Thank you, Mr. Murphy.
I'll keep my comments to two points and I'll try to be as brief as possible.
First of all, I want to reiterate the importance of the lawful access perspective. There is misunderstanding on the part of the public, based on some of the media articles I've seen over the course of the past few years. Law enforcement and intelligence officers, right now, merely want to be able to do in 2009 what Parliament intended that we be able to do back in 1974 when the original legislation was enacted. We need to bring legislation to today's standards to be able to benefit from or facilitate the use of today's technology. That's my first comment.
The second comment, which really hasn't surfaced in my responses when I was talking about the multi-faceted approach, is to deal with the importance for us of ensuring the enforcement community's ability to share information and intelligence between agencies, both domestically and internationally—there is an issue domestically as well. We need to realize that good intelligence will allow us to have early warning of what is coming down the road and will put us in a position to prevent some of the actions of criminal organizations.
In the legislative reviews, aside from lawful access there's also a need to look at some of the legislation put in place, sometimes several decades ago, governing the exchange of information—including the Privacy Act—to make sure that federal agencies can share the intelligence, among themselves and with the provincial and municipal agencies and vice versa. A gap exists now that is actually putting Canadians at risk.