Canadian Security Connection

When Parliament was prorogued last month by Canada’s Conservative party government, the so-called anti-malware bill, and three other tech-related bills died.

Getting them back on the legislative agenda will depend on the prime minister’s priorities

The bills are C-27, the Electronic Commerce Protection Act, which covers spam and malware; C-47, which gives police increased power for criminal investigations; and two pieces of legislation, C-46 and C-58, are for fighting child pornography.

Of particular interest to those gearing up their email campaign marketing plans for the new year, is Bill C-27 which forbids anyone in Canada from sending a commercial message to any electronic address unless the receiver has consented.  An exception is if the person sending the message has had a business transaction with the recipient in the previous 18 months. Penalties range from up to $1 million for individual violators to up to $10 million for organizations.

As a business owner,  this may be your window to run that email campaign to prospects you had planned.  As an over spammed consumer, hopefully Bill C-27 gets resurrected and passed soon !

Read realetd story on Network World Canada.

Interesting article in WIRED magazine about a suit suit that could force increased scrutiny on the mostly self-regulated credit card security practices.

Andrea Matwyshyn, a law and business ethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School says…

“We’re at a critical juncture where we need to decide . . . whether [network security] auditing is voluntary or will have the force of law behind it”

“The proposed legislation strikes an appropriate balance between the investigative powers used to protect public safety and the necessity to safeguard privacy and the rights and freedoms of Canadians.”

Another excerpt from the press release…

…”technologies have also provided new ways of committing crimes such as distributing child pornography. We must ensure investigators have the necessary powers to trace and ultimately stop crimes.”

Here are some thoughts from the Canadian Privacy Law Blog and the Gartner Blog on this legislation.

Your thoughts ?? Does  it change things for you ? How does this affect your security policies ? Does it ?