We haven’t heard much that’s new, but then again this is a gathering of spies who are not likely to reveal their secrets. But when one of the country’s top spooks, cse chief Keith Coulter, finally talks, the crowd hopes he will have something profound to say about Getting It Right. Coulter, head of the agency since 2001, has a doctorate in political science from Carleton University and is a fighter pilot who once commanded an American CF-18 squadron. He begins by saying, “It’s time to share more information than we have in the past to meet the realities of the post-9/11 world.” To do this, his outfit has “two business lines.” One is called sigint, lingo for foreign signals intelligence, meaning the collection and analysis of foreign e-mails, phone calls, radio transmissions, and other communications. Coulter says there has been more pressure to deliver sigint information than ever before, and it began five weeks before 9/11.

The second business line is IT security. “We have leading-edge technical expertise to defend government communications,” he explains. This line is in “a growth phase,” and he will soon be working with a task force dedicated to reducing cyber attacks. And he is being pushed to do more faster.

So, in the interest of getting it right, is his outfit intercepting our e-mails? Our phone calls? No, he reassures us. The Criminal Code prohibits it unless it can be proven that both users are foreigners. But somehow that doesn’t make me feel any more secure about my own rights to privacy. “People use a vacuum cleaner analogy,” he says, “but that’s not how it works; we selectively hunt for what we’re looking for within huge banks of data.” And yes, they are sharing their data with the US National Security Agency.

There is also much discussion on the failure of sigint and the importance, says Coulter, of bringing back humint, or human intelligence, i.e., the quaint notion of using people, not machines, to hunt and gather facts. Gradually, the failure of sigint to make a difference in preventing 9/11 and the finding of wmd (as they call the whole weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco) becomes the underlying theme of the conference.

So, what are we left to conclude—that spies on the ground in Iraq would have revealed a lack of wmd and prevented the ensuing debacle?

The most pleasant diversion is from David Ignatius, a Washington Post foreign-affairs columnist and the author of five spy fiction novels, and guess what? The spying in his books involves more humints than sigints. Journalists are also humints, it seems, and Ignatius acknowledged that the American media have failed the public over the past three years. “We did not get it right,” he stated, “either in covering 9/11 or Iraq. With Iraq we were insufficiently skeptical. We reported what people said, but not whether what they said was true.”

So how do we get it right then? If there is one person at this spy-fest who might have an answer, it is Margaret Purdy, former deputy secretary on security and intelligence for the Canadian Cabinet. After studying the root causes of terrorism, she believes there are several key ones: poverty, a youth population bulge in the Arab world, globalization, extreme religious views, and failed states with repressive regimes. And she thinks she knows why we have been getting it wrong all this time. “The obstacles to developing long-term prevention strategies to terrorism,” she says, include “governments’ refusals to acknowledge the legitimate root causes of terrorism, the unwillingness of governments to admit that their actions might be creating terrorism, a reticence to cite religion as a factor, and, most important, the irreversible nature of some causes, such as globalization.”

And none of the spies at the conference had a solution to any of these problems. Which, as the spy-fest concluded, left us all with a troubling question: which is really more effective—humint or sigint?