Mr. Paul C. Dwyer:

On my background, I am a cyber-threat adviser and I work with the military, law enforcement, etc. The reason I am here today is that this topic is more dangerous and more important than any other type of cyber-criminal work I do, such as on cyber-terrorism. I have come along here to represent an organisation called the International Cyber Threat Task Force, ICTTF, which works on making the Internet a safer place. I am here with my colleagues from the National Anti-Bullying Coalition, NABC.

We need to address this area in a holistic way. We should learn from road safety, and the three Es - education, enforcement and engineering. We need to tackle those three areas. My colleague spoke about the education side of the matter. It is important that each different person, from a collective responsibility point of view, must be educated on what is their responsibility within those areas.

On enforcement, the laws and treaties are not in place to be able facilitate a safe environment for children to socialise, operate and educate themselves online. I refer to such matters as the European Convention on Cybercrime. We need to have these treaties in place so that we can get co-operation from other sovereign states to deal with such issues. This is not an Irish problem. This is a global problem. Fixing it in our own back garden will not fix the problem. We need to deal with that area.

On engineering, there are certain steps that can be taken that do not affect people's privacy because one of the things that will get people's backs up is technology solutions that may invade their privacy, I refer to such matters as IP addresses. We must acknowledge that these massive companies involved in making fortunes out of the Internet have the technology in place to identify users, not only by IP addresses or such numbers but by profiling the devices they are on and their behaviour online. In such cases, one can ban or block users from the Internet on the basis of their behaviour but not from the context of what they are saying or doing online. That would fall nicely into place and complement freedom of expression, freedom of information and such matters that seem to be arguments against being able to block or control what is being said or done online.