Law enforcers plan Canadian cyber-crime centre

The Canadian Association of Police Boards’ initiative to establish a global centre for cyber crime in Canada got a boost this week with a $100,000 pledge from Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.

The CyberPol Global Centre for Securing Cyberspace is envisioned to become a centralized collaboration centre for Canadian and international law enforcement agencies in a bid to combat all forms of cyber crime, according to Ian Wilms, president of the Canadian Association of Police Boards (CAPB).

“There are only 245 technology police officers in Canada and in almost every single crime now there is a computer involved,” said Wilms. “Whether it’s a BlackBerry, cell phone or computer, they are going into evidence rooms and it’s taking six months to a year to actually get to do forensics on it, which is completely unacceptable in this day and age.”

The federal government’s contribution will help fund a national study the CAPB will conduct on the impact of cyber crime on all sectors of Canadian society, Wilms said.

The study will involve both businesses and consumers to get a sense of the extent of computer-related crimes in Canada, including child exploitation, financial fraud, identity theft and intellectual property offences, he added.

The cyber crime impact study will be conducted over the next four months, after which the CAPB will release a national report “so Canadians can become aware,” Wilms added.

At the same time, the CAPB will commence work on a feasibility study that will bring together various law enforcement agencies, including the RCMP and municipal police forces, technology experts, as well as security partners from the U.S. and other countries to determine what the best model for the CyberPol Centre would be, he said.

Much of the details of how, when and where the CyberPol Centre will be established have yet to be determined, but Wilms is certain that the initiative will create a central clearing house for developing policies and assisting countries, not only in enforcing the law, but in prosecuting crimes in the borderless world of the Internet.

“Law enforcement is kind of stuck in a bit of a jurisdictional rut, I guess,” said Wilms. “With computer crimes crossing so many borders, it’s extremely hard to prosecute, especially with everybody’s computer laws not being in the same standard.”

While the proposed CyberPol Centre may be a “perfectly legitimate exercise,” the difficulty for the proponents of this project will be on trying to get stakeholder support, according to Mary Kirwan, CEO of Toronto-based security consultancy Headfry Inc.