Information & Ethics committee  Right, but I think “necessary” is pretty wide.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Data, as you know, can be very significant, particularly metadata, which is a lot of what our service harvests these days, and a lot of agencies are trading in it. There's a big debate right now about its usefulness and its probativeness in criminal trials, for example, and wheth

Information & Ethics committee  I guess what you're asking is whether or not the standard should be more forgiving of sharing information—I'm using “information” to include data—or less forgiving of sharing. Again, it comes back to a question of balance. From my perspective, if this is a national security pie

Information & Ethics committee  I think the concept of having regulation of information sharing is a good one. You've heard various criticisms about this particular act, but the idea of identifying agencies that are delivering information and identifying each of the recipient agencies is a good thing. I would

Information & Ethics committee  Well, at least it's better than none. I suppose the Privacy Commissioner will have a particular sensitivity to the extent to which information is being passed on when it's not in accordance with this statute. I don't have a visceral objection to it. I'm more interested in the e

Information & Ethics committee  On the warrant question, I think both Craig and Kent testified about how this is infirm in relation to section 8, to the extent that it connects to criminal law enforcement. In my other life, I defend and occasionally prosecute on the crime side. I would say that this bill needs

Information & Ethics committee  I would say that in a criminal investigation, you can't make a request. You have to....

Information & Ethics committee  No, I think that harmonizes it and rationalizes it to the national security remit.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, on the recipient side I would agree, but on the delivery side, if I can put it that way, I don't have any trouble with who knows what kind of information floats in through any different agencies. This is about national security, so the hub has to be the lead agencies. They

Information & Ethics committee  I don't, provided that the test is a necessity test.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. I don't see why not. As I said, it's not rocket science. I think it was somebody from the service who testified before you who said we have to educate them on relevancy.

Information & Ethics committee  I think there are two components to any sort of after-the-fact oversight of it, rather than a real-time review. I've said before other committees that I think real-time review is kind of silly. You can't have an investigator out there trying to do his investigation and at the sam

Information & Ethics committee  Really, this is just an indemnification issue. The government has to be responsible for mistakes. Individual persons are on this team and are transmitting information. Just by indemnification, the government can solve this problem so that they're not hung out to dry. From my pers

Information & Ethics committee  It certainly allows for sharing of information, but this problem that existed in terms of Air India was really the result of a very immature approach by the RCMP and CSIS to their respective mandates. Of course, keep in mind that CSIS was a baby at that time. It had just been cre