Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, let me congratulate you all for making the decision to address the important problem of identity theft in Canada. Let me also thank you for inviting me here today. This provides me with the opportunity t

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and the lack of data is a problem not only in terms of the government being able to understand the problem, but also in terms of our capacity to undertake research and development for the purposes of finding security solutions. As Mr. Dupont stated, not all organizations ar

Information & Ethics committee  We are losing the battle from a technological point of view indeed, not so much in terms of development of new technologies but in terms of deploying them and deploying them effectively, whether it is to combat identity theft or some other more serious issues. Again, it goes back

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I think it's important. Again, the United States has shamed us by investing way more money than we have, dollar for dollar, citizen per citizen, in the development of educational programs in computer security. Also I'd like to underline the fact that—as you say—the solution

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. The problem is that, unfortunately, a lot of these identity thieves are not in Canada. They're not within our jurisdiction. It's organized crime in eastern Europe, in Indonesia, in Brazil, and they're simply outside our jurisdiction. A lot of these countries are not collabor

Information & Ethics committee  I'm going to forward that question to my colleague, Benoît Dupont, who has some interesting ideas about what we could do about disrupting the black market.

Information & Ethics committee  That figure comes from Symantec, which is an anti-virus company. The 2013 report for Canada reports that figure. I'm not an expert on how to quantify these things. Some people might say they suspect that figure comes from a party that is interested in maybe growing the size of t

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I will very briefly. The world of cybercrime has become more complex in the last few years. There are at least four different kinds of groups. There are those who attract you to a website where you are going to get infected. There are those who operate those websites to inf

Information & Ethics committee  That was Aramco. Yes. They had about 30,000 desktops that were—

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Typically viruses do not harm the hardware, but in this case it was a management decision of Aramco. Of course they are rich. They said the best way to deal with the problem is to throw away all those computers, buy new ones, and reinstall them. Probably that was a very goo

Information & Ethics committee  As I said, high school kids hacking with respect to the Heartbleed incident, students from the University of Western Ontario, they used to be the bigger problem. Now they are just a nuisance. They are not the problem. From a social-political point of view, however, in countries

Information & Ethics committee  It's not only the government. It's Canadian industry. It's foreign governments worldwide. It's a worldwide problem. I don't think the Canadian government is less diligent than all the governments worldwide or even all the big organizations. It's not only in the last few years. It

Information & Ethics committee  If you don't mind, I can borrow your credit card, I'll shut off my phone and I'll be able to read your credit card number over the air, and your name, and your expiry date. There's an app for that.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, unfortunately the banks were mostly motivated by profit in developing this technology. They wanted to get their filthy 3.5% of profit on the market of the small pocket change. That's at the cost of Canadians’ privacy because that technology is not protecting their privacy.

Information & Ethics committee  What regulation...?