Written evidence to be reported to the House
Counter-Terrorism Bill
4:00 pm
Sir Ken Macdonald: Certainly, if we can rely on the intercept material in court it is very useful in founding charging decisions. My sense of it is that if we started to use this material in criminal trials, most of the intercept material that we would use would be police intercept, not agency intercept. My feeling is that once we started to use it, it would become fairly prominent in our armoury. The Australians say that it is so cheap and so effective, the danger is that they use it too much and neglect other areas of investigation. That is obviously something that one would have to guard against.