Insight Monitor Dispatches
Hello, Insight Monitor subscribers, and welcome to another week of news and analysis focused on illicit finance. I have a few updates for you: some Monitor news, some Insight news, and some Secure Line podcast episodes to share.
Secure Line
We’ve released two new episodes of Secure Line: the first features
from Debating Canadian Defence. He sits down with Steph and Leah to talk all things Canadian defence, procurement, and relationships. From Justin Trudeau’s stark warning about Trump’s threat to Canadian sovereignty to the challenges facing the Canadian Armed Forces—aging equipment, recruitment struggles, and a reliance on U.S. systems—this episode dives deep. Lagassé explains how Canada’s “plug and play” model of defense has left us vulnerable and what a real path to military independence might look like (spoiler: it’s generational).Then, Steph, Leah, and I get caught up on the news.The Secure Line trio reunites to break down the cacophony of news, rumors, and real threats shaping the political and intelligence environment. From foreign interference in Canada’s early election days to China’s digital whispers on WeChat, from annexation talk on X to a government that still hasn't figured out how to talk to diaspora communities—there’s signal, and then there’s a lot of noise.
Insight Monitor Updates
As many of you might have noticed, our regular news roundup is no longer free to read. Blame tariffs, blame inflation, blame the sheer volume of terrorist financing news: this has become increasingly costly to produce, so we can’t continue to offer it for free. Fortunately, many of you upgraded your subscriptions to help us cover these costs, so we can continue producing it for now (even if it remains a loss leader). You can read our latest edition here, and part II will be released next week.
We’re also in the midst of a series looking at Al Shabaab financing. The first two newsletters focus on how the group raises and spends money. The next edition is coming out next week, and you won’t want to miss it.
Increasingly, I’m also looking at other types of illicit finance. This newsletter was heavily focused on terrorist financing because when it started, I was finishing my book Illicit Money. However, as many of you know, my experience and interest span all types of illicit finance, so you’ll see different aspects in this newsletter in the future. For instance, last week, I wrote about money laundering and why it’s a threat to national security but also your personal prosperity. Check it out here:
Insight Threat Intelligence Updates
We're continuing to build our datasets on the ITI side of the house. We now have data on terrorist financing trends and methods (one of the only empirical datasets on this issue in the world!), terrorism charges, prosecutions, and attacks in Canada, a compilation of FINTRAC annual report data, a summary of all the terrorist financing information contained in UN Security Council reports, and soon, we’ll have a dataset on money laundering. All of this helps us provide evidence-based research and analysis to our clients.
You’ll see some of this in this newsletter, but if you need bespoke analysis on any of these issues, get in touch! We can usually accommodate a few research requests throughout the year.
Finally, we’re continuing to update our case study library for our terrorist financing course. This allows our learners to expand their knowledge using real case studies. Nothing hypothetical here! And yes: our courses are some of the most expensive in the industry, but that’s because we provide exceptional value by offering tools, case studies, and a superior online learning platform.
Our terrorist financing analysis course caters to researchers, intelligence, law enforcement, and compliance professionals to help them learn about terrorist financing and analyze suspicious patterns and activities more effectively. Sign up today!
That’s all the news for this week. Stay subscribed for more illicit finance news and analysis, and be sure to share this with a friend!
© 2025 Insight Threat Intelligence Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
This newsletter and its contents are protected by Canadian copyright law. Except as otherwise provided for under Canadian copyright law, this newsletter and its contents may not be copied, published, distributed, downloaded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or converted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.