Just quickly, our bread-and-butter investigative authority is section 12 of the CSIS Act, which is at RGS—reasonable grounds to suspect. For a section 12 investigation, obviously we have to have RGS that there's a threat to the security of Canada. Not to get too technical, but section 2 of the CSIS Act lays that out broadly: espionage and sabotage; foreign influence; terrorism, essentially; and subversion. Those are the four broad definitions that we would be looking at.
On our side, there's an additional safeguard, let's call it, which is “strictly necessary”. That's to avoid what's been deemed here as fishing expeditions. Not just as a resource question but from an authorities perspective, we can only collect and retain information that is strictly necessary to advance an investigation for us at the RGS level, pinned to section 2 of our act.
Hopefully, that helps.
This is an additional tool, at the same standard, that would allow us, as we've talked about, to get one of the very first steps. Let's say there's a phone number that we think is involved in a terrorism case, for example. We need to determine which provider owns that phone number, whether that's Rogers, Telus, Bell or somebody else, so that we can then come back with the higher level of authorization, which, again, is coming from judicial authorization.