National practices Suppose information is received from another State which routinely uses torture in the interrogation of suspects. The information alleges that identified persons present in your jurisdiction pose a specific, serious and urgent threat to national security. How should law enforcement and other agencies charged with security treat the information and respond? Perhaps detainees held by another State are interrogated using information supplied by your own intelligence agencies. The State holding the persons later passes the information collected back to your intelligence agency. Your intelligence agency does not know whether the persons were tortured for the information, and does not ask how the interrogation was conducted. Does your intelligence agency bear any responsibility for the treatment of the persons held overseas? What if one of your agents embedded in a terrorist organisation overseas learns of a serious and dangerous plot against national security. If you ask a partner agency working in the State where the terrorist organisation is based to detain the persons who made the threat, they will certainly be tortured, but if you do not pass on the information, the terrorist organisation will likely develop and may carry out the threat. These scenarios demonstrate some of the routine questions faced by executive agencies in the treatment of information or intelligence. But beyond hypothetical scenarios, several particularly egregious examples from real life easily demonstrate some of the risks with intelligence sharing practices. That executive agencies have used torture-tainted information at least in the recent past, as part of the war on terror, has become accepted fact. First, statements made by Foreign Ministers in several European countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom and Denmark have all condoned the executive use of information obtained by torture since 2001. And second, from media reports, it is clear that in many cases, executive agencies 9