Canada's Communications Security Establishment,Signals Intelligence and counter-terrorism

Canada's Communications Security Establishment has undergone a far-reaching transformation in conjunction with the expanded role of Signals Intelligence in the global ‘war on terror’. For the first time, Canada adopted a formal statute for CSE, including an expanded remit for countering terrorism. With a shift in targeting priorities towards terrorism and threats to Canadian interests abroad, Canada's participation in SIGINT-related international partnerships takes on new significance. The collection of communication intelligence touches upon public sensibilities regarding privacy rights of Canadians. The evolution of Canadian SIGINT capabilities was therefore accompanied by the establishment, as early as 1996, of a system for intelligence accountability and review, the Office of the CSE Commissioner. Recent advances in communications technology and pressing requirements for Signals Intelligence have impelled changes in the law, while also accentuating the role played by the CSE Commissioner in scrutinizing CSE activities to ensure compliance with ministerial authorizations and the laws of Canada.     

British Intelligence and Propaganda during the 'Confrontation', 1963-1966

This study examines the importance of British intelligence and propaganda in the Confrontation with Indonesia. It shows that Britain had access to human and signals intelligence on Indonesia, which influenced British policy and strategy in several ways. In particular, signals intelligence gave London the confidence to launch 'Claret' cross border raids against Indonesia from 1965. The study also reveals that Britain mounted an aggressive propaganda campaign against Indonesia during the Confrontation and especially after an abortive coup attempt in 1965. British propaganda successfully encouraged the army to destroy the Indonesian communist party, remove President Sukarno from power and end the Confrontation.     

Explaining Petroleum Policy in Britain and Norway, 1962-90

Petroleum policy in Britain and Norway provides comparativists with an opportunity to study policy formation, stability, and transformation on a cross-national basis. This study explains why British and Norwegian officials decided to intervene in the North Sea, why offshore policy in the two countries went through periods of stability and change, and why they adopted similar offshore systems in the 1960s and 1970s but diverged markedly in the 1980s. We develop an explanatory framework using insights from state-centric, group politics, rational choice, and institutional models of policy-making. The framework identifies three decision-making contexts in which petroleum policy-makers operate simultaneously: an oil context, a domestic political context, and an international context, Each context establishes objectives for policy-makers, indicates an acceptable degree of government intervention, and narrows policy options. Rational decision-making within each context, however, may yield conflicting results. These must be worked out through intrastate and/or state-society bargaining. The decision-making contexts in Britain and Norway produced similar policies in the 1960s and 1970s, but the similarities hid deeper differences. Norwegian officials consistently favored state intervention offshore, and Norwegian interest groups successfully lobbied the state for offshore favors, while British officials intervened more reluctantly and paid less attention to societal interests. Differences in decision-making contexts finally produced a major divergence in offshore policies in the 1980s when the Thatcher government dismantled the state's offshore participation policy.     

Gender,quality of life,and growth in Asia 1970-90

This paper examines the gender distribution of the benefits of economic growth in several Asian economies from 1970–90. Using Borda rank ordering, we compare the progress made in these countries towards closing the gender gap in well-being. In addition to commonly-used indicators, trends in the ratio of females to males in the population are examined. We explore determinants of changes in this ratio, using regression analysis. The results indicate that gender equity in quality-of-life ratings is highest in those Asian economies that grew the slowest over the period in question. Further, the data indicate that economic growth does not have a significant effect on the female-to-male population ratios for this set of countries. Variables that affect women's bargaining power do, however, have a positive effect on relative female life chances, as does spending on public education.     

US Atomic Energy Intelligence Against the Soviet Target, 1945-1970

Throughout the Cold War, the United States and its allies mounted a massive atomic energy intelligence effort against the Soviet Union. Long-range, standoff technical systems provided the most data and allowed for successful tracking of many aspects of the Soviet nuclear program. Because of the closed nature of Soviet society and Soviet security and counter-intelligence measures, exploitation of open sources and traditional espionage operations, although important, were less productive. The relative lack of human intelligence made it difficult to understand important developments inside the Soviet nuclear complex and resulted in significant intelligence gaps.     

Competency Costs in Foreign Affairs: Presidential Performance in International Conflicts and Domestic Legislative Success, 1953–2001

Numerous prominent theories have relied on the concept of “audience costs” as a central causal mechanism in their arguments about international conflict, but scholars have had greater difficulty in demonstrating the efficacy and even the existence of such costs outside the bounds of game theory and the political psychology laboratory. We suggest that the audience costs argument focuses too narrowly on the likelihood that leaders will be removed from office by domestic constituencies for failing to make good on threats. Instead, we argue that scholars should ground these arguments on Alastair Smith's ( 1998 ) broader concept of “competency costs.” Our analysis of presidential legislative success from 1953 to 2001 demonstrates the existence of foreign policy competency costs by showing that public disapproval of presidential handling of militarized interstate disputes has a significant and substantial negative impact on the president's ability to move legislation on domestic issues through Congress.     

Fiction,Faction and Intelligence

There is a demonstrable overlap between authentic intelligence operations and the way they have been portrayed in works of fiction, which is not entirely surprising considering the number of distinguished, and some lesser-known, novelists who have worked for MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service over the years. Setting aside for a moment the work of Compton Mackenzie, Graham Greene, John le Carré and Somerset Maugham, arguably SIS's most renowned authors, what about Kenneth Benton, David Footman and Jack Cordeaux? The writing culture was especially prevalent in the Security Service, where the legendary case officer Jack Bingham, for whom David Cornwall once worked, raised no objection to the employment of authors. His colleague Max Knight wrote some terrible thrillers, and his assistant, William Younger, chose the interesting pen-name William Mole. Bingham's wife Madeleine and daughter Charlotte, who also worked for MI5, wrote many books, and they were not alone. Curiously, however, it is Ian Fleming who has attracted the greatest attention for his great invention, 007. Yet there remains some doubt about whether Bond may not have been inspired by his former tutor in pre-war Kitzbuhel, Phyllis Bottome, whose 1946 novel The Lifeline introduced a suave, German-speaking, Swiss-educated, mountaineering, British agent a full five years before the publication of Casino Royale. A coincidence? Maybe, but the paths taken by these two authors criss-cross on many occasions.     

Pork-Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953–94

This article analyzes the political determinants of the distribution of infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to the country's 92 provinces between 1953 and 1994. Extending implications of theories of legislative behavior to the context of open-list proportional representation, we examine whether individually powerful legislators and ruling parties direct spending to core or marginal electoral districts and whether opposition parties share resources via a norm of universalism. We show that when districts elect politically more powerful deputies from the governing parties, they receive more investments. We interpret this as indicating that legislators with political resources reward their core voters by investing in public works in their districts. The governing parties, by contrast, are not able to discipline their own members of parliament sufficiently to target the parties' areas of core electoral strength. Finally, we find no evidence that a norm of universalism operates to steer resources to areas when the main opposition party gains more votes.     

Intelligence,International Relations and 'Under-theorisation'

This article submits that the conceptual framework within which intelligence is studied must continue to evolve and adapt to the new conditions of the early twenty-first century. As more intelligence and intelligence related material than ever before enters the public domain, scholars of international relations must take greater account study of the role of intelligence. Despite its obvious importance to the course of the Cold War, for example, most accounts of the Cold War tend to ignore or downplay the importance of signals intelligence in particular. Intelligence, moreover, is all but absent in most contemporary international relations theory. The essay argues that intelligence should be placed closer to the centre of new interpretations of both the course of the Cold War and of the political dynamics of authoritarian states.     

Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999

At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations of judicialbehavior is the assumption that justices have policy preferences.In this paper we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo methods tofit a Bayesian measurement model of ideal points for all justicesserving on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 through 1999. Weare particularly interested in determining to what extent idealpoints of justices change throughout their tenure on the Court.This is important because judicial politics scholars oftentimesinvoke preference measures that are time invariant. To investigatepreference change, we posit a dynamic item response model thatallows ideal points to change systematically over time. Additionally,we introduce Bayesian methods for fitting multivariate dynamiclinear models to political scientists. Our results suggest thatmany justices do not have temporally constant ideal points.Moreover, our ideal point estimates outperform existing measuresand explain judicial behavior quite well across civil rights,civil liberties, economics, and federalism cases.     

Counter-Terrorism,Information Technology and Intelligence Change

Since 11 September 2001 Counter-Terrorism has been Intelligence's super-priority. It puts a special emphasis on the potential of advanced Information Technology for integrating different databases in different organizations. The problems of applying it fully are organizational and cultural, not technical. They should be met through emphasizing the unity of modern intelligence power, and through personnel policies across separate agencies designed to develop this holistic view. Central authority and leadership will be needed for these purposes.