Industry minister needs to wake up

Re ‘Massive’ cyber attack hijacked NDP

vote, March 28 Your article explains that the NDP voting mechanism was probably compromised by a “botnet” — a robotic network of compromised computers usually belonging to people you call “innocent and unsuspecting.” I call them negligent and stupid. And I call the federal government criminally negligent and stupid. For almost a century, Industry Canada has published standards for analog and digital telephone equipment, with strong prohibitions against the connection of unregulated equipment that has the po- tential to seriously damage or destroy parts of the public switched telephone network. One unregulated overvoltage device connected to a phone jack by a stupid or negligent or malicious individual can destroy phone communications for thousands of people. Yet, the Harper Conservatives allow anyone with a personal computer or even a cellphone — devices with more computing power than NASA needed to put a man on the moon in 1969 — to connect to the global public Internet with no requirement that it be protected by antivirus, anti-malware or firewall safeguards.

As we have seen, this unregulated connection of powerful devices loaded with remotely controlled malicious software has the potential to bring down our democratic processes, to falsify results, to eventually place control over entire governments in the hands of criminals. That is a consequence far more sinister than a burnt-out resistor in the phone company’s central office.

Just how far behind is Christian Paradis and his industry ministry that there is not one single regulation to govern connection to the Internet, the communications tool that is shaping the world’s future? Stuart Rogers, Toronto