Mr. Speaker, I must admit, the first thing I thought of was Bill Gates saying that all anyone would need is 64 kilobytes for their Commodore 64 and nobody would ever need anything more.
On the weekend I picked a little memory stick that has 16 gigabytes of memory on it. The cost of this is coming down very substantially.
On the commercial side, the member is absolutely right. This is a tremendous amount of information. On a personal level, our computers get filled up pretty quickly. I think members of Parliament have all experienced the same thing, where they can go into their office after having left late at night and find somewhere between 100 and 200 emails in their computer. This is such an easy facility to use, so we can understand that so many of these are people from around the world.
The member is quite right that the risk to us is that we have the intelligence or maybe the misapplication of intelligence of virtually the entire world looking at ways in which it can intrude, looking at ways in which it can take advantage of our information, destroy our information, share it with others, or park itself for activation later on.
Some of the Norton software for bugs and the like cannot keep up. Every time I go to Future Shop, there is another version of Norton there.
Certainly businesses need to get engaged here. They have a significant role to play. I do not know how many small and medium-sized businesses, though, have been engaged to protect their information, to protect their software from invasion, and whether they can or even know how to detect it, and this concerns me.
Eventually what is going to happen is that business information will be modified in ways in which there is such a high volume of traffic through it that ordinary businesses that are operationally focused will never be able to see it until there is substantial damage.
Again I thank the committee. I hope we will be able to continue to improve upon the legislation as the risk continues to evolve.