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 to the fact that those who have the power to deploy those technologies are not motivated to do so. There's a broken triangle of incentives here. Those who suffer, the public, those who can suffer from identity theft, a lot of the time their machines were not hacked, it was somebody else's machine, or in the case that we were just discussing, it was the organization's.
So this is where I think government needs to show leadership and try to mend and put that triangle of incentives together so that those who can fix the problem feel the pain if they don't, or they feel the positive incentives of doing so, for example, through insurance premiums or better deals with government. The technologies are there.
Just to mention one example, when we're talking about identity theft—and the same applies for crossing the border into the U.S.—biometric technologies exist and they are affordable. Granted, they are not applicable to all applications like banking, but there's also two-factor authentication. Again, our friends in the U.S. have made it mandatory for a government-related application to have two-factor authentication for logging into government web servers.
But on the other hand, certain sectors of the industry are going the other way. The banking sector, mostly driven by profit, has decided to go back in the authentication technology and is now promulgating RFID credit cards, that are, from an authentication and identity theft point of view, a bigger problem than we had.
The technology is out there. The standards are out there. The common criteria, for example—you were talking about software of government—are a very well-written, very comprehensive set of technical standards that are being applied to highly secure government systems. Why shouldn't they be applied to certain sectors of industry as well?