Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Bonjour and good morning. My name is Chris Lewis. I'm the chief scientist at Spamhaus Technology, which is part of Spamhaus, one of the largest and most well-respected sources of Internet threat intelligence in the world. While most of you may not have

Industry committee  Informally, there have been some discussions. Naturally, for example, since I have been consulting directly with CRTC, they are evolving. What they are dealing with is evolving. They themselves are learning. There's a very steep learning curve in trying to deal with this, so they

Industry committee  I believe protection is built into the law about the private right of action. For example, there's the CRTC, the Privacy Commissioner, and the competition branch's ability to override an individual lawsuit. The laws in Canada are fundamentally different in this regard from the Un

Industry committee  I was part of the FASTF deliberations back in 2005-2006. I consulted when they brought it in, and I have watched industry follow it. It has surprised me that some of the companies seem to be going a little overboard with compliance. I have to think that various people are making

Industry committee  The law already has provisions for a lot of that material, for a lot of that sort of thing: if there's an innocent mistake, you write a letter and tell us you're not going to do that again. That's actually in the law. It strikes me that it's fairly gentle in that sense, in that

Industry committee  We do. I'm specifically looking at botnets, but I do see what's going on elsewhere. There is considerably less of what you would call “white spam”, which is somebody making a mistake and sending out stuff they shouldn't have. We're seeing the criminal side. There is more grey. Mo

Industry committee  An example is advertising fake pills. These are being done by groups of people, many people, who when they send out their spam will have a link on it so that when someone follows that link to the illegal pill site, there's a cha-ching that gives the affiliate a penny. It's that s

Industry committee  And that affiliate was Canadian.

Industry committee  They are. I don't know if any of them have gone all the way through yet, but they are looking at that. The other thing they are working on, at a less than “in front of a judge” level, is dealing with Canadian hosting environments or hosting providers who provide web services to

Industry committee  It's quite good. The CRTC needs more time and experience in dealing with them.

Industry committee  Yes. It's a matter of experience and time and working away at it. Mr. Lau is not seeing it, but I'm seeing how the CRTC is interacting with international organizations, law enforcement, and regulatory bodies.

Industry committee  I'm seeing it. There's a lot more going on than we used to see.

Industry committee  Spamhaus offers its threat intelligence data to individuals and small organizations for free. It always has. We are all believers in doing that. However, when we get into a big organization, we figure that we are saving them millions of dollars and making their customers happier.

Industry committee  Yes. In fact—as she was referring to with the question about how small organizations do their marketing and whether they are going to worry about trying to do it themselves—there is a burgeoning market of companies that are specifically intended to run mail and marketing campaign

Industry committee  Did you say the CRA?