When Kathy Macdonald goes to work, she's fully armed. But her weapons of choice are PowerPoint and e-mail, the tools she most often uses in her battle against cybercrime.

Reacting to incidents at critical infrastructure in Canada has historically been done on a localized basis. If something suspicious happened - such as someone taking curious photos of a hydro dam - typically it has been dealt with by corporate security staff that might then pass the concern along to local police. If something similar happened at another hydro installation in a neighbouring province, it was unlikely the information was cross-referenced or forwarded to a centralized database.

Privacy advocates may rail against the steady encroachment of video surveillance in public places by law enforcement - but the all-seeing camera eye is also focusing on police departments themselves. 

We see it all the time in television shows like 24: The bad guy is on the run and the authorities have no idea which way he went. But by simply tapping into a video surveillance system and checking out the footage from 10 minutes ago, the police figure out exactly where to find him. Thanks to CCTV cameras, the criminal is apprehended and the case is closed - at least until the next episode.

When you have a 33,000-tonne ship bearing down on a bridge, and it takes a mile to stop, you better make sure that bridge is ready to lift. Cameras also play vital part in safety of employees who work on vessels.

ASIS International, a global organization for security professionals, wants to connect the ivory tower with the security industry's feet on the street through its Connecting Research to Security in Practice (CRISP) reports program.

Quietly, and without a lot of public fanfare, Canadian Pacific has spent the last eight years working closely with other railways and government agencies across North America to protect one of the continent’s most critical supply chains — the company’s 16,000 miles of railway.  

The Calgary Board of Education has awarded a contract to Sonitrol to install Sielox access control systems in 72 K-12 school buildings.

From executives to longshoremen, the 200 people who have security clearance for restricted areas at the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority represent a wide range of individuals.

There have been no major interruptions to the North American electricity supply since the blackout of August 2003, at least on the same scale.

But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been plenty of “incidents,” as Bryan Singer calls them. We — the public — just haven’t heard about them.