As an addendum to that, I agree with everything Robert said.
The idea of technology is to me almost ancillary to the bigger issue, and that is of law enforcement resources--in particular personnel. The most effective organized crime enforcement is not in technology, and it's not even in laws; it's in the police forces. It's in experienced, integrated best practices that work.
Bob worked for years at the RCMP. I've worked for the RCMP for years, and I've worked in the private sector with a number of retired RCMP members. The private sector generally hired the best and the brightest of the RCMP. And I was amazed at the differences once they hit the private sector, when you had this core of really elite investigators and what they were able to do.
Another issue as well is police cooperation. ACIIS has been generally a failure. We've pumped millions of dollars into it, but police forces aren't willing to input the data into that database. It's similar with Stats Canada, which does surveys, and of course the The Uniform Crime Reporting Survey. They've added a new element where the police are supposed to report on when they lay charges under section 467--a criminal organization charge--and that's been a failure because the police aren't entering the data.
Historically, one of the big problems in Canada has been the lack of cooperation between police forces, similar to the United States and similar to many other countries. We've overcome that obstacle quite a bit. There's excellent cooperation now, but we still have a long way to go in the sense of sharing information. Police are very jurisdictional about the information, for good reason. Some of it is empire building and some of it is disclosure issues.
So the issue to me is not technology. It's not even criminal laws. It's being able to give police forces the resources, the training, and the expertise to enable them to adequately target these very sophisticated organized crime groups.
On the second question raised specifically to me.... Conceptually, we could look at four different models when attacking crime and organized crime in particular. The first is what I call a prohibition/enforcement model--