In my opinion, you have raised an important issue, namely, the type of categorization that both the police and people working in national security need to do. The message that I would like to give you today is not that any type of categorization is prohibited under the Privacy Act, far from it. It is absolutely essential that our security forces do this type of classification. The problem that we have raised and which results in a contravention of the Privacy Act and in a breach of citizens' rights occurs when categorization is inaccurate and false.
I will go back to my example of the review we did pertaining to the RCMP's exempt data bank, which existed at the same time that the Arar Commission was doing its work. If we had not had the authority to audit that exempt bank, there would have been all kinds of inaccurate audits, and the name and identity of several thousand Canadians would have ended up in an exempt data bank, because these individuals would have been persons of interest to the RCMP. When we began our audit, the RCMP was the first to admit that this data bank had not been cleaned up. It's possible— and we were not able to ascertain whether or not this was the case— that there were repercussions for individuals whose name had been in this bank for five or six years at the time of the audit.
I completely agree with you that we need to move persons from one category to another, but this has to all be based on facts.