies, government departments with national security functions, and the evolving national security review landscape. Chapters generally adhere to a structure that describes an agency’s mandate, inter-agency cooperation, the resources possessed and needed by the organization, the challenges facing the agency, and its controversies. This framing gives both the book, and most chapters, a sense of continuity throughout.

The editors of the volume were successful in getting current, as well as former, government bureaucrats and policymakers, as well as academics, to contribute chapters. Part One, which discusses the central agencies, were amongst the most revealing. Fyffe’s discussion of the evolution of the National Security Intelligence Advisor’s role and the roles of the various intelligence secretariats, combined with Lilly’s explanation of the fast-paced and issue-driven focus of political staffers in the Prime Minister’s Office, pulls back the curtain of how Canada’s central agencies intersect with national security and intelligence issues. As useful as these chapters are, they also lay bare the difficulty in structuring the book: whereas Fyffe’s chapter faithfully outlines the Privy Council Office per the structure outlined in the volume’s introduction, Lilly’s adopts a structure that, significantly, outlines what government bureaucrats must do to be more effective in engaging with political staff as well as how political staffers’ skills and knowledge could be used by intelligence and security agencies. This bifurcation in the authors’ respective intents creates a tension in answering ‘who is this book for?’, which carries on in some subsequent chapters. Nonetheless, I found these chapters perhaps the most insightful for the national security-related challenges faced by those closest to the Prime Minister.

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Review of Desk.PM’s Publishing App (v. 1.0)

/ Christopher Parsons / 6 Comments

Desk.pmI downloaded a copy of Desk last week, an OS X applications that is designed for bloggers by bloggers. It costs $30 from the Mac App Store, which is in line with other blogging software for OS X.

To cut to the chase, I like the application but, as it stands right now, version 1.0 feels like it’s just barely out of beta. As a result there’s no way that I could recommend that anyone purchase Desk until a series of important bug fixes are implemented.

What’s to Love

I write in Markdown. At this point it’s so engrained in how I stylize my writing that even my paper notebooks (yes, I still use those…) prominently feature Markdown so I can understand links, heading levels, levels of emphasis, and so forth. Desk uses Markdown and also offers a GUI where, after highlighting some text, you’re given the option to stylize add boldface or italics, insert a hyperlink, or generally add in some basic HTML. That means that people like me (Markdown users) are happy as are (presumably) those who prefer working from a graphical user interface. Everyone wins!

In line with other contemporary writing applications (e.g. Byword, Write) the menu options are designed to just fade away while you’re writing. This means there are no distractions when you’re involved in writing itself and that’s a good thing. You always have the option to calling up the menu items just by just scrolling somewhere in the main window. So, the menu is there when you want it and absent when you’re actually working. Another win.

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