Mr. Colin Larkin:

I thank the Chairman. The simplest definition of telecommunications is the transmission of words, sounds or images electronically. Regardless of whatever laws are put in place, we need to have some sort of infrastructure that allows organisations to build a case of some sort, whether defamation or whatever. Typically, the telecommunications infrastructure for doing this is to use something like lawful intercept legislation. This is what enables criminal and civil cases. It is very clear and simple. All stakeholders, whether the Garda, the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Judiciary, understand the part they play. It forces equipment vendors and telecommunications operators to put lawful intercept infrastructure in place within their networks.

However, telephony is changing beyond anything of which we know today. The existing operators in Ireland are becoming bit carriers. They only carry ones and zeros. The telecommunications systems the members all use to communicate with their constituents are the new telecommunications networks. We need to start thinking beyond the traditional operators we all know that have been here in Ireland for many decades and looking towards these new providers which just see themselves as being a website or application of some sort.

Slide No. 4, for example, shows the new device that will be in the shops at Christmas. It does not look anything like a phone, but that is what we have to deal with. One of the challenges the members will be dealing with is trying to legislate for devices such as this. More challenging still is trying to legislate for devices which persons have not yet thought of and that are just coming out of the skunk works of these large organisations that are supplying these really innovative interesting devices.

Certainly, NABC has a much better understanding of cyberbullying than I do. I come from a technical point of view. Cyberbullying is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is silent and it is anonymous. There is no escape. The traditional sanctuaries of a person's home or bedroom no longer exist. People can reach into them any time of the day or night. Victims' friends and families are largely powerless to help in this. They do not understand it. They do not know how to handle it. There is a lack of education as to what is this technology, what it can do and whatever else. It does not have to be like that.

As Mr. Dwyer stated, the social networks have all the information they need to be able to address this. They know everything about one. They know what one had for breakfast, where one lives, one's friends and family, one's e-mail address, one's phone numbers and one's location. All of the information we need to protect victims exists in the networks today. We just need to access it. It seems a link is being made between free and open sharing of information and being anonymous, but the two do not necessarily come together. One does not have to be anonymous to be able to share information freely. Websites store logins and details.

The legislation and treaties which Mr. Dwyer mentioned are important. I would like the committee to consider examining existing legislation such as that on lawful intercept. Everyone knows what it is all about and it would be easy to educate people. It should be used to extract the information needed from the social networks. They are telecommunications providers although they may not meet the legal definition. Perhaps the Attorney General or Director of Public Prosecutions simply needs to issue guidelines to the local superintendents to give directions to gardaí on what people need to do to address this.

It should be made easy for people to report instances of bullying. There is no big deal to putting an abuse or report button beside a messaging function on a social network application. It would remove the silence and empower victims and give them an escape. It would use the existing lawful intercept infrastructure I spoke about earlier. It could be designed so that if one pushed such a button, a message could pop up on the bully's screen stating he or she had been reported to the Garda. It could gather all of the information needed about the bullying, including photographs, messages and words, and dump it in a secure database under the control of the Garda. All of the information would then be in one place which would make it very easy for someone to create a simple access request for a civil or criminal case. More importantly, it would allow teachers, friends and families to go quietly to the Garda if they perceive something is not quite right to ask them to have a look to see whether something could be done so the matter could be dealt with quietly.