Last week, Toronto Hydro Telecom announced that it has selected Siemens to power its city-wide WiFi project.

Want to see a preview of the network in operation? Register now for The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit, June 12-14, 2006 where Toronto Hydro Telecom will be powering the onsite WiFi services being provided to all delegates.

I’ll be leading a module tomorrow morning at the Executive Development Program which is run by University of Toronto’s Master of Engineering in Telecom program. I have to say that I enjoy being on campus through the year to deliver the couple lectures to the Master’s program and it is also a rush to be in front of 60 high energy, high potential management employees of the carriers, manufacturers and government.

Hopefully, we’ll get some good discussion going – for me, it’s warm-up time for the big show in 4 weeks, the launch of The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit.

While we can argue about whether the Commander-in-Chief (you know, the guy who is empowered to overturn verdicts and pardon death-row criminals) is allowed to authorize access to your phone records, hopefully there is no disagreement over whether the police can simply use web search engines to help find criminal behaviour.

I’m talking run-of-the-mill web-surfing. That’s what Maryland fire inspectors did to crack a case of 17 fires over the past 4 months.

And today’s winners of the coveted ‘what-the-heck-was-I-thinking’ award are the two teenaged arsonists who bragged about their exploits, complete with photos, to their friends on MySpace.com.

I’m waiting for their lawyer to file suit for unreasonable search. After all, it’s called MySpace, not OurSpace.

Safety tip, kids: the internet is a pretty wide open public space. When bragging about arson, shop-lifting or whatever helps pick up dates these days, you may want to try some other approach.

The freedom to associate with who ever you want to is a pretty fundamental civil right. In Canada, that freedom is found in Section 2d of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the US, the right is established by the first amendment.

By no means am I a constitution expert.

I like to ensure that people examine issues from both sides now, from win and lose, from up and down and still somehow… sorry, that was another Canadian.

A hot news story is how the US National Security Agency has been looking at people’s phone records. Some are arguing that this constitutes unreasonable search and seizure. People are up in arms. I find it fascinating that people don’t mind their phone company having this information, or that someone working in a call centre half-way around the world can look at your calling patterns. But, not the people who take an oath of office to defend and protect you.

Have we seen too many movies?

Let me just note that both the Canadian Charter and US Fourth Amendment use the modifier ‘unreasonable’ in front of ‘search and seizure’. Both countries modify the freedom of assembly with the adjective ‘peaceful’. So, neither right is absolute. Both sides now.

These are different times. When we read that the UK had identified the transit bombers in advance but did not act because of resources, one wonders if people would have preferred that there had been no surveillance at all.

Why am I weighing in on this? It appears to me to have telecom policy issues associated with it although clearly this is an area better kept for real lawyers – not those of us trained for the NY criminal bar by distance learning – otherwise known as watching Law & Order.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state that my politics on this subject are likely skewed in part by having one of my kids attending school in a part of the world that sees more than its fair share of terrorism. Is any amount fair?

It’s interesting for me to try to figure out who reads these postings. Sometimes I wonder if it is simply cathartic – not a bad thing, of course.

Clearly, the internal website team at the CRTC does not read my blog. Otherwise, they would never have posted a note on their site today:

Not after yesterday’s commentary about The Xanga Tango. With one weekend’s power interruption, the CRTC goes to 99.5% availability – two 9’s. That’s if nothing else happens all year – and we know the chances of that!

I guess that Canada’s regulatory departments just can forget about access to the archives this weekend. Take the weekend off. Miller time. There’s nothing important happening anyway. Oh yeah, there was something I read recently about an abbreviated schedule for the VoIP reconsideration. Wait ’til you get through reading the Sunday papers. No problem.

I understand that government security regulations may stand in the way of using off-site third party hosting. Otherwise, there are a lot of carriers and hosting companies that could provide guaranteed up-times, redundant 4-barrel, overhead cam, turbo-charged, gonkulators and all that.

Maybe the CRTC and Public Works can take a look at finding a secure site, somewhere in Canada, to provide business grade hosting services that don’t need to go off the air for 42 hours at a time. By the way, the folks who can help build that for you will be speaking on Wednesday afternoon, June 14 at The Canadian Telecom Summit.

I know, it’s a shameless plug. Hey, this is my blog and it is cathartic. I told you.