Mr. David McGill:

Head 46 is an innovative head in respect of the new legislation. It allows us to keep abreast of new evolutions in technology. At present our powers under section 787 of the Companies Act allow us to apply for search warrants to enter premises. That search warrant allows us to interrogate any electronic devices found on the premises. We are also allowed to use any devices to search any connected devices, whether at that premises or somewhere else. One of the issues that poses for us comes back to maintaining risk concerning evidence and maintaining best evidence. By using evidential items on-site to access other evidence, we are actually interfering with evidence. That is not best practice.

We also have a substantial amount of equipment and software that we could bring with us and use that instead to interrogate devices in offices. Our current powers, however, do not allow us to do that. There is also the issue of the proliferation of mobile devices. They have permeated every aspect of our society. Most of the data stored on those devices are now stored in cloud services and not on the physical devices. Trying to transfer data from a device into an evidential item, such as a USB key, is virtually prohibitive. If enacted the way we envisage, this new section will allow us to use our own devices and the log-in credentials from the mobile devices on-site to access the cloud services instead. We can then take the data down that way. It is a much sounder and more robust approach.