Mr. Simon O'Brien:

We are a State investigative agency. We are a corporate body. I was faced, and we were faced, with threats to our independence and to the way we do our business. I think it was a proportionate and justifiable action to open this investigation and then allow us to use some of our police powers to look at these specific threats - one involving the telephone and one involving an IT network. Again, without going into policing methodology that would benefit other people, it was important that we could proceed quickly. While I have said that I keep an open mind, I have to say on this one that I really hoped that I could close this down, isolate, potentially look at those threats and then say that we had mitigated those threats because they do not come forward. That was always my intention. If one looks at where we are now, we cannot get to any specific place where we can say these threats have moved forward any more than that they could have been suspected surveillance activities.