I certainly admit, you understand as well, that this is quite a task. The Internet is a network set up by the military many years ago, and specifically designed so that it could be entered into from just about any place, you could access it from just about any location. It was built so that there would be redundancies in case of failures or attacks in certain locations. It's a very difficult nut to crack. It's the beauty of the Internet. I think it's a highly democratic structure. I think the military has to be applauded for creating a democratic structure, but at the same time, any security agency is going to have a terrible time trying to detect threats and being able to deal with them appropriately.
Within the context of the threat we're looking at here, we were asked by Minister Toews—and just in passing, I'm sure we all wish him a speedy recovery. I understand he's still hospitalized, and that's never something I would wish on anyone. We're here because he was threatened specifically by a YouTube video that was posted, and my understanding is that in fact it was posted outside of Canada as well. So there was a YouTube video that was sitting on a server elsewhere. The very structure of the Internet makes it very hard to determine where it's residing. There are servers all over the place. Again, redundancies within the IP system would make it very difficult to determine where the fault lies and where the threat is coming from.
I'd just like to understand better. If your mandate is to protect us against foreign signals and intelligence, to protect the Canadian government and Canadians in general from IT security threats, threats that seek to steal or do harm to federal information systems, where does that fit in within our mandate here?
We started this with a YouTube video that was posted, so where is the threat exactly in the YouTube video? Is it possible that, if you click on the link for that YouTube video, a hack would automatically come into this country and possibly compromise your security here? Would that be a fair and accurate reason why we're worried about this particular YouTube video?