David Akin’s On The Hill

My colleague Sinclair Stewart and I teamed up for this story in today's Globe and Mail:
Top officials at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce huddled over the weekend in an effort to stem the fallout from an embarrassing glitch in which the confidential information of hundreds of customers was mistakenly faxed to a junkyard in Virginia.
Chief executive officer John Hunkin, along with chief privacy officer Ron Lalonde, retail banking head Jill Denham, and other members of CIBC's “business recovery team” met at the bank's Toronto headquarters Saturday morning to discuss ways of defusing the controversy and fine-tuning their communications strategy . . . [Read the full story]

The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has taken the remarkable step of banning the use of fax machines for any transmission of customer information in the wake of revelations that confidential data for hundreds of its customers had been faxed to a scrap yard operator in West Virginia.
The Toronto-based bank issued the ban in the early afternoon — shortly after the scrap yard operator, Wade Peer, received two more faxes from CIBC branches, each of which contained confidential customer information.
Peer said one fax arrived at his office at about 11:15 a.m. ET Friday from a CIBC branch in Edmonton. The other arrived about an hour later from a CIBC branch in Ottawa. Both faxes contain names, social insurance numbers, phone numbers, and bank account details for CIBC customers in those cities.
Peer said he has received hundreds of similar documents since July 2001, despite alerting bank officials immediately about the problem and at several intervals since then.
Also Friday, Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart launched an investigation to determine if the CIBC violated Canadian privacy laws.
“This is virtually unprecedented in terms of scale in the private sector anyway,” Stoddart told CTV in a telephone interview from Ottawa … [Read the full story and watch the video report]

The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has been faxing confidential information about hundreds of its customers to a scrap yard operator in West Virginia for more than three years, and he says he can't get them to stop.
Wade Peer says he has been overwhelmed since 2001 by internal CIBC fund transfer request forms containing the social security numbers, home addresses, phone numbers and detailed bank account data of several hundred bank customers.
“Had I been a bad guy, I could have got credit cards in their name, I could have assumed their identity. I could have transferred money out of their bank accounts and they'd never know that it happened,” Peer said at his 30-acre scrap yard in the rolling hills of West Virginia . . . [Read the CTV story and watch the video ]

I've received a pile of e-mail on the CIBC privacy breach, most of it from CIBC customers. Here's my answers to the Frequently Asked Questions in those messages:
Is there a class action suit being launched?
I don't know. If you have a lawyer or know of one, ask him or her.
How do I find out if my information was faxed incorrectly?
So far as I know, the bank has no list of customers who had their confidential customer data sent out of the country. Wade Peer and his lawyer do not have a list, either. Mr. Peer does have a file folder full of documents that contains confidential CIBC customer data but neither he nor his lawyer would show me the contents when I asked.
The only documents Mr. Peer received, though, were for one specific kind of transaction and he has only been receiving CIBC documents since July, 2001. The transaction forms are for a transfer of funds into a CIBC RSP or a CIBC RIF. (They are not for automatic contributions to RSPs but for unique, one-time transfers).
How would this affect me if my personal information is listed on these faxes?
It may not affect you at all for the simple reason that the information appears, by lucky chance, to have fallen into the hands of a responsible individual, Mr. Peer, who either shredded the documents he received or placed them in a locked filing cabinet in his office.
What actions should I take as a client of CIBC's?
I can't help you with that one. You should consult with your CIBC branch manager and other advisors, such as your lawyer.
Is anyone doing anything about this?
Yes. Canada's Privacy Commissioner opened an investigation Friday and, as of Sunday night, had a message at her Web site for CIBC customers.

My friend Tyler Hamilton ,who used to work where I do now, at the Globe and Mail, is over at The Toronto Star, Canada's biggest daily newspaper, where he writes about technology and business. Tyler just jumped into the blogosphere with both feet.
” I've come to realize that blogs aren't about what other people think. It's freestyle thinking, a cathartic ritual jotted down in text so I have proof that what I thought at some point in time really happened,” Tyler wrote in his first post. “Those who visit might like it, might not, doesn't matter, really. Maybe a month from now I'll be hooked. Maybe this will be my first and last entry. I guess we'll see…”
Like my friend Mark Evans (who also used to work at the Globe and now works where I used to, at the National Post), Tyler is great on telecommunications stuff. He's got posts at his blog already on Bell Canada and Nortel.

Hamilton International Airport said last week that its entire passenger terminal is wi-fi enabled, a significant plus over its major regional competitor, Toronto's Pearson International Airport. So far as I know, Wi-Fi access at Pearson is pretty much restricted to special lounges and is not available where it would be most valuable, in the waiting areas outside the departure gates. WestJet and CanJet are the two major carriers that offer service to Hamilton's airport. Opti-Fi Networks is the company that is wiring (or do we say, de-wiring) the Hamilton site.

Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto is the most expensive airport in North America — and second most expensive in the world, behind one in Tokyo — to land a plane in. Airport operators typically charge airlines a landing fee to cover the costs of putting a plane down on the tarmac. But at Pearson, the cost for a average-sized jet (an Airbus 300) is more than $3,300 (U.S.) and that's nearly double what it costs to land at the second most expensive airport in North America, New York's LaGuardia. Atlanta, the busiest airport in North American, charges less than $150 for the same service that Pearson charges more than $3,300 for.
Last week, my Globe and Mail colleague Brent Jang reported that Pearson's operator – the not-for-profit agency known as the Greater Toronto Airport Authority — had floated the idea of bumping those landing fees by a further 18 per cent. As one source on the story told me, if Pearson went ahead with that increase — and it appears from Brent's article that they are backing away — that would have meant that landing fees would have doubled at Pearson since 2002.
Of course, even though airlines pay these fees, it's passengers who are ultimately dinged for them in higher ticket prices. And since Toronto is Canada's busiest airport — 50 25 million passengers a year — and acts as a hub for much of the country's domestic and international traffic, that means that costs of air travel in Canada are higher than many other jurisdictions.
And while Toronto was tops, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton all placed near the top end when it comes to landing fees.
This data — a selected chunk of which is reproduced in the table below — was compiled by a University of British Columbia researcher, working for a group called the Air Transport Research Society.
I used some of that data in a CTV National News piece I did on Pearson's plans to open a new $2-billion airport east of Toronto in Pickering, Ont. In the following table, all dollar figures are in U.S. currency.

	BOEING 747-400 (524 seats)	AIRBUS 300 (266 seats)	CRJ200-LR (50 seats)
Toronto	$7,965	3,311	483
New York – LaGuardia	4,506	1,874	2,73
New York – JFK	3,063	1,273	186
Cleveland	2,818	1,171	171
Newark NJ	2,450	1,019	148
Denver	2,441	1,015	148
Seattle	2,188	910	133
Vancouver	2,084	866	74
Calgary	1,974	821	77
Boston	1,934	804	117
Washington, D.C.	1,864	775	113
Edmonton	1,818	756	93
San Francisco	1,733	720	105
Philadelphia	1,654	688	100
Los Angeles	1,488	618	90
St. Louis	1,470	611	89
Miami	1,348	560	82
Phoenix	691	287	42
Atlanta	350	146	21

From David Weinberger's Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (otherwise known as JOHO) blog:
Joho the Blog: BBC World Service goes RSS

BBC World Service goes RSS
This is way cool — a major news service (hey, we're talking The Beeb here!) distributing its news by letting us view it wherever and whenever we want. And in lots of languages.
Here's an informal email (lightly edited) from Ian Forrester:

BBC World Service have gone public with RSS 1.0 feeds
I'm proud to say we at the BBC World service have launched RSS 1.0 (RDF) feeds to the public and automatic discovery of the rss feed is also in place.
There is no help or notification page of any type yet because we are tackling the problem of working with many different languages. The multi-language rss reader and aggregator market is still very much in flux it would seem. We are very much relying on automatic discovery at this stage, as not to confuse our audience.
We chose RSS 1.0 because of its universal acceptance throughout the blog/we…

I don't know that I've been much help so far, but I'm on the advisory board for a new and, I think, exciting e-journalism program at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ont. Rob Washburn is the driving force behind this initiative. I met Rob very early in my career. He was at the Cobourg Daily Star Belleville Intelligencer and I was at the Orillia Packet & Times as the city hall reporter. Rob was really into spreadsheet and database software, convinced that these software tools could be put to good use by reporters to crack open data and unearth new and exciting stories. He organized a workshop at Loyalist and brought in some pioneers of what we would call computer-assisted reporting or CAR from the U.S. Rob's initiative got me fired up about using these tools and I've been a big fan of using the spreadsheet as much as the word processor in my daily reportage ever since.
Rob is still writing and reporting but, today, he is at Loyalist teaching new generations of journalists. The e-journalism program he's developing will be — he and and his advisory board hope — a kind of sandbox for journalists old and new to experiment with new methods of newsgathering and storytelling. It's called e-journalism because it meshes traditional journalism skills and techniques with some new electronic opportunities — everything from blogs to streaming audio and video to Flash content.
I'm happy to report that Samantha Israel, a Ryerson University student, visited Rob at Loyalist and had good things to say about Rob and the program. Samantha (when she isn't saying absolutely silly things about me) is putting together a piece for the Ryerson Review about blogging and journalism in Canada. If you read the blog she's got going as part of her homework for that subject, I'm sure you'll be able to spot some writing which sounds like it's just about to ready to hop into a magazine piece.

FOX News commentator Bill O'Reilly says he's keen to broadcast to us Canucks. As my Globe and Mail colleague James Adams reports in today's paper, O'Reilly made mention of the fact that Canadian broadcast regulators had approved the distribution of FOX News here in Canada during a segment on his show called the Most Ridiculous Item of the Day:

Another ridiculous situation: Looks like the Canadian government will finally allow Fox News into that country, and it might happen next year if one of the cable operators up there picks us up, and they should, we'll make 'em a lot of money. The headline today in the Toronto Globe and Mail read CRTC likely to approve abrasive Fox News. Of course, The Globe and Mail makes The New York Times look like the Jerry Falwell newsletter, so we're not too upset with what they say. We want all Canadians to know how open-minded we are, and we look forward to broadcasting north of the border. Eh?

You can watch a bit of O'Reilly in action in the news item my colleague Lisa Laflamme produced for last night's CTV National News. [Be sure to click on the Video link on the right hand side of the page.]