For years the SIS has run a public freephone to allow the public to report "information of security concern". As the world has gone online, they've backed this up with an Orwellian-titled "Public Contribution Form", allowing people to anonymously denounce their friends and neighbours to the secret police. So how effective are these mechanisms? Someone used FYI, the public OIA service, to ask. The response? 76% of online submissions are spam or frivolous. Of 370 online submissions:
- 281 (76%) were spam or frivolous;
- 70 (19%) were "determined to be of security interest";
- 19 (5%) were not spam but "did not meet the threshold for our definition of 'security interest'".