ABSTRACT
The sharing of intelligence information between and among states is among the most important intelligence practices in the post-9/11 era. Its value from a national security perspective is clear: no one state is so omniscient that it has access to all the intelligence information relevant to its national security interests. This observation is even more pertinent in a period in which the focus on terrorism has prompted increased consumption of intelligence shared with and between the states from which Islamist terrorists operate. At the same time, intelligence information sharing presents serious challenges to key values animating democratic societies. Intelligence sharing lay at the heart, for example, of the comprehensive Canadian public inquiry into the precipitous and unorthodox removal in 2002 of Canadian citizen Maher Arar by the United States to Syria, and his subsequent imprisonment and torture in that country. In the Arar matter, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) provision to American authorities of raw information, along with sensationalist (and untrue) commentary on the putative affiliation of Mr Arar and his wife with al-Qaeda, was the likely cause of Arar’s treatment at the hands of the US authorities. Further, as the commission of inquiry underscored repeatedly in its report,
the RCMP provided American authorities with information about Mr. Arar without attaching written caveats, as required by RCMP policy, thereby increasing the risk that the information would be used for purposes of which the RCMP would not approve, such as sending Mr. Arar to Syria.2
