By Andrew Amaro

This piece is a response to “Canada can’t tackle national security if we don’t understand our intelligence services” by Matthew A. MacDonald, published in The Globe and Mail on February 18, 2026. MacDonald is an Ottawa-based filmmaker and political scientist developing a major documentary series on CSIS called The Service. I encourage every Canadian to read his article.

Read the original: theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-cant-tackle-national-security-if-we-dont-understand-our

All views expressed belong to Shadow Tactics IIS Carbon Copy and do not reflect the position of any sponsor.

⚠️ Warning Label: This article examines why half of Canada can’t identify its own intelligence service. The uncomfortable truth about a country that wants national security but can’t be bothered to understand who provides it. Side effects may include frustration, patriotic discomfort, and the sudden urge to actually read the CSIS Act.

THE BRIEFING NOBODY ATTENDED

Ottawa. A government building you’ve driven past a hundred times without knowing what happens inside.

Third floor. A room with no windows and no nameplate on the door.

Inside, an intelligence officer is writing a threat assessment that will land on a decision-maker’s desk by morning. The assessment is about a foreign state actor who has been systematically mapping Canadian critical infrastructure for the past eighteen months.

The officer knows the actor. Knows the methodology. Knows the timeline.

The decision-maker will read it, nod, and file it under “concerning but not urgent.”

The Canadian public will never know this assessment existed.

And according to a recent survey — half of them wouldn’t even know which agency wrote it.

HALF THE COUNTRY DOESN’T KNOW WE EXIST

Matthew MacDonald wrote something in the Globe and Mail today that every Canadian should read. Go read it. I’ll wait.

His piece, “Canada can’t tackle national security if we don’t understand our intelligence services,” nailed something that those of us in the intelligence community have known for decades but have struggled to articulate publicly: Canada has an intelligence literacy problem.

And it’s not a small one.

A 2025 Ekos Research survey found that only half of Canadians could identify CSIS as the agency responsible for investigating threats to Canada. Nearly twenty percent said they’d never even heard of it.

Let that land for a second.

One in five Canadians has never heard of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The agency that has been protecting this country’s national security since 1984. The agency born out of the McDonald Commission after the RCMP Security Service got caught doing things that made everyone uncomfortable enough to build a civilian intelligence service from scratch.

And one in five Canadians doesn’t know it exists.

— Grumpy Bob: “Half the country can name every judge on a reality TV show but can’t name the agency that keeps them from getting blown up. This is fine. Everything is fine.”

MacDonald’s Globe article was a call to action about intelligence literacy. But he’s not just writing about this — he’s doing something about it. Over the past year, he’s been meeting with over thirty former CSIS officers and others across Canada’s intelligence community to develop a major documentary series called The Service. And the theme he keeps hearing is the same one I’ve heard my entire career:

Canadians are kept in the dark. And the darkness breeds distrust.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE FROM THE INSIDE

I’m going to say something that might surprise people who think intelligence officers are some Hollywood caricature of trench coats and dead drops.

We’re your neighbours.

That’s not a recruitment slogan. That’s the literal truth. Former CSIS Assistant Director Alan Jones said it best when he told MacDonald he wishes Canadians would see the people who work for the Service as the neighbours they are — Canadians trying their best to serve their country.

But let me tell you what “serving their country” actually looks like for the people MacDonald’s article doesn’t mention. The people who never get mentioned. The TechOps side of the house.

Because when Canadians think about intelligence work — if they think about it at all — they picture analysts at desks reading cables. Maybe a handler running a source at a café. That’s the clean version.

Here’s the version nobody talks about.

THE OPERATORS IN THE WALLS

Technical operations personnel don’t sit at desks.

They crawl through attics at three in the morning. They navigate ventilation shafts in buildings they were never officially inside. They work in tunnels, crawlspaces, and confined areas that would give most people a panic attack — in the dark, in silence, on a clock, with zero margin for error.

They pick locks. Not the YouTube hobbyist kind. The kind where failure means compromise, where compromise means an officer is in danger, where “in danger” means something very specific and very permanent.

They attack servers. They exploit Bluetooth vulnerabilities in devices that belong to people who would very much like to know they’re being watched. They breach cybersecurity systems designed by nation-states with budgets ten times the size of ours. They deploy technical collection capabilities in environments where getting caught doesn’t mean a performance review — it means an international incident.

They operate regionally. Not just in Ottawa. In places across this country and beyond that I can’t name, doing things I can’t describe, for reasons that will never be declassified in our lifetimes.

And they do all of this alongside allied services — the FBI, CIA, NSA, and others — on joint operations involving critical infrastructure protection, supply chain threat analysis, and counter-proliferation work that most Canadians don’t even know Canada participates in.

I know this because I was one of them. CSIS TechOps. That was my world.

— Grumpy Bob: “People think intelligence work is Jason Bourne. It’s actually closer to a plumber who can pick locks, hack servers, and fit through a ventilation shaft — except nobody thanks you and you can’t tell anyone what you fixed.”

These are the people MacDonald’s documentary needs to capture. Not just the analysts and the policy advisors — though their work matters enormously. But the operators. The regional teams. The technical specialists who built capabilities from nothing, improvised solutions in impossible conditions, and came home to families who could never ask how their day went.

When Jones told MacDonald he wants Canadians to see intelligence officers as neighbours — this is who he’s talking about. The person next door who can’t explain the bruises, the odd hours, the phone calls at 2 AM, the trips with no itinerary. The person who carries things they can never put down.

And that’s the part of intelligence work that no survey will ever measure. Not just whether Canadians know CSIS exists — but whether they have any concept of what it costs the people who serve inside it.

Intelligence work, when done correctly, is invisible. You don’t see it because it worked. But here’s the cost of that invisibility: when something does go wrong — when there’s a leak, a failure, a controversy — the public has no framework for understanding what happened. No vocabulary. No context.

They judge the work based on what they see in movies. And movies get it spectacularly, dangerously wrong.

— Grumpy Bob: “Hollywood thinks hacking means typing fast with green text on screen. Real TechOps means lying flat in a crawlspace with a laptop balanced on your chest, sweat in your eyes, and thirty seconds before someone checks a door. But sure, tell me more about how Jason Bourne did it.”

THE THINGS NOBODY TELLS YOU

MacDonald raised an example that stopped me cold — not because I didn’t know it, but because someone finally said it in public.

Canada’s F-35 fighter jets rely on U.S.-controlled intelligence mission data, developed and validated at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. If Washington decides to withhold that data — for any reason, political or otherwise — it could theoretically compromise our jets and our pilots.

Will they? Probably not. Unless things between Canada and the U.S. go somewhere nobody wants them to go. But the point isn’t whether they will. The point is that this is the kind of dependency most Canadians have never contemplated.

And it’s just one example.

Do Canadians understand the distinction between intelligence and evidence? Do they know that CSIS officers can’t arrest anyone? Do they understand why intelligence can’t always be shared in a courtroom? Do they appreciate the moral and psychological toll of doing this work for years, in silence, with no public recognition?

These aren’t academic questions. These are operational realities that shape how Canada protects itself. And if the public doesn’t understand them, they can’t make informed decisions about the policies, budgets, oversight, and accountability structures that govern intelligence work.

You can’t think carefully about something you don’t understand. That’s not my opinion. That’s the conclusion of the Mackenzie Commission. In 1966.

— Grumpy Bob: “We’ve been having this same conversation since the sixties. The only thing that’s changed is the threat actors got better and we got more confused.”

THE SECURITY ILLUSION

Here’s what frustrates me most.

Canada is in the middle of the most complex threat environment it has faced since the Cold War. And I’m not being dramatic. I’m being measured.

China is conducting systematic espionage operations against Canadian institutions, universities, and technology companies. Russia hasn’t stopped. Foreign interference in our democratic processes is documented and ongoing. Our critical infrastructure — energy, telecommunications, financial systems — is being probed by state actors on a regular basis.

And Canada-U.S. relations are at a point where we can no longer assume our closest ally will always have our back unconditionally.

This is the moment where intelligence literacy stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a national security imperative.

Because here’s the thing: a country that doesn’t understand its intelligence services can’t properly fund them, can’t properly oversee them, and can’t properly support them.

And a country that can’t do those three things is a country that is flying blind.

— Grumpy Bob: “We want world-class intelligence but we fund it like a bake sale and understand it like a spy novel. Good luck with that.”

SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

MacDonald is doing something with The Service that I think matters more than most people realize. And frankly, it’s something our intelligence community should have done years ago. He’s giving former intelligence officers a chance to tell their stories. Not operational secrets. Not classified material. Their stories. What the work felt like. What it cost them. Why they did it.

That’s not a security risk. That’s a bridge.

Because intelligence literacy doesn’t start with reading the CSIS Act. It starts with understanding that the people who do this work are human beings making impossible decisions under impossible constraints, on behalf of a country that mostly doesn’t know they exist.

Here’s what I think needs to happen:

We need to talk about intelligence openly. Not operations. Not sources and methods. But the role, the purpose, the value, and the limitations of intelligence in a democracy. We need Canadians to understand what CSIS does the same way they understand what the RCMP does or what the CAF does.

We need former officers to step forward — especially the operators. Within the boundaries of what’s permissible, we need people who’ve done this work to speak publicly about it. Not just the analysts and the executives. The TechOps people. The regional operators. The ones who picked locks and crawled through ducts and breached systems. MacDonald found thirty who were willing. There should be three hundred. And the TechOps community — the people whose work is the most invisible and the most misunderstood — should be leading that charge.

We need the government to make intelligence literacy a priority. Not just in policy circles. In schools. In public discourse. In the same way we talk about defence spending and military readiness, we need to talk about intelligence capability and why it matters.

And we need the media to do better. CSIS makes the news when something goes wrong. It almost never makes the news when something goes right — because when it goes right, nobody knows anything happened. The public narrative is permanently skewed toward failure.

Go read MacDonald’s piece in the Globe. Share it. And if you know anyone working on The Service documentary — support it. This is the kind of work that moves the needle.

— Grumpy Bob: “We stand on guard for thee. It’d be nice if thee knew we were standing.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“Canada can’t tackle national security if we don’t understand our intelligence services”

By Matthew A. MacDonald • The Globe and Mail • February 18, 2026

theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-cant-tackle-national-security-if-we-dont-understand-our

MacDonald is an Ottawa-based filmmaker and political scientist who has taught at Carleton University. He is currently developing The Service, a major documentary series on CSIS featuring interviews with over 30 former intelligence officers.

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Security discussions from an ex-CSIS TechOps member. Current news and historical references with a spy and security spin.

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