Hello, my name is Phil Gurski and I'm Canadian. I spent more than 30 years working in various Canadian intelligence communities as an analyst both with the Canada's signals intelligence organization called CSC, and with the security service, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. And I'm here today to talk to you a little bit about what intelligence analysis is all about, how it's used. And what are the relationships and challenges between intelligence and the outside world, both policymakers and academics. So first and for most, what is analysis? Well, intelligence services can really be divided into largely two types of people. Collectors and analysts. So the collectors are those that, well, collect information. Whether it be signals intelligence, or human intelligence or intelligence that are gathered from partners around the world, that's what they do. Now, collection's not enough because once you collect something, you have to figure out what does it mean, is it important, what does it tell us and perhaps most importantly, what does it not tell us. Meaning what are the gaps in our intelligence collection? So that's what analysis do, we go through the information on a daily basis. We determine whether or not it's accurate, we determine if it's useful. And we go back to the collectors and say, hey, great job, that was great information. Or this complete garbage, this is not true and maybe you might want to get a different source. Or this is great but we need more and I can help the collectors go and find more information to help fill the intelligence requirements that the government asked for. So the collectors collect, the analysts analyse and it's that analysis that goes to policymakers. So in my case, in Canada, the government of Canada would have a number of clients in a variety of ministries, the Foreign Ministry for example. Public safety, which is kind of the Ministry of the Interior in Canada. Department of National Defense, and a few others, and intelligence analysis would be shared with those agencies to help them create policies with respect to national security. So, it's a really important part of policymaking. But there are some problems. In that, intelligence is normally classified. So, in the case of Canada, it's either secret, or sometimes even top secret. The higher you classify something, the fewer people can read it. And even beyond that, even fewer can actually use that to make their policies. So classification is really a problem. Sometimes it's even difficult to get access to classified information because it has to be handled in a very careful and sensitive way, which means you just can't leave it open on your desk. You often have to go to a special computer in a special room, and we all know that if you have to walk more than 15 meters from your desk to a computer, you're not going to do that. So those are some of the challenges I think that policymakers face in using intelligence. I should also say, and this is being very brutal and honest, in Canada, the intelligence culture isn't nearly as robust or developed as it is in let's say, the United States, or United Kingdom. So it's not that intelligence is not used and is not valued, but people really haven't gotten to a point where they integrate it into their daily lives. That's coming. I think we've made great strides in that over my three decades of working. But there's still a lot of work to be done. The other relationship I want to talk about today is that between academics or researchers and the intelligence world. Not surprisingly, traditionally that was a very, very non-existent relationship, first and foremost because of the classification. So, you need a security clearance to look at intelligence information, and very few academics have that security clearance. So, what I found as an analyst, is I would read everything that, well, not everything. I'd try to read everything that academics wrote in my field. Terrorism and homegrown radicalization to violence. And yet, they could read nothing of what I wrote. And going back to the policy world. One of the unfortunate, I guess, results was that policymakers would tend to rely more on academic sources than on intelligence sources to make policy. Because of the access issues I talked about before. So what can we do to make that relationship better? Well, a couple of things. We can allow our intelligence analyst to talk in unclassified public venues. I did a lot of that when I worked for the security service. You have to be careful obviously because you can't share classified information. But you can talk in generalities about what you've seen, what you think's going to happen, what the trend lines are and what are the gaps in our knowledge. Secondly, you can bring academics in. You can give them a security clearance, you can bring them in to look at the data that the security services have. Because one thing is really true, and it's ticked off a lot of academics, but I think it to be kind of a basic reality, intelligence services have the best data. Because that's what they collect for a living. A lot of academic studies by some very bright people with very good intentions are based on little or no data. And that's been a real I think a cause of concern in terms of what does the analysis say when it's not data-driven. When it's not based on actual facts. So we can bring people in, clear them and give them access to the data. The problem being is that they can't publish on it and we all know that in the academic world, it's publish or perish so there might be some obstacles there as well. One thing we've done in Canada, which I think has been really interesting is that my former service, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, developed an academic outreach program. And what that was is that we would regularly bring in academics, either for one-on-one sessions. Or we actually organize conferences with academics from around the world to talk about counter terrorism, counter intelligence, global trends, and that was a way to allow the secret people to talk to the non-secret people and exchange information. So I think a lot more has to be done. I think it's a great opportunity for both sides. For academics to learn about the secret world and for the intelligence world to learn from academics. And I sincerely hope we do more of that in the future.
