That was the trade-off at the time the legislation was passed, because it was felt to be important to be able to look at large quantities of objectively reported information, in other words, large cash transactions or international wire transfers, which individually are not in and of themselves suspicious, but they are the types of transaction among which it was known that a fair amount of suspicious activity was occurring and could occur. Therefore, to be able to access that information, FINTRAC was created as an airtight or a black box into which all of that information could flow. Then we were very tightly circumscribed as to the circumstances under which we could disclose any of that information to law enforcement.
We have produced quite a number of important leads for law enforcement, and we are increasingly able to identify large networks of individuals who are engaged in money laundering or terrorist financing and were not previously known to the police. Because of the access that we have to the information from a wide variety of reporting entities and information sources, we have been able to identify quite a number of instances where people had been carrying on these activities for many years—eight to ten years—without ever being detected. We have been able to identify them, we've made such disclosures, and some of those disclosures are in fact the subject of prosecutions.
I can't mention them because we have not been identified as suppliers of information to those particular investigations. But over the past year, just watching them go by in the newspapers every day as we read about prosecutions, we've seen 35, maybe 40 instances where prosecutions were ongoing and convictions were being obtained on cases to which we know we supplied some critical information.