Most of the national media outlets have covered what I watched on CPAC today.  Rob Nicholson (Attorney General and Min. Justice) and Peter Van Loan (Min. Public Safety) tabled legislation which is allegedly meant to empower police with greater capacity to fight cyber-crime.

It’s hard not to feel fatalistic about this kind of legislation - it seems this kind of curtailing of Court oversight in law-enforcement is a pernicious ideology that pervades the Conservatives, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

While I’m obviously not opposed to enabling law-enforcement bodies do their job of apprehending criminals - I am suspicious of any law that might provide them with increased autonomy. The RCMP has an astonishing degree of latitude afforded it already and increasing their freedom at the expense of citizen rights subverts the very purpose of the police.

Of course the conventional boogey-men of the internet are trotted out again to provide a pretext for what amounts to systematic constraints on our, that is Canadian’s, right to privacy and presumption of innocence. Child molestation, fraud and identity theft - this apparent torrential storm of cyber-crime is difficult control under the existing framework, at least that’s what the RCMP lobbyists would have you believe.

There is little explanation as to how this legislation will manifestly improve the capacity of police to catch cyber-criminals. The kind of data they would gather can, in no way, positively associate a crime with a given person. Server logs, access records of IP addresses etc. are at the very best, circumstantial, at worst ambiguous and muddying rather than implicative.

I suspect that this legislation is met with enthusiasm by media companies - particularly Rogers and Bell-Globemedia. Buttressed with seemingly inevitable copyright restrictions mirroring the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act, this act actually provides subsidy for these corporations to develop the infrastructure required to investigate and prosecute alleged copyright infringers on a grand scale.

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To some this may seem patently obvious but it’s worth repeating that, throughout history, those people we (in this case “Western Civilization”) hold in the greatest esteem are those that think in and about systems.

These days the best paid employees are CEOs, doctors, lawyers and software developers among many others. These people specialize in systems. CEOs are concerned with the systems of productivity and profitability. Doctors are concerned simultaneously with the body as a system but they are also responsible for the proper functioning of our health-care system. Lawyers provide the generative constraints on our social systems. Software developers construct virtual systems for interaction, commerce and information storage.

It is puzzling then that our education system, and in fact our society. Lacks any sort of operable understanding at a general level of how different kinds of systems are structured and how they function.

Globalization to many scholars is the symptom of a greater struggle between two opposing kinds of organizational structure - command-and-control hierarchies with decentralized networks. This struggle is manifested in many proverbial (and often literal) battlefields.

How then will we grapple with teaching a new generation about how systems work? Or will this knowledge by the purview only of an elite professional class of people lucky enough to have learned the concepts?

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