Dan Rogers is a secret servant. He was appointed director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in October 2024. But he has spent more than twenty years in the intelligence world, starting out as a software developer at the Communications Security Establishment in 2002. He now leads an agency governed by the CSIS Act—first passed in 1984 and recently updated through Bill C-70 to reflect today’s threat environment.
Anyone taking on the job as head of CSIS has to brace for whatever might come their way. For Rogers, that included the final phase of the foreign interference inquiry (launched in 2023 to examine attempts by foreign actors to sway federal elections and democratic institutions), the return to power of United States president Donald Trump, and pressing cultural and morale problems within his own agency. A 2024 employee survey revealed only about 40 percent had confidence in top management, and, according to an interview with Huda Mukbil, a former CSIS intelligence operative, many criticized excessive red tape and ineffective decision making. Allegations of sexual harassment and a “macho culture” have damaged morale, Mukbil said. Rogers, reports the National Post, acknowledged these issues as “disappointing and unacceptable” to staff, pledging reforms.
It’s the role of the CSIS director to juggle a multitude of national security threats, never more so than in the present, where the Arctic faces growing challenges, like spying and military activity from countries such as Russia and China.
The following exchange was conducted by email and lightly edited for clarity and length.
The Service published its 2024 Annual Report in June, one of the principal ways it provides information to Canadians about CSIS. You also just delivered your first public speech on threats to Canadian national security. What do you think is the nature of public attitudes towards CSIS and trust in the ability of CSIS to perform its mission?
That is a great question, and one that we take seriously. For CSIS to effectively deliver on its mandate, we must have the trust of Canadians. Thankfully, in recent years our work has been front and centre in the news, which has helped Canadians understand what we do and why it matters. Earlier this year, we conducted Public Opinion Research regarding Canadian attitudes to CSIS. This was the third POR since 2018. The POR research indicates a greater awareness of CSIS among Canadians than in 2021 and 2018, and that CSIS has the trust of the majority of Canadians. A total of nine in ten Canadians also indicated they were more willing to support CSIS upon learning of its actions to protect national security, which highlights why it’s so important that we continue to share information with Canadians.
The CSIS 2024 annual report calls attention to a shared concern among our Five Eyes intelligence partners about youth radicalization to violent extremism. What are you seeing in Canada and across our allies that is worrying?
Violent online groups, including accelerationist occult networks (AONs), utilize online platforms and applications, such as Discord, Telegram, Roblox, and Minecraft, to deliberately target, victimize, and recruit vulnerable children and youth under the age of eighteen.
In addition to our most recent Public Report, we joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and our Five Eyes partners in publishing a report on young people and violent extremism. It details how minors can pose the same risks as adults. As “digital natives,” minors have grown up online and are technologically savvy. They can use the online environment to interact with adults and other minors, allowing them to view and distribute violent extremist content or lead violent extremist groups.
Engaging with minors is more complex than engaging with adults. The unique characteristics of adolescent development require our agencies to factor in additional considerations when dealing with them.
Can you say something about the extra considerations required in CSIS investigations involving minors? Are they legal, ethical, operational, or do they involve specialized training?
All CSIS operational activities, including those involving minors, are conducted in accordance with the CSIS Act. When planning and conducting operations, we continuously consider a minor’s inherent vulnerability and the special care we need to afford them due to differences in maturity, experience, and cognition. For example, CSIS investigations involving minors require higher levels of approval to make sure that our decision making is well considered.
Canada’s Arctic is now a main focus of our defence effort. What is the CSIS role in contributing to the security and sovereignty of Canada’s North?
We actively monitor foreign state intentions and actions, including those from the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. We also engage with Arctic partners, including Indigenous organizations, industry, and governments, in various outreach capacities. This includes providing relevant information to help inform decision making. Contemporary security threats to the Arctic stem not only from strategic competitors’ military capabilities and from the effects of climate change but also, increasingly, from espionage, foreign interference activities, and illicit economic activities.
Given the rising tempo of threats, does CSIS have the resources it needs to meet the challenge in the Arctic? Are there things that CSIS needs to do to strengthen its engagement with Arctic powers, including Indigenous groups?
The new disclosure powers granted under C-70 in Section 19 of the CSIS Act—which now allows us to share intelligence whenever action or public interest demands it—let us more fully engage with key partners, including provinces, territories, Indigenous organizations, the private sector, and cultural, ethnic, and religious organizations. We can provide them with information and share expertise so that they ready themselves against a range of high-impact threats. CSIS is also working more closely with trusted international allies, and it’s making sure Indigenous priorities and partnership opportunities are part of any security discussions that affect the region.
Are there ways to measure whether CSIS’s Arctic initiatives are actually strengthening sovereignty and security?
Evidence of progress is showing up in the intelligence CSIS now receives. Contacts and relationships built over time with Arctic communities and the different levels of government have resulted in valuable threat-related information being shared proactively with us. This would not have been possible without CSIS’s dedication to expanding and deepening relationships with key stakeholders. We continue to travel regularly to the region to offer and participate in threat briefings, panel discussion, and other engagement opportunities.
You say that CSIS has been transformed in recent years, including in relation to the environment in which it must operate. Can you tell us about some aspects of this transformation?
The threat landscape has evolved considerably over the past twenty-five years, and we’ve had to keep pace and evolve with it. Unsurprisingly, CSIS’s focus in the 2000s was primarily counterterrorism, or CT. Today’s environment is much more complex and destabilized, and we face the full array of national security threats all at the same time. While CT remains a concern, we contend with cyber threats, foreign interference (including transnational repression), espionage, sabotage, and so on. And to do that effectively, we need to prioritize more deliberately and nimbly than ever.
Advances in technology and the evolving nature of the online environment also add to the complexity. Geopolitical realities are shifting; states are becoming more competitive and assertive, which raises the value of intelligence—both the intelligence CSIS provides and the intelligence that hostile services seek to obtain. The evolving nature of technology and the increasing amount of sensitive information and resources held by the private sector also means that we have to consider how to partner and engage differently in Canada to protect our security and prosperity.
All of this has meant we’ve had to reassign resources, restructure aspects of the organization, adopt technology at an accelerated pace, change the nature and increase the breadth of our international partnerships, and more.
Of course, transformation isn’t a one-time effort. We’ll need to continue to evolve and get comfortable with a constant and demanding pace of change. My priority is to ensure we can do it quickly enough to be prepared for whatever Canada will face in an increasingly unpredictable security environment.
The Service celebrated its fortieth anniversary last year. This also means that aspects of the CSIS Act are pretty old. There have been recent changes to the legislation. Is more needed to be done?
Amendments to the CSIS Act under Bill C-70 have closed some gaps so that CSIS can better protect Canadians and Canada, but it will come as no surprise for those that follow issues of national security closely that CSIS would still benefit from a review of its enabling legislation. Canadians rightly expect that CSIS has the authorities it needs to protect Canada against today’s threats. The reality is, however, that as technology has changed and the value of data has increased, our ability to provide the same level of protection to Canadians has, in some ways, diminished.
That said, the government and Parliament will have the responsibility of determining what kind of agency they want us to be. We’ll provide advice to the government around options they may consider to update the CSIS Act to help us keep pace.
There was a line in the 2024 report that caught my eye. On page 27 it states, “for the first time in many years,” CSIS made concerted efforts to counter sabotage. Dealing with potential sabotage is part of the original CSIS mandate. Can you tell us how this threat has arisen recently?
Over the past year, and as was widely reported by media both in Canada and in Europe, Russian intelligence proxies were involved in activities that posed a threat to civil aviation and international supply chains. Our European allies have commented publicly that they have seen an increase in violent sabotage operations across Europe in 2024. CSIS will continue to work with our allies to prevent sabotage operations from affecting Canada.
Foreign espionage is a long-standing, founding concern for CSIS. How has this threat changed in recent years?
In recent years, we’ve seen a shift in the foreign espionage threat, largely driven by changes in technology and societal trends.
Private sector organizations, academic institutions, and other levels of government, are increasingly targets of espionage efforts. The larger amounts of sensitive information and the positions of influence that they hold has made them more attractive targets. They have increasingly valuable intellectual property, research data, and other sensitive information that can be exploited for economic or strategic gain, or even to enable transnational repression or foreign interference.
The widespread availability of cyber tools and techniques and the recruitment avenues opened by social media and similar technology have lowered the barrier to entry for many actors, increasing the number of potential threats.
Were the government to decide in the future to create a full-blown foreign intelligence service as part of CSIS, what are the challenges that a CSIS director would face?
If the government were to be interested in a foreign intelligence service, we’d provide the best possible advice and support to help. I’ll have to reserve my advice for the government, but I think that I would start by saying that CSIS already does significant work internationally and with international partners, and the Communications Security Establishment already does excellent foreign SIGINT (signals intelligence), so there is a strong base on which to build, and that the overlap between our security intelligence and foreign intelligence priorities is probably larger than ever, given the environment we’re in.
What changes do you anticipate might occur in Canada’s intelligence relationships with allies and partners? Why do these relationships matter?
Today’s geopolitical landscape is clearly changing and more divisive. States compete more than ever for economic opportunities, and any perceived weaknesses of alliances or multilateral institutions could cause states to act more boldly to advance their interests, sometimes in ways counter to Canada’s interests.
In this environment, the value of alliances, like the Five Eyes, NATO, and the G7, among others, remains essential to build innovative, prosperous, and resilient economies; to deter our adversaries; and to counter increasingly sophisticated and transnational threats. They serve as a force multiplier, providing the scale to advance our interests on the global stage and to burden-share as we collectively grapple with an increasingly threatening world. But they can’t be taken for granted or neglected; member states, including Canada, must contribute and play an active role in supporting common goals that help strengthen our collective security.
Beyond this, I think that it will be important for CSIS to continue to deepen a variety of international relationships to be as ready we can for any future changes in the geopolitical environment. That includes relationships with the intelligence services of states where we’re not aligned on all issues—we can still advance common interests, but equally, we will need pragmatic ways to address security concerns.
Does that involve CSIS reassessing any of those partnerships?
From an operational perspective, we have no choice but to prioritize partnerships and joint work with international allies—our size and the volume of issues demand it. On the whole, we’re doing more work with international partners in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia while keeping our Five Eyes relationships strong.
You run a big organization, maybe three times the size it was prior to 9/11. How do you engage with Service employees?
As director, I’m very proud of the capable professionals I work with at the service, and I’m grateful to each of them for their personal commitment and dedication to the mission. For me, engagement tends to be best in small groups and in a variety of direct engagements across all levels of the service. I’ve made a point of visiting each of our regions across Canada over the last year and plan to continue that trend. Of course, the biggest barrier to this engagement is the demands on my time, so I always find myself wishing I could do more.
Engagement is essential because the work environment of each person in the service—from front-line professionals through to senior executives—is, in my opinion, the biggest determinant of how effective we are as a service. The ability to retain skilled professionals, make effective decisions, nurture the best ideas for our operations, and refine our judgment and risk tolerance all depends on this. No amount of technology, training, or level of resourcing can compensate for a service that lacks focus, makes slow decisions, or applies poor judgement. Engagement—not just from me but across the service—is the way we understand these experiences and learn how to improve. It helps us understand each other, feel safe to innovate and try new things, and be united in the face of our challenges.
Finally, there is a phrase in John le Carre’s collected letters, A Private Spy, where he writes: “In a healthy democracy it is probably not desirable that the intelligence services be wholly efficient, or wholly admired.” It’s quintessential Le Carre, but what do you make of it?
Hah! It’s a great quote. In a way, I think he’s making a good point. In a healthy democracy, intelligence services should be subject to oversight and review, including sometimes slightly adversarial scrutiny. That scrutiny means we’ll be less efficient than we could otherwise be because enabling oversight and review means additional steps in decision making, rigorous policies, sometimes onerous record keeping, judicial and quasi-judicial oversight, etc. But this tension is what helps citizens know that their services are acting within the bounds that they consider appropriate and, on balance, in the overall best interests of the country.
In my view, what matters most in a democracy is getting that balance right—and getting the balance right means having a balanced, informed, and honest conversation amongst Canadians and decision makers about the trade-offs. It also means regularly re-evaluating that balance against the environment we find ourselves in. When our security environment changes, Canadians might rightly expect changes in the actions of their security services.
