Legal Research

A (Cyber)criminal mind

By Mark Lewis

The colour of this post changed given yesterday’s introduction of Bill 61 but I had completed some research on this prior to yesterday and I would be willing to wager that I put more thought into this post than the BGH’s¹ put into Bill C-61 so I’m going go ahead anyhow.

In May, the Canadian Association of Police Boards released a report which stated that Cybercrime is a close second to Drug Trafficking as the #1 crime committed in Canada. A Report on CyberCrime in Canada. I don’t want to get bogged down in the report but the idea that Cybercrime has become so prevalent caused me to start thinking about the Criminal Code and other related pieces of legislation; so I ran a couple of searches (using CanLII), in doing a search for the word “computer” in the Criminal Code, I found that the word occurs in 17 sections of the Code. A search for the word “computer” in the Evidence act reveals that the word occurs 3 times. The word “internet” does not occur at all in either the Criminal Code or the Evidence Act. “Computer System” is defined in the Criminal Code s.342.1(2)

“computer system? means a device that, or a group of interconnected or related devices one or more of which,

(a) contains computer programs or other data, and

(b) pursuant to computer programs,

(i) performs logic and control, and

(ii) may perform any other function;”

Computer Program:

?computer program? means data representing instructions or statements that, when executed in a computer system, causes the computer system to perform a function;

Computer Service:

computer service? includes data processing and the storage or retrieval of data.

I don’t want to make any assertions based on this very rudimentary inquiry into a couple of pieces of legislation. Prior to yesterday I simply wanted to ask the question, are we in Canada prepared to deal with Cybercrime? After yesterday, I want to ask the question, are our legislators and institutions in Canada even remotely in touch with what is actually going on in the cyber dimension?

1. Big
   Giant Heads

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 13, 2008 (boomark / email).