Certainly.
First let me say that information sharing amongst our nations continually improves and is at a very high state. I know I, for one, worked very closely with ITAC when I was at NCTC, worked very closely with the Canadian defence forces at the Department of Defence.
But what I was alluding to, sir, is much, much broader than the information-sharing amongst nations. I think we're pretty good; we have lots of room for improvement, but there are vehicles in place. And there's a tendency to certainly treat the members of the Five Eyes and certainly our relationship with Canada as a very important and very special relationship where information-sharing is part of the norm.
I'm actually talking about not only amongst our nations, but internally amongst our own agencies within our own countries, and respectively amongst those agencies. For us in the United States, information-sharing has gone much further than the foreign intelligence of the past and it now butts directly against law enforcement intelligence.
Of course, as you know, as you are very sensitive to that, we are very sensitive in America to ensuring a distinction between foreign intelligence and law enforcement intelligence and information, because we will never have the federal government, and the military, and our homeland defence apparatus using intelligence against American citizens. We try to protect those rights and work very hard at it. That in itself creates a very convoluted system of sharing information among agencies and among law enforcement and intelligence agencies as well.
Case in point: when we talk immigration, one of the things we must consider, of course, is health and medical. I can't speak for Canada, but I would submit to you that we have lots of room for improvement in the United States in the ability to bring our immigration services in line with our health and human services and our centre for disease control, many of the areas that have to come into contact with each other, to ensure that we are protecting the nation against...whether it just be natural occurrence of people with various diseases transmitting globally in a much smaller world that we face today, or, quite honestly, if you get somewhat science fiction about it, perhaps a specific threat of spreading disease throughout the world, the hemisphere, the North American continent.
My point is that we have to work together as a nation and we have many of those vehicles in place. We have to work internally within our respective nations, and then we have to ensure that information and intelligence are shared appropriately across all those interfaces—while protecting sources of information, of course.