Licensing of doctors, nurses, attorneys, engineers, etc. is a means of creating order from chaos and a tool that our society has used to instill public confidence in those practitioners. Anyone attempting to ascertain the professional bonifides of a computer security practitioner may be handed a litany of certificates or credentials that may or may not have bearing on whether the individual can properly identify and preserve evidence of a computer crime.

In short, as computer professionals we don?t have a licensing board, yet. I say yet because the actions described in the article point to a push by government (elected, bureaucratic, and judicial) to bring some order to the situation. We need to get in front of this movement. Rather than complaining that a state legislature has attempted to pigeonhole us with their state?s PI licensing, we need to be lobbing the state with our own licensing scheme. If we cannot do that we will most likely need to get licensed as PI?s to continue to legally practice our profession.


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