Sixth Estate On Overseas Spying

 One of my blogging faves is back, with this post on the notion that CSIS should become a foreign espionage service:

It’s worth asking exactly why CSIS was prevented from foreign operations in the first place. [John Ivison] describes it as just a bit of needless legal fluff. It isn’t. It’s based on the fact that when we set up the Security Service after World War II, fresh from the horrors of Nazi Germany and fretting about the “papers, please” totalitarianism of Stalinist Russia, Canada, the United States, Britain, and Australia agreed that a foreign intelligence service and a domestic security service should always be separate organizations. When you combine them, you say that threats at home and threats abroad can be dealt with in the same way. Again, the KGB and Stasi goons would happily agree.