I'm happy to respond, Mr. Martin.
I agree that we should not be circulating the names of access to information applicants far and wide. In this case, that's not what happened.
First of all, Mr. Bronskill was writing stories about this issue fairly frequently, as I mentioned. We knew that. It was known to anybody who was paying attention to the newspaper. That does not mean we knew the name of the ATIP applicant. We did know that Mr. Bronskill was in possession of the documents from an ATIP, because he phoned me about that very issue on February 22, when I was the media spokesperson. He said he had an ATIP released by PCO, and asked if I could tell him about it.
So I knew that he was in possession of documents released by my office under access to information. That doesn't mean we knew he was the applicant for the PSEPC ATIP on the top of that e-mail. Indeed, the assumption was merely that he would likely write another story, given that documents were coming out under access to information.
Perhaps this was not the right assumption to make. We might instead have said that documents were going out on the issue of alleged CIA overflights. In the past, when documents on this issue have gone out, articles from individuals such as Mr. Bronskill have resulted. Therefore it was likely that it would happen again in this case.
However, there's a distinction between assuming that the documents being released are going to result in an article and having knowledge of the ATIP requester. I want to say once more: I'm not and have never been privy to the names of requesters. I was not privy to the name of the requester pertaining the PSEPC ATIP. There was a PCO ATIP that was released. I knew that Mr. Bronskill had those documents because he told me so himself.