You could go to a conference about technology somewhere in the world every day, if you were that crazy.
Conventional wisdom holds that we’re being congressed and summited to death and that only losers spend much time at these things. Recently, I had two consecutive conference experiences that redeemed my faith in conference-going. In fact, they may even pay off for you.
One was Convergence 2001, the annual Canadian Information Processing Society conference. This was Calgary’s year to host the gathering of Canada’s geek elite. And they were there in full form — I spotted one guy with a wireless device on his belt that was the size of a toaster.
But CIPS also attracts a solid business crowd, and they heard some terrific speakers. One of the keynoters, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski, was covered in Business Edge last week. He was good, but some of the small group sessions were terrific!
As just one example, Eric Ouellet of Nortel Networks gave a killer tutorial on Wireless Security. He knows his stuff, having worked in this field for more than 12 years serving Fortune 500 companies, government and military customers.
He covered the many ways wireless voice and data systems can leak your secrets. With the proliferation of cellphones, wireless PDAs and air networks, security often goes out the window as people think about convenience.
Ouellet was so good that the Faculty of Continuing Education at the University of Calgary has arranged to bring him back, in the fall.
He’ll present a full-day tutorial on (prepare to be overwhelmed with acronyms) TDMA, CDPD, Ricochet, Blackberry, GPRS, WAP, WTLS, IP-SEC, 802.11b/g, WEP, i-mode and Bluetooth.
Details are on the faculty’s Web page (see Web watch details at the end of this column) and if you have any responsibility for wireless networks you should be there. Finding a great new speaker like Ouellet was enough to make the conference worthwhile for me, but there was plenty more.
I finally got to understand things like XML, COM and JavaBeans. You can view some of the presentations as Web casts on the Converge 2001 Web page.
Another top-notch conference was the Second International Summit on Cybercrime organized in Washington, D.C., recently by the National Institute for Government Innovation.
Cybercrime is the hottest new topic for police forces around the world — and with good reason. Your stolen car can be replaced, your bank has theft insurance, but if somebody steals your online identity you might really be in trouble.
That was a key message of James Perry, Detective Chief Superintendent of Scotland Yard. He reminded attendees that the old crimes like fraud and extortion are going high tech.
“In the U.K., we’ve got a real problem with drug trafficking where people are using the Internet to order drugs from places where the legislation is more liberal than in the U.K.,” he says. The contraband is then delivered by the unwitting U.K. postal service.
Things are about to get even harder for our friends in law enforcement. “Just off the U.K. coast is the new country of Sealand, which was an old WWII fort put up to protect the U.K. from the German army,” says Perry.
It’s been bought by someone who is starting his own virtual country (www.havenco.com).
While Perry does not accuse the owner of any wrongdoing, there is certainly the potential for abuse when you have your own legally sovereign principality.
“They could set up false investment scams, issue passports, create whole new identities,” says Perry.
“It’s a whole new ball game.”
He argues that international legislation needs to be updated to deal with challenges such as virtual countries.
Canada has its own cybercrime problems, and our law-enforcement authorities are working on their response. Edmonton-based Cpl. Peter McLelan heads the RCMP’s Technological Crimes Unit.
At the Cybercrime Summit, he gave a tutorial on Computer Forensics, the art and science of finding and preserving evidence.
It’s a tricky business, because even booting up a computer can destroy important clues like time and date stamps on system files. One U.S. law-enforcement agency was embarrassed because an agent used a crime scene computer to surf the Web. This gave the defence attorney all kinds of opportunities to challenge the computer evidence, and ruined the case.
One of the best features of this conference was the chance to rub shoulders with Mark Rasch, who served as a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice for almost 10 years.
He was responsible for the prosecution of Robert Morris, who launched the first “Internet Worm,” as well as the German hackers featured in Clifford Stoll’s book The Cuckoo’s Egg.
Now he’s gone to the private sector, as vice-president for cyberlaw of Predictive Systems in Reston, Va.
Like Toaster Man at the CIPS conference, Rasch carries a flotilla of wireless modems and networked PDAs, and he says there’s a major issue hiding inside them. “The expectations of privacy in wireless technology have really not been developed yet,” he says, “so there are questions of what you can pull off the air and read from a law-enforcement perspective.”
When you factor in location-based technology such as GPS, privacy all but evaporates, according to Rasch. “Soon, I’ll not only be able to say that you sent Joe an e-mail, I’ll be able to say that you were standing on a particular street corner when you did it, and exactly the time and date you sent it.”
Looking ahead to the future, most of the experts feel that they’ll be spending less time on issues like Internet death threats and child pornography, and more time catching international financial criminals.
Whole new kinds of crimes will become possible. “The biggest crimes in the cyberworld are going to be crimes against intellectual property,” says Rasch.
“These are crimes against information, not against computers. So the type of Napster copyright things are going to move into video, conversations, voiceover IP, and so forth.”
As new ideas keep coming out, maybe we will have to take in more of those conferences. And if the CIPS Converge 2001 is any indication, we may be able to visit conferences by Web cast without even leaving town.
Web Watch:
www.converge2001.com
www.cips.ca
www.ucalgary.ca/cted/esecurity
www.nigi.org
