CanadaCanada considering expanding powers of its security agencies

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) released a report earlier this month, saying it had identified ninety radicalized Canadians who were either trying to leave Canada and fight for the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, or planning to launch terrorist attacks in Canada.

One of the radicals identified by CSIS was Martin Rouleau-Couture, a Quebecer who had converted to Islam and had already attempted to travel Iraq to fight with ISIS there. On Monday, he used his car to drive over and kill a veteran member of the Canadian forces in an attack near a Quebec military base, before being shot dead by the police.

The Guardian reports that security analysts in Canada say that the two attacks – the one on Monday, and yesterday’s attack on the parliament — constitute a spectacular failure for CSIS, which had claimed to be protecting the country against a range of terrorist threats.

The national threat level was raised on Tuesday, but security experts say there appeared to be no serious tightening of security measures near parliament. Earlier this month, the director of CSIS said in a parliamentary hearing that domestic terrorist threats were real, but not imminent.

The Globe and Mail reports that the Harper government is considering legislation which would expand the powers of CSIS to investigate, apprehend, and detain homegrown terrorists.

CSIS wants the power to take advantage of the so-called “Five Eyes” spy network to which Canada, the United Kingdom, America, Australia, and New Zealand all belong. CSIS is also asking for more power to track Canadians believed to have been radicalized, and to take more advantage of anonymous sources.

Analysts note, however, that Canada’s intelligence services have already been granted considerable additional powers in recent years. Powers crafted in 2012, for example, enable law enforcement to arrest and prosecute Canadians who try to leave the country to fight for a terrorist organization. Rouleau-Couture could thus have been apprehended well before he carried out his attack on Monday.

In addition to these powers, the 2012 law establishes secret courts to compel material witnesses or accomplices to divulge information about prospective terror attacks.

That legislation also gives police the power preventatively to arrest would-be terrorists.

The Globe and Mail reports that Ottawa officials are talking about whether to give CSIS explicit legislative permission to engage in “threat-diminishment” — a power which the intelligence agency’s watchdog recently pointed out that CSIS already uses, but the law does not explicitly permit.

If parliament approves such a measure, CSIS intelligence officers would have greater leeway to deal with their targets.

Current intelligence-gathering techniques — such as CSIS officers aggressively interviewing a young radical’s parents, or his bosses — are in a legal grey area. Experts note that such methods risk wrongly red-flagging individuals as potential terrorists to parents or peers when these individuals have not been charged.

The Globe and Mail notes that a shared concern among security officials in Canada and other countries is that they are overwhelmed by the domestic implications of the threat represented by Islamic State’s so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

Officials say the territory under ISIS control has created a Jihadist nexus which similar groups, such as al-Qaeda, never had. This has increased the scope and pace of the work of monitoring extremists — and keeping tabs on travelers, sympathizers or Jihadists returning from war zones is becoming more time-and-money consuming.

This is because 24-hour/7-days-a-week eyes-on surveillance of any suspect can involve at least a dozen undercover officers and a half-dozen cars.

Canada’s security agencies have another problem: Monitoring phone conversations in Canada is similarly labor-intensive — under Canada’s laws, this cannot be automated. Live operators have to listen to wiretaps.