Posted on 06/05/2003 3:50:56 PM PDT by MalcolmS
6/5/2003 5:00:00 PM - The Canadian Firearm Centre says anti-gun lobbyists contributed to a flood of data its infrastructure couldn't handle. We talk to EDS, CGI and the IT expert leading a gun control group for answers
An overwhelming number of registrants and anti-gun lobby sabotage shut down the nation's online gun registry days before the New Year's Eve deadline, the Canadian Firearm Centre said Thursday.
Both the CFC's main Web site and the secure site that received actual registrations were "down or up sporadically the three or four days before the deadline," said spokesman David Austin.
Austin said that Canadians attempting to register their guns may have been affected, but couldn't specify how many. "It's hard to determine, because the only way that something would be lost is if someone had been online at the time and in the midst of entering data and the system had gone down," he said. "They would not have received confirmation."
A six month grace period for the deadline has been added in recent weeks, he added. Gun owners that filed their registration request or sent a letter of intent to register to the CFC before Dec. 31, 2002 have until the end of the month to complete the process.
There are 1.9 million licensed gun owners in Canada, said Austin, and 1.4 million of them have registered their guns. The CFC has received 70,000 letters of intent.
Austin admitted that gun owners may have tried to register before Dec. 31 in good faith, but had been unable to due to the CFC's IT problems. "The expectation was that . . . people would apply rather than waiting till the last couple of weeks," said Austin.
Those who didn't meet the deadline could be liable for prosecution.
"They're only going to be on line for prosecution if they encounter a police officer and they have a gun and they can't produce paperwork. It's a possible scenario, but the police generally use their discretion and they take everything into account," said Austin.
The Solicitor General of Canada Portfolio, the federal body that took over Canada's gun control program from the Department of Justice Canada on April 14, did not return calls for comment at press time.
A possible reason for the CFC's capacity issues is the amount of interference the Web site may have received at the hands of anti-gun lobby groups. "Some of the opposition groups were encouraging people in other parts of the world to try to tap into the Web site. . . . We know that it was there but we can't tell the impact," said Austin.
He added that the lobby has also overloaded the CFC's call centre, and have written requesting copies of the firearm act "even though they didn't need it, but just to tie up the system."
The CFC's IT woes really aren't that different from any other government department's, said Wendy Cukier, president of the Toronto-based Coalition for Gun Control. She noted that government projects are frequently plagued by things like budget and capacity issues, but the amount of vocal opposition to the gun registry and made the CFC a flashpoint for controversy.
"The system was built on the assumption that it would have something like a 10 per cent error rate and instead the error rate was 90 per cent. Some of that was because of the compexity of forms and some of that was deliberate" said Cukier, who's also a professor of information technology management at Ryerson University. "You'd be hard-pressed to find another program that faced such extensive efforts to undermine it."
(Excerpt) Read more at itbusiness.ca ...
1) Gun owners wait until last minute to register
2) Some seem to register with intentional errors in the data
3) Anti-gun lobby types from all over the world stage a denial of service attack on the registry, presumably to prevent gun owners from registering. What's their goal--to get them all arrested? You can't arrest them if you don't know they own a gun, because they have not registered. I'm confused.
4) Or does the reporter really mean anti-gun registration lobby?
Stupid peasants, wanting a copy of the law they are required to live under. I pray that Canada returns to sanity soon.
/john
That would be my guess. A silly typo screws up the whole point of the story and leaves multiple readers confused.
OTTAWA (CP) — A recent network crash may have deleted gun owners' names from the already troubled firearms registry, Solicitor General Wayne Easter admitted today.
In yet another blow to the controversial gun-control initiative, Easter said a system overload might have wiped out online applications in late December.
Federal officials are still trying to determine how many applications were lost in the computer crash, he said.
"It's well known that the system could not handle the intake on Dec. 28, 29 and 30 and 31," Easter said after a caucus meeting.
"The system went down because it was overloaded."
He said government officials are getting phone calls from people who believed they registered their guns about the time of the crash, but have yet to receive confirmation.
"There are some problems with some of the people whose names may have disappeared as a result of the crash Dec. 30 of the system," Easter said.
"We're checking that out."
An employee at the Canadian Firearms Centre said the number of lost online applications is likely negligible.
The centre's Web site (http://www.cfc-ccaf.gc.ca/) offers forms for gun owners to register their firearms and a small number of transactions might have been interrupted at the end of last year, said spokesman David Austin.
The system was flooded with applications just before Jan. 1, the original deadline for registration, which was pushed back six months.
Applicants should contact the centre if they haven't received confirmation their application was accepted, Austin said.
"We know by phone calls we received and we know by e-mail we got that people were concerned and they contacted us to see whether or not the information actually had been transmitted," Austin said.
"If anyone did not receive a confirmation message or did not get their certificate, what they should probably do is pick up the phone and give us a call."
People could also use the Web site to check the status of their application, he said.
Easter said the computer system is working fine now, but today's unprompted admission adds to a series of setbacks plaguing the registry.
First came resistance from critics and gun owners, then came drastic cost overruns, and now provincial governments are fighting the project.
Earlier this week, Ontario and Nova Scotia joined Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba's refusal to prosecute gun owners who break the law by failing to register their weapons.
Easter said the law will be applied despite provincial resistance — but he didn't say how.
"I believe there is a responsibility to uphold the law," he said.
"And we're going to move forward with that campaign and we will find ways of getting around to prosecution at the provincial level."
The project came under intense fire last year when the auditor general reported that costs had spiralled out of control, ballooning from an initial projection of just $2 million net to a current bill approaching $1 billion.
And with the July 1 registration deadline fast approaching, the firearms centre says about one-quarter of an estimated 1.9 million gun owners have yet to register their firearms.
Easter said the law will come into effect next month even if thousands have yet to register.
"I have made it very clear that we will not be extending the deadline," he said.
It is as if he is saying, "Only those states that disarm their serfs can be proud of themselves!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.