Fesgrama. Welcome to the justice sub-committee and policing second meeting of 2018. We have no apologies. Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. It's a discussion on the sub-committee's work programme. Are members agreed to that? Yes. Thank you very much indeed. The second item is undercover policing. It's an evidence session from Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary in Scotland's report on its strategic review of undercover policing in Scotland. I would refer members to paper 1, which is a note by the clerk, and paper 2, which is a private paper. I welcome to the meeting this afternoon Michael Matheson, Cabinet Secretary for Justice. Aean Kernehan organised crime unit at the Scottish Government. Derek Penman, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary in Scotland, and Stephen Whitelock, the lead inspector of Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary in Scotland. Two of the meeting. I would invite the cabinet secretary, if he wishes, to make an opening statement of perhaps up to three minutes, please. Thank you, convener. I'm grateful to Derek Penman and his team for delivering their strategic review of undercover policing in Scotland, which I received on 2 November. The review provides reassurance to the public and to this Parliament around the extent and scale of the use of undercover police officers since 2000. It identifies room for improvement and makes a number of recommendations that Police Scotland has committed to implement in full. I have taken my time to consider carefully this detailed and comprehensive report with a view to making a decision on the matter of a public inquiry in Scotland. As I mentioned in my statement yesterday, the Scottish Government is currently being judicially reviewed on the issue of not having held a public inquiry in Scotland. This has also had a bearing on the time that I have taken to consider the report. The on-going legal proceedings with regard to the judicial review constrain what I can say in direct relation to that issue, but I will try to be helpful to the committee as I can. I set out my reasoning yesterday on my decision not to hold a separate Scottish inquiry and did so in some detail. I know that others will take a different view to mine and I respect those views, but I have taken this decision on the basis of all of the information that is available to me. There is a lack of evidence of any systemic feelings within undercover policing in Scotland, and in light of the limited scale of the activities of SDS and NP-OIU police officers in Scotland, I believe that setting up a further inquiry would not be a proportionate response. I believe that such an inquiry would inevitably create a measure of duplication with the undercover policing inquiry by involving many of the same core participants, law enforcement officers, and has the potential to overlap in its conclusions and remedies. It could, because of the scale and duration of the undercover policing inquiry, be subject to potential delay in obtaining metropolitan police service participation and documentation, and would be disproportionate in terms of costs. Our position remains that the clearest and most effective way of addressing concerns about what may have happened in Scotland as a result of English and Welsh police forces is for the terms of reference of the undercover policing inquiry to be amended to allow it to look at the activity of English and Welsh police operations that took place across Great Britain. That is why I wrote again yesterday to the Home Secretary to ask her to reconsider those terms of reference. I have genuine sympathy for the individuals who have suffered due to the actions of undercover police officers who have behaved in ways that are unethical and unacceptable, but I am clear that behaviours by police officers in particular English and Welsh units is properly a matter for the Home Secretary. Police Scotland has established a steering group chaired by Assistant Chief Constable Steve Johnston to oversee delivery of the 19 recommendations made in the report and HMICS are represented on that group to provide advice and context behind each recommendation. I am happy to repeat the mission that I gave to Parliament yesterday that any recommendations arising from the undercover policing inquiry will be considered and where appropriate and necessary implemented. Should new information or evidence become available in due course, particularly through the undercover policing inquiry, I will give it careful consideration and, if appropriate, revisit the possibility of an inquiry. I am grateful to the committee for providing me with an opportunity to give evidence on my strategic review of undercover policing in Scotland. As you are aware, undercover policing raises complex ethical questions and there has been legitimate public and political concern over its use in the past. It must be tightly controlled in accordance with the law, with effective safeguards and robust supervision in place at all times. My statutory function is to inquire into the state, effectiveness and efficiency of Police Scotland, and the terms of reference for this report has primarily focused on providing assurance to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and the Parliament that effective safeguards are currently in place in Scotland to mitigate against unethical behaviours and that undercover policing operations by Police Scotland can be conducted lawfully and with sufficient oversight and scrutiny. I have made 19 recommendations, which I believe will drive improvement within Police Scotland. Some of those will also require engagement with other agencies and should drive improvement undercover policing across the United Kingdom. My report also examines the extent and scale of undercover policing operations carried out in Scotland since the introduction of RIPSA in 2000. That includes operations conducted by legacy police forces across Scotland and, notably, those operations conducted by the special demonstration squad and the national public order intelligence unit for the same period. While I have been able to provide information on the number of operations conducted and a level of detail not previously made public, I have not reviewed those operations. In terms of the information about the SDS and NPOIU, that was provided by Operation Herne and the National Police Chiefs Council. That has been identified from the substantial amount of information being collated as part of their obligations to provide information to the undercover policing inquiry currently being conducted in England and Wales. Having conducted that review, I conclude that the use of undercover officers is awful and the legitimate way of tackling the threats from serious organised crime, cyber and terrorism. The officers who undertake this function volunteer for the role, often placing them in a challenging and occasionally dangerous situation, a role for which they receive little or no recognition. I have been careful in my report not to compromise the operational integrity of the tactic and I am sure that members will understand that, in my evidence today, I will be unable to answer any questions that may identify undercover officers or disclose covert policing tactics. If I could finish by emphasising my own view that there can be no place in modern policing that relies on legitimacy and public consent for the unethical behaviours from undercover police officers that have been identified through previous reports published in England and Wales, I sympathise with those who have suffered from this and I understand their need for justice. The activities of those undercover officers from SDS and NPOLU, whilst operating in Scotland, were part of wider undercover operations being conducted across Great Britain. The responsibility for the management and supervision of those operations lay out with policing in Scotland, in my opinion, they are inextricably linked to the matters being considered by the undercover policing inquiry in England and Wales. It would therefore seem appropriate to me that those who have suffered those operations in Scotland should have some form of redress through the undercover policing inquiry. I ask the cabinet secretary a question yesterday in relation to securing and protecting information. The cabinet secretary assured me that we met all the legal requirements and I accept that unreservedly. I just want to look forward, perhaps rather than backward. I am looking at recommendations 18 and 14 that I talked to the cabinet secretary yesterday, but it would also include 16, which is about a record management system. I really just wonder whether, given the extraordinary sensitivity of information in this area and the potential life-threatening consequences of unauthorised unplanned disclosures in relation to individual officers, it might be time to look at how we store and how we provide access to officers who have operational needs together access. I am not going to go into any sort of detail, but I come from a banking environment where, in many instances, no single person could ever do certain things. I wonder whether there are examples in other industries. Maybe it is already used in the police and I do not want any operational material to be compromised by answers. Whether there is scope for looking at further protecting the information that it is necessary of course to hold and making sure that we understand who has access to information and who has access to information so that we can make sure that, in the future, we continue to protect those very precious, but also very vulnerable, assets. The second point that you make is incredibly valid. The type of information or intelligence that is gathered in these operations is highly sensitive and obviously has the potential to identify sources and put them at risk. What we have done is made recommendations within our report that there should be a single system that would maintain and manage all of the authorisations, but it would also manage all of the information and intelligence that would fall from that. We have also made recommendations for Police Scotland about the officers who are in the field being able to gather and collect that information on secure laptops effectively. There are already robust processes in place within Police Scotland for the secure data. There are confidential networks that are walked above a level that other people can access, and there are also auditing functions that are available within that. What our report does is to ask them effectively to collate that and to go further and bring it all into one specific system, but the point that you make around the security of information is well made. I will just ask one further thing because I do not want to bogg us down on this to any great extent. Absolutely except seniority has to be associated with access, but equally my own experience in other domains is that seniority alone is not enough in the sense that if it is necessary for two people to come along with a quiesion for the sake of argument that actually protects those people as well because it secures access in a particular way. I just think that it goes back a long way in quite primitive ways and nowadays it is quite sophisticated. I do not think that it is for the inspector to go and do that. I am merely encouraging the inspector to encourage others in the Scottish Police Authority and who have responsibilities here to look further at that particular process. I mean if I can reassure you the systems in place where even regardless of rank actually some senior officers will be unable to access that material, it is very role specific. The systems require the officers to basically log on and access them. The system will be capable of auditing the access to that information. I am right to say that even an assistant chief constable who is authorising them must do that on the computer system, so it provides that audit trail going through. Those who are allowed access are strictly controlled and their access is monitored as part of the process. Good afternoon. Could I, Mr Fairman, perhaps mention to your opening statement that undercover policing should be robust? The supervision should be robust, as should be the authorisation, progress and recommendation 9. You said that there should be a results analysis that demonstrates the impact of under-cover policing should be introduced and that Police Scotland should engage with the College of Policing and progress a self-assessment of the authorisation, governance and tactical management arrangements for under-covering policing as part of a formal national accreditation. Could you elaborate on why that is? In terms of the processes being robust, they will be drawn from the legislation primarily and then the statutory guidance and then the authorised professional practice, which is effectively the doctrine of guidance advice that is pulled together by policing across the United Kingdom almost for practitioners in how they would operate that. What we encourage Police Scotland to do and they do it is to ensure that they follow not only the legislation and the statutory guidance but also the approved professional practice in relation to that. That, if you like, provides that everyone is operating to the same standards across the country in a way that everybody understands and is accountable. The recommendation 9 is about looking at the results analysis. It was actually a recommendation more intended to say that once undercover policing tactic has been used it would be sensible for Police Scotland to evaluate its use almost in a kind of operational benefit cost benefit. Having used the tactic, what did it get from that? Was it a good use of police resources? Was it a good use of money, to be honest? What did it learn from that that it could then roll over into future operations? That brings me on to the financial recommendation in 17 that Scotland should strengthen the financial management of covert accounts and introduce independent financial audit regime with improved reporting, perhaps if you could indicate why. Maybe the Cabinet Secretary could respond to that recommendation. Indeed, again, because the nature of this business requires to be funded, so the covert activity requires to be funded, as you can imagine, and if the officers who are undercover are spending money, that has to be accounted for what we were keen to do. Although we did do an audit and everything was accounted for, what we felt is that there could be greater detail in terms of what receipts and things provided for. A rationale behind that simply is that if there is detail provided within the receipts for almost every pound that is spent, it does give a fairly good picture, a detailed picture, of what undercover officers are spending money on and provided that that is being done by someone who is suitably vetted and secure, you can then start to almost make sure that when people are not being supervised all the time, what the money is being spent on is accounted for and it does give an additional safeguard to the officers integrity and the rest of co-behaviour. I do not know if I can add anything further to what the chief inspector has mentioned, because it is largely an operational matter for Police Scotland to take forward, other than that it seems to me that it is a very practical measure that it should put in place and that it would provide that additional assurance in an audit trail. As I mentioned yesterday in my statement, Police Scotland have accepted all 19 of the recommendations and we will be taking them forward, which HMICS will be engaging with them in the process of ensuring that that happens. Cabinet Secretary, it is an operational matter. Could you indicate the financial management of undercover operations if it requires more oversight? Can we expand on that if it is either the Cabinet Secretary or the inspector? Is there an oversight role for the SPA, for example? I think that we have made some recommendations that include the Police Authority and their ability to provide scrutiny over covert activity from that. It is inherently difficult to do some of that, as you can imagine, publicly, but there is a need to account for the use of the resource and the use of the money. We also said in our report that the authority has been able to provide to receive some assurance that this work has been undertaken ethically. I definitely believe that there is a role for the authority that probably has to be further developed about how it can be reassured or assured that the money has been spent properly and the tactics have been used effectively. In fairness, the tactic is also regulated by the Office of Surveillance Commissioners, who have a statutory function, who come in and examine it in detail. On the wider question about is the tactic a good use of public money, has it been dealt on properly and has it been accounted for, are all relevant for the authority? Before I bring Ronan in, can I clarify something with you, Mr Penman? It is about the practicalities. Everyone wants public money to be accounted for, but I am conscious that an undercover officer might indeed look suspicious asking for a receipt. I presume that there is a measure of latitude among that to ensure that no one is compromised as a result of this. No, absolutely. I think that there has to be common sense in all of this. Probably my statement, accounting for every pound, is perhaps too dramatic a statement. I think that it is just about being able to account for the money that has been made from that. If no receipts are there, I would still expect a discussion between the undercover officer and the undercover officer who is looking after his welfare to be able to account for the money that has been spent in that way. Again, there will be other things that will support whether that is reasonable or otherwise. Can I ask you about the use of undercover policing in Scotland and the level of that? Your report states that the capacity and capability within Police Scotland to conduct undercover policing is currently limited and needs to be further developed. I wonder if you could expand on that and link into that the level of undercover policing now with the single force as to previously and if things, operations have changed? I mean, we have provided the numbers in the report and if you want more, I am sure Stephen can provide the detail. I suppose in broad terms that what we saw in Police Scotland has been very limited use of the tactic. There was probably greater use of it within the legacy forces, although perhaps still not a great deal of use in Scotland. There was perhaps more in legacy forces than there has been within Police Scotland in relation to that. In some respects, we were reassured by that because, after the 2014 HMIC report in England and Wales, we actually wrote to Police Scotland and met with them around picking up on the learning from the report in England and Wales. I think that that encouraged them to look at what their operation was across Scotland and to start putting the safeguards and building the capability and capacity in order to support those undercover operations. Our concern would have been that they had lots of undercover operatives out but not having the back office to support them. So what we have seen is Police Scotland looking to bring the legacy practices together and then starting to develop and improve them. I think that they are now in a position where they can start to scale that up. There is also the changing crime and demands on policing. So what we found, as you have seen from the report, is that all the activity, including legacy forces, was directed towards serious organised crime. From what we are seeing as a changing crime now, we have certainly moved towards internet-related crime and pedophile activity and other things where we think that there is greater capacity now for Police Scotland to invest on the undercover online function, which I think would be particularly fruitful. Thank you. Liam and Ben had supplementaries on that point. I was interested in the point around capacity and capability because, obviously, an operational matter has not been raised by Police Scotland that they did not feel that they had the resources needed to scale up in order to carry out more undercover activity. Therefore, I suppose that it would be interesting to understand why it is that this is emerged as a recommendation through this review when it has not been flagged up as an issue. Other than the issues around online crime and what not in the generality is an area where Police Scotland has made very clear that additional resources will need to be committed going forward. I think that, although perhaps in the lowest ability, I think that Police Scotland himself, certainly in our field work, recommended that it was recognised that it was a tactic that more use could be made of, but it did not have themselves the capability and capacity. So, for example, one of our recommendations was to have a full-time com-UC. It is a technical role that is dedicated to looking after the undercover policing facility. That was not a full-time post and they themselves recognised that that needed to be developed. I think that they, themselves, recognised that they needed to increase the capability and capacity of the tactic. The online one, I think, is the one in particular that would require more work. However, our first recommendation, though, effectively is a more strategic recommendation to say that Police Scotland really needs to consider covert policing in the round and consider what it is that it needs to tackle the crime and other problems that it would deal with in Scotland and actually start to scale up in size accordingly. Therefore, our first recommendation is very much to Police Scotland to say, you know, you need to look at where they see their need for undercover policing online in particular and then start to size up and build that capability and capacity. So, what you are saying is that effectively the relatively low level of usage in Scotland is partially a reflection of a lack of capacity and capability rather than a recognition or a view within Police Scotland that it was not necessarily relevant or appropriate to the jobs that we are having to carry? I think the numbers, as you will see, are very low. I imagine the numbers will still be relatively low. We are not counting for an exponential increase. I think what we are saying to Police Scotland is that they need to understand themselves, I think, through their strategic assessment about policing more generally. What do they need in terms of undercover capability? They need to start developing that capability once they understand what it is that they are trying to do. That will be online. It will also be about serious organised crime as well from that. Part of the 2026 policing strategy that you will be aware of is looking into what are the new threats and what is the new shape of policing going to be like. If you take policing as a cake, what size of the cake comes to specialist operations in covert policing? If there is an expectation that the level of undercover activity is likely to increase for the reasons that you have suggested, is there also an expectation that the way in which that is carried out and the oversight and the regulation of it takes place will need to adapt to reflect the higher degree to which it has been carried out? That is exactly the point in our report about that. You cannot increase the number of undercover officers without having a commensurate increase in the back-office support for all that to ensure that the safety of the officers and integrity on the ethical standards and how the tactic is being delivered around that. It is also where the undercover policing bit fits into more generally the major crime inquiries as well. It is about how everything fits together, what do Police Scotland need for the future in the start to build that, is what we are seeing in our report. I accept that. I was thinking more along the lines of whether or not transparency would be the wrong expression, but an oversight of that, if it is a larger component of what Police Scotland is doing, I suppose that there will be a public expectation that it is being carried out according to fairly well-established rules and how that reassurance can be provided, is perhaps going to be different in the future than it is currently. No, absolutely. That will come from, as I said, the legislation controls that, the guidance controls that. There is the role of the surveillance commissioners in inspecting how that works taken out as well. There is a whole framework. What we are also being clear is that Police Scotland should also join the accreditation that will be run by National Police Chiefs Council. It will provide another level of safeguard and assurance around how the whole tactic is operated and how it has worked. I might be just about to point out that there has been some changes around the governance already, so a combination of the legislation and the codes of practice that go alongside the regulation from the Investigative Powers Act in Scotland, but also the office of the surveillance commissioners who were previously responsible for monitoring and assessing compliance with the legislation within bodies that had the ability to undertake surveillance operations has now been consolidated into the Investigative Powers Commissioner office, which has brought together a number of the oversight bodies into one single body, but you still have the tribunal system there for people who feel there has been breaches. There are changes already taking place around oversight function and how a force such as Police Scotland will be inspected and how they will be held to account and evaluated and how they are utilising those types of tools under the legislation and the codes of practice as well. I have brief supplementaries from Ben Stewart and then Daniel Stewart. Thank you, convener. Very briefly, as Rona and Liam have covered much of what I was going to ask, but I just wanted to appreciate the point about the undercover online activity as potentially an area where more capability and capacity will be required. I note that in recent months there has been significant progress in terms of significant prosecutions for organised crime. I wondered how, throughout the process of producing the report and the research around it, how pertinent is undercover policing to taking forward that shared responsibility to tackle organised crime? I mean, I think we've said it. It's a legitimate, it's another tool in the toolbox, it's a legitimate tactic that can be used and it can be used to good effect, I think would be our take on it. What we feel is that Police Scotland's current use of it is very limited and there's the opportunity to make more of it to tackle those people who cause the greatest threat, harm and risk to communities of Scotland, so serious organised crime, sex offenders and others, those online and I say those other crime groups as well. Our view is that it's a legitimate tactic and more can be made of it. It's just occurred to me there is another question where we're talking about online embedding. There is not necessarily a physical contact between Police Scotland's staff and the potential criminals, but in particular given the very specialist skills that are required in certain areas online, are there actually people who are not Police Constables involved in this? In other words, civilians employed who are part of the covert operations and if so, are there special arrangements that relate to them? I mean, certainly those who are involved in undercover online officers, it's a specific qualification, but perhaps I could pass over to Stephen. Everybody involved in undercover are Police officers, sworn officers and Constables in relation to that and go through the training course in relation to it. Some bring specialist skills in terms of their digital awareness in the world of the world wide web, etc. I'd like to ask a couple of questions of Mr Chief Inspector Penman regarding the scope of his work before asking the cabinet secretary about next steps. On page 4 of the review, you state that, we established that there was no evidence that undercover advanced officers from Police Scotland had infiltrated social justice campaigns or that officers had operated out with the parameters of the authorisation. Did you establish whether that was also true of the legacy forces? Likewise, can I just ask whether it's correct to state that the situation pre-2000 was not within the scope of your review? The date that we were working to was effectively ripser. Where would I have expected the document sets and things to be available from that? So it seemed a logical time when this Parliament passed the legislation and your interest in that. It was a good time for us to take and move forward. What we did in terms of legacy police forces is—I made reference earlier about what we wrote to Police Scotland after the 2014 HMIC inquiry down south, and what we asked Police Scotland that time to do was to start collecting and collating their informational legacy forces. To be blunt, I had a view that I thought that it would be required for the undercover policing inquiry, and I felt that it was helpful for Police Scotland to start a piece of work to pull all that together. They had been working on 18 months pulling together all of the legacy force material at the point that we came to do our review, so we were then able to examine that material and all the authorisations that were contained within that, and from there we were able to say definitively that all of that activity in legacy police forces in Scotland pertained to serious organised crime and not to social justice campaigns. In terms of Police Scotland's work, we went into that in detail, not only looking at the authorisations but also looking at all of the supporting information that went behind that as well. I understand that. Again, your report goes into some detail regarding the welfare of officers and how that is looked after. Did your review look at, or would it occur to you to look at the welfare of those who have been targeted by undercover officers, and indeed those who may be associated with them, family members and so on? I suppose that it is inherently difficult to do that on the basis that it is an undercover policing tactic. Those who have been in contact with undercover police officers by definition would not necessarily know that they have been in contact with those officers in terms of serious organised crime, so to go and have conversations with those people and identify them would be unnecessary. What we did do in the scope of our review was to make a statement to say that we would be quite keen to speak to anybody who had anything to say to us, so anybody who had been involved or considered themselves to have been a victim of undercover policing, we were quite keen for them to come forward and engage with us. That offer was made, but nobody came forward with that. Cabinet Secretary, following on from those, I think that we have heard that clearly the scope was set out, and that obviously limits things. It is a very thorough report, but it obviously has limited by its scope. Secondly, you acknowledged yesterday that between the scope of this and the limitations of the inquiry that is being carried out at UK level, there is therefore going to be a number of situations or circumstances which essentially will fall between the scope of the work that Mr Penman has carried out and the scope of the inquiry, whether that is regarding timeline, acts carried out by forces other than those in Scotland. Indeed, I think that if we have just established here, there may be aspects of this. I understand what you have said about a separate Scottish inquiry, but are there other ways that perhaps those questions could be clarified, could be looked into, other than an inquiry, should your request for the UK inquiry's scope to be expanded? I suppose that it depends on what those issues are. If there were specific concerns about undercover policing that individuals had, that they had identified, that they had concerns about at a specific time, that they believed that the review that has been undertaken by the HMICS has not covered, then clearly that is a matter that could be considered. As I said, if there was new evidence that would be merited given further consideration to the matter, I would certainly do that. In short, my answer is that I am not close to whether there are concerns or issues being raised or highlighted to me that they should not be considered. However, as I also said yesterday, there is also another route for those who have concerns. That is the way in which the investigatory powers tribunal operates, in that people can take their case and their issues up through that particular process, which can allow it to be investigated and it can go to a tribunal for consideration. My concern with that response might be that, given the nature of what we are talking about, taking a passive response and waiting for people to come forward, I think that there might be good reason to believe that those who might feel that they are victims might be reluctant to do so. I am just wondering whether there are more proactive steps, rather than simply waiting to see whether cases come forward that could be taken.  Or indeed, while it is perfectly possible that officers have conducted themselves in accordance with regulation, the personal impact on those people might not be something that would be satisfactory in a common sense. It is worth keeping in mind how the inquiry in England and Wales came about. There is a significant history to that. The first element of it was back in 2012, with the HMIC report looking at the actions of the special demonstration squad, which highlighted concerns about the way in which they had been behaving, and the way in which they had been operating. There was then the review commissioned by the then Home Secretary into allegations relating to conduct around undercover operations with the Stephen Lawrence investigation. There was also the HMIC report in 2014 for England and Wales again, which highlighted issues and serious concerns about the way in which undercover policing was operating in England and Wales. What we have from this review is assurances around the processes that we have in Scotland and how they have been operating. It is important to keep in mind that the inquiry in England and Wales has not come about on the basis of, let's just look to see if there are problems. It has come about because significant problems were identified, some of which involved unethical and unacceptable behaviour among some undercover officers. There was a strong, considerable evidence base to justify that decision. What I have not had to date is a level of evidence or information that would suggest that there is a similar problem here in Scotland. In fact, the HMICF review gives us assurance that that is not the case. I come back to the point that I was making earlier is that if issues of concern—for example, it could be for the Investigatory Pills commissioner in reviewing conduct within policing in Scotland at some point, if they highlight concerns, then they can pursue that with Police Scotland. They can, of course, raise it with government as well. However, if there was specific information that would suggest to me that there is justification for further investigation, I would look at that and take that into account. However, it is extremely important to recognise that the history as to how they got to having a public inquiry in England and Wales is based on very considerable evidence of concerns about how undercover policing was operating in England and Wales and how some of those specific units were operating as well. I mean just very specifically on that point. If your request is denied, the then is the very real possibility that units that we know carried out these things, who behaved unethically, where they have operated in Scotland, those cases are simply going to be left in the gap between the work that has been carried out here and the inquiry. Is that not the case if your request is denied? As I said yesterday, the operation of those two units—let's take the two specific units that I referred to in my statement yesterday—were based in Metropolitan Police, national units. The evidence that we have to date in relation to the SDS is as complete as we expect to be. HMICS can sell a bit more about that and how complete that information is as well. Also, the evidence that we have around the activities of the national public order intelligence as well is as up-to-date as we can at the present moment, although maybe there is further information that becomes available in the future. Those operations were based on operations taking place across the UK. Their origins were in England and Wales, and part of it brought them into Scotland. There weren't specific Scottish operations. They weren't being brought in by Police England Scotland to carry out specific operations as such, as we can see up with the exception of the G8 authorisations. Those were part of a UK process. If I, for example, was to set up a Scottish inquiry to look at those very specific examples of when individual officers from these units came into Scotland, they would have to take it into England and Wales, because that is where their origin is. They were authorised under UK-based legislation as well. They could not get a complete picture, even if they were to do it in isolation, in having a Scottish inquiry. Given some of the complexes around the undercover policing inquiry in England and Wales, it would appear to me that it could be many years, a good number of years, before you even get to a position where you would actually get some of that data from the Metropolitan Police, given how much is involved with the undercover policing inquiry. To do the Scottish inquiry, it would not even give you that level of insight, because it all relates to the UK operations. That is why it makes complete sense for the UK inquiry, or the inquiry in England and Wales, to cover those units when they were UK-based operations, which allows them to get the whole picture and the complete picture of what they were doing. As I said out yesterday, that was part of the rationale that I had gone through in coming to a decision on whether there should be a separate Scottish inquiry, and why I came to the view that I do not believe that that was the appropriate course to take, based on the evidence that we have at the present moment, but that would be better if it was covered by the undercover policing inquiry in England and Wales. The UK inquiry has peace campaigns, environmental campaigns, trade unionists and others as core participants. We see from that that use of infiltration tactics was very extensive indeed. That inquiry goes back to 1968 and your review only went back to 2000, so that major gap, that period of 1968 to 2000, is a very important time socially, economically and certainly politically. There were major events that took place during that period—pultax, minor strike, anti-war campaigns, peace campaigns—and now, throughout that, for people who were impacted through that period, the only people who do not have access to an inquiry are Scottish victims. That cannot be right. Part of the reason for the inquiry has that timescale is around the special demonstration squad, because we are operating from that time frame. I do not know if the HMICS can give you a bit more of an insight into the nature of the data that we have around the special demonstration squad that brought them into Scotland. I hope that we will give you some reassurance about how much information we have and how accurate that is. However, the issue going back to 1968 is because that is at the point when the special demonstration squad was established. I do not know if you want to give a bit of an insight into— Can we just add to that, because we might help in the answer? Obviously, the issue that has been focused on in the special demonstration squad is that we are therefore saying that they were the only people who were conducting such activity. Therefore, if they did not appear in Scotland, no one was undertaking surveillance against them—political environmental peace campaigners here. In our review of undercover policing, we were looking at the legacy force authorisations for undercover advanced operations, which should be the infiltration type operations that they were all directed towards serious organised crime. On that basis, in terms of the legacy police forces from 2000 onwards, which is all that we looked at within the scope of our inquiry, that that was being directed towards serious organised crime groups and not social justice groups. Was that on the basis of the records that they have retained? Yes, in terms of all the authorisations that have been done under RIPSO, which was obviously—in order to do that covert activity, it would require to be authorised under RIPSO, so what we looked for was the authorisations within that. Prior to that, we— We didn't look prior to that. So we have nothing on that prior to that. Our terms of reference were clear that it would be RIPSO onwards. The rational was because that was when the record-keeping, if you like, in the legislation came into account for it. Can you also just pick up an issue that I mentioned about the special demonstration squad in terms of the nature of the data of where Mr Whitelock wants to mention, because he was involved in helping to get that data and engage with them on that, and how accurate that is to what we have within the report? I mean, there's a live investigation on going just now, but you'll be aware of by Debleshire Police into the disbanded SDS in relation to it, and I was looking over that 40-year period in relation to it. We engaged with them through chief officers, very interested in the Scottish footprint by SDS officers, and their and other terms of reference was from RIPSO from 2000 to 2016. They gave us what they had relative to SDS deployments in Scotland, and it went to 1997. So we've got that documented in the report. So we've got the footprint of SDS officers deployed in Scotland from 1997 to 2007. I have asked what was their material prior to 1997, and there's no records in relation to that. So at the time of our review, that was as much as this independent investigation by Debleshire had, i.e. Operation Herm. They had no information records documents, which would indicate that any SDS officer was deployed in Scotland prior to 1997. The issue is that we have major national events, such as the poll tax, the building trade strike of the 70s, the minor strike of the 80s. We've got things like the blacklisting scandal, where we know that Scots were disproportionately affected by that. Thinking of environmental campaigns such as the Pollock Free State, Greenpeace activity in the North Sea, the rise of political parties such as your own political party minister, the SSP, the Communist Party's involvement, the Labour Party's peace camps on the Clyde. Those were all campaigns that people who were involved in them took it for granted that they were being infiltrated. I just find it inconceivable that we think that those things only happened in England and Wales. I go back to the point from what I made about what was the core reasons that drove the creation of the inquiry in England and Wales. It was around some specific things, it was around the activities of SDS, it was around the work that they looked at in terms of undercover policing and the concerns that were raised regarding that, and also the stuff around the Stephen Lawrence case. It wasn't the issues that you've highlighted, and the purpose of the inquiry in England and Wales will not be to look at, as far as I understand, it will be to look into whether undercover policing was and infiltration took place at that time. It will be about where people have raised concerns and issues, and core participants can raise concerns and issues with them, whether they've got legitimate reason to do so, for those issues to be explored and to be considered. I've taken a decision on the basis of the information that is presented to me, and I think that at the present moment there is insufficient evidence to justify me having an inquiry in Scotland into undercover policing, because there is an insufficient evidence to justify that. Should it take one victim to have to seek judicial review to try and get justice on this? People make individual decisions on their own about these matters and understand judicial review in the UK Government and the matter as well. That's entirely their choice. I'm also conscious that many of the names that have been highlighted to me of individuals who believe that they were under surveillance here in Scotland that relate to the Special Demonstration Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit are core participants in the undercover policing inquiry in England and Wales. As the solicitor for the undercover policing inquiry in England and Wales has said that they will be able to, if evidence is presented to them that relates to Scotland, they will be able to record that information, but they won't be able to do is to interrogate it. As I mentioned yesterday in the chamber, should there be any issues that come from that particular inquiry that I believe that require a Scottish specific response to it, I will give that consideration at that particular point. If there's any other additional information that comes to hand between now and then, that will be taken into account as well. Should it raise concerns about the way in which things have been operating in Scotland? I appreciate that there are a number of issues to follow up on. If I can maybe just ask a few myself, please. I should first of all declare that G8 has featured a lot. I was at G8, not in an operational capacity in a capacity of looking after the welfare of officers in terms of accommodation and food, etc. Cabinet Secretary, Mr Penman, has any assessment been done of the reputational damage of undercover policing? I'm not aware of any assessment that's been made. Do you mean on the basis of what's happened in England and Wales? Historically. Historically. Yeah. On the basis of what's happened in England and Wales or? No, in Scotland. In Scotland? No, I'm not aware of any assessment. Would you see a benefit in having that assessment at all? For what purpose? I think that we'd want to know the extent to which people's concerns about the police are founded on those practices that I think everyone would condemn from past operations. Do you mean that there has been any assessment made of the reputational damage to undercover policing on the basis of individual personal experience? To policing in Scotland? No, I'm not aware of any assessment. I don't know where. I'm not aware of any assessment either or, in fact, it's been raised as an issue by the general public or by the police service more generally around that. I think certainly the publicity around undercover policing and, quite frankly, the unacceptable behaviours of those officers that has been well reported in the reports being on the Wales will no doubt have damaged the legitimacy of the tactic in the public eyes around that, which I think is why our report hopefully provides some reassurance around the safeguards that do exist for what is a legitimate policing tactic as well. One of the things that we were struck with when speaking to undercover officers themselves is their professionalism and their adherence to ethical standards. One of our recommendations is to allow drug testing of those officers. It's not a welfare point of view because they can be exposed to drugs and to other areas, but officers themselves were very keen that they could be subjected to those drug tests to demonstrate their own integrity around that. I personally do not think that it is a significant issue in terms of public confidence in policing around that. I hope that our report does to some extent demonstrate that safeguards are in place. Can I ask you—this is page 40, Mr Penman—that the heading at the top of the page in bold letters is analysis of undercover police operations in Scotland. If you then go to the next paragraph, there's a footnote there. It's Footnote 62, which outlines all of those who are not covered by that. Are you with me? It's Footnote 62. Now, I've raised issues here previously about intelligence services. You've obviously got Her Majesty's Forces. You've got the Ministry of Defence. I don't know if that includes the Ministry of Defense to Police as well. National Crime Agency is relative police. Can you tell me if it includes a special branch when you talk about Police Scotland? Do you include a special branch? What we looked at was the authorisations that were issued by Legacy Forces, so I'm understanding as it would have been, but I'll defer to Stephen if I can. I would relate to the individual territorial force. Some forces have special branches, others don't, in terms of England and Wales. In relation to Police Scotland, Mr Whitelock, would it include a special branch? No, no. Any activity in Police Scotland would require rips, unless it was for national security, then it would be authorised under ripper, and probably led by the security services. If I phrase it another way, special branch weren't excluded from your deliberations about Police Scotland? In terms of Police Scotland, there is no special branch in Police Scotland? Or whatever its success or organisations called until it's changed again? They were part—we did look at all the activity that was authorised by Police Scotland, and it was all organised crime related. All the activity has to be authorised under ripper, and that would require authorisation by chief officers, so that would have fallen within the scope of our review. Did you receive any evidence from members of the public at all? No, as I said, we did, in our terms of reference, and I usually say that we would welcome approaches from anyone who would want to come and speak to us about that, or anyone who had been affected by that. That was not the case. Also on your report, you talk about the single force brought consistency. What were the inconsistencies previously with the legacy forces? I think I've walked—sorry—again, I'll ask Stephen to maybe find some detail for that, but it was just again issues around not having common systems, how things were recorded and how things were conducted in the past, but perhaps Stephen could offer a view. You had nine organisations in Scotland, eight territorial legacy police forces and the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, each had a record management system for dealing with covert policing. The single service brought those nine things together. They were all slightly different in relation to it, and it standardised and provided consistency in terms of record management in relation to that. Also, it became a single-pointer contact for dealing with the Crown Office and procurating the fiscal service and for other partner agencies. Okay, I'm conscious there are a lot of questions, but my final one is because I want to get other members in. There's reference in the report, Mr Penman, to Mark Kennedy, in the fact that there are 17 visits and reference to the term multiple activities. Do you think it's a satisfactory—this isn't a criticism. Clearly, that just flags up more questions than it answers having that information there. Is there not scope to provide more information about that? I think that where we were, it was around providing the nature and scale, we felt it was helpful to put that information, which probably isn't in that detail in the public, but I'm also conscious that that information came from what is effectively the information base that will inform the undercover police inquiry. We didn't consider it appropriate or necessary to go in and look at the actual detail behind that. Our terms of reference was very much just about trying to get some high-level figures around the extent and scale. You'll understand the frustrations about the scope of what has been undertaken. Would you see scope for more work? As I said in my opening remarks in terms of the work of the SDS and the MPOU, these are UK operations that will have had a footprint in Scotland, not necessarily even operationally, but might have been up looking to legend-build in other areas. I genuinely believe that they should be looked at in the round, because the people who are involved, the victims of that, to some extent, will be victims in England and Wales, and we will also come into Scotland to be part of that. It seems difficult to try and pull out and investigate that separately. Cabinet Secretary, people will be surprised, particularly when you and I share the view that Scotland should have all the powers, that you're not choosing, as Cabinet Secretary, for justice to take a greater interest in intrusion, if you like, or the scale of intrusion, which seems to me to be as yet un-clarified. Let me just challenge you on that point. I commissioned this report because of concerns that were raised. To say that I do it that I'm interested in it is inaccurate, and I don't think that there's a fair reflection of my position on the matter, but what I have taken into account is the evidence that it's available to us in making a decision on this matter as well. For the very reasons that I mentioned to Daniel Johnson in my response to his question about the idea of trying to have a Scottish inquiry that looks at, from what we have from the HMICS report, the specific Scottish elements of it, which are part of a UK-wide operation, would inevitably mean that you would have to look at the whole UK-based operation. That's why the idea of trying to cut off the Scottish bit and just have an inquiry that looks at that specifically, in my view, will not give you the whole picture or a true picture of the situation. You have to look at the whole operation, and that's why it makes complete sense. I have raised it in a number of occasions, not just in correspondence and meetings I had with the former Home Secretary at the time, Theresa May, that it makes complete sense for the undercover inquiry in England and Wales to look at the whole and complete picture, as she described it herself. That would allow them to then follow the elements of work that were taken forward here in Scotland by these particular officers to be able to look at what they were doing in Scotland at that particular point. Time's caught up with us. A final question from Matt. Yes, very briefly. On the register of cover assets, you've explained how important it is with the eight legals that the force is going into Police Scotland. What are we talking about here? Are we talking about houses or cars? Are we talking about something fairly insignificant? Is there concern that there's been lost track of some of those assets? They could be substantial. It relates to all those things and what we're looking for is a proper quality and stock check in terms of it. Everything was documented, but there wasn't any independent audit of it, and that's what we've recommended that there should be an independent audit of the material that they use. Is it the case that some of those assets could have gone AWOL and they should have been recovered in Hampi? There was no evidence of that, we serve with them documented, but what was missing was independent audit of that material. Okay, two final, final ones. Very briefly, please, Neil, and then Liam, please. The pursuer of the judicial review was she under surveillance by the Metropolitan Police or Strathclyde Police or a Scottish force? I genuinely don't know the answer to that question. Up to the points made by Neil Daniel and the convener in relation to the way in which there will be some in Scotland who fall between the gaps and the scope of the UK inquiries that's currently drafted and the inquiry that you asked for, cabinet secretary. What discussions have you had or are you prepared to have with the Secretary of State for Scotland around supporting the call that you've made to Amber Rudd in relation to extending the UK inquiry? As far as I'm aware, most, if not all, of the individuals who have raised concerns regarding the Scottish element are core participants in the undercover policing inquiry in England and Wales. They will have an opportunity, obviously, to leave their own evidence there or to make their own case there as well. The Scottish aspect of it will be that, as I mentioned earlier, that can be highlighted, but it can't be interrogated in the same way that it would be during the course of the inquiry. I mentioned yesterday in the chamber that I raised the issue again with the Home Secretary about extending it. To cover Scotland, I think that the report from HMICS reinforced the logic of having it extended. I'm also conscious that the previous Northern Ireland executive view was that it should be extended to Northern Ireland as well. They were making similar representations because concerns had been raised with them. The logic of this is that it should sit in a single inquiry, given that it was a UK-based or the concerns that are related to UK-based undercover officers involved in operations that originated in England and Wales. On that basis, have you sought the support of the Secretary of State for Scotland for that argument? I haven't in any direct engagement with him. I've engaged directly with the minister who has responsibility for setting the terms of the public inquiry. I've now done that on a number of occasions and I've repeated that in the last few days, as I mentioned yesterday in the chamber. Okay, thanks very much for that. We've overrun our time a bit. Can I thank the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and his officials? Can I thank Mr Penman particularly? That is likely to be your last visit here. I can say that the Police Committee and, indeed, the Justice Committee have been very grateful for all your work. It's much appreciated. I wish you well in your retirement. The scrutiny that's been provided by the committee to policing in Scotland, which I think has added great value over certainly my last four years of the term. Thank you for that. Thank you. Right, we now move into private session. Thank you.


First of all, thank you very much to the organizer for inviting me. So today I'm not going to talk exactly about collective behavior, because I don't know if we can treat slime mold as a collective, but we will see. So I will talk about slime molds. So first of all, just let's place slime molds in the acryl tree. So here you have like the, nope, I don't think this thing is working, oh yeah. So here you have like the general big kingdoms, like the fungi kingdom, the animal kingdom, and here's the plants. And you can see that most of the eukaryotes are unicellular organisms, and very valuable. Huge diversity of unicellular organisms. Slime molds are, oops, sorry, I will use this one, that would be easier. Slime mold belong to a kingdom called amebozoa, I think the most famous species in amebozoa is ameboa proteus. So usually when you see slime mold in the field, they sit on trees like that, in forests, they can also sit in your garden. There's more than 1,000 species of slime molds, they can have all kinds of colors and shape. And this is the life cycle, usually you have a huge cell called the plasmodia, and the plasmodia will transform into spores to reproduce. So what I'm more interested in in this slime mold is the plasmodia stage, so the huge cell. So here's a life cycle, so you have the plasmodia stage and it will go around like that with a sexual reproduction, like classical reproduction, except that there's not two sexes but 720 different sexual types in slime molds. So it's quite a bit more complicated. So this cell, as you can see in the video, is giganteous and in fact it was even recorded in the Guinness, the largest cell, it's 10 meters square. So this is a cell that is particular because it's polynucleated, so in fact inside the slime molds you have billions and billions of nuclei. So what is interesting for somebody studying animal behavior when you come to slime molds is in fact the fact that they're moving and in fact they're moving all the time. The life of a slime mold is going forward. So you can see a slime mold here exploring leaves in a forest and it's always very strange to think that you are looking at just one cell. So this cell is quite particular because it moves and it moves using a network of veins that you can see here on this green marking. You can see the vein of the slime mold and it's using these veins to move. How does it do it? If you look inside the vein you will see the protoplasm moving and the protoplasm is moving back and forth inside the cell. So in fact by doing this movement the slime mold is pushing the membrane that you can see here at the bottom and it's pushing the membrane forward, take it back, pushing forward. It's like the slime mold is going two steps ahead and going back one step. So if you look from outside, this is how it looks like, you have this kind of oscillation mechanism. And so it's pushing and you can even see by the eye the contraction of the veins. If you look a bit further away you can see all slime molds oscillating and you can't see that in nature, just to tell you. It's time lapse. So in fact the oscillation, so the protoplasm is moving every one minute and a half but this oscillation is like around one hour cycle. So you won't see that. You have to be very passionate to see this kind of thing. So this is for example a follicose septica oscillating in the forest. So slime molds are moving in the forest and they're a huge predator of bacteria that they also feed on fungi and when they feed on fungi they really take them all. So nothing is left from the fungi. So you will see this video is 24 hours video in the lab. So you see nothing is left. So problem when you have slime mold in the lab, it's the fact that they grow exponentially. So in fact a slime mold would double size every day so you need to feed them every day. So you have to go to the lab all the weekends, Saturday and Sunday. If not they would escape. It's a bit of a nightmare. It's a nice animal but it's not an animal. Anyway there's a good way you can make the slime mold slip. So it's good. You can drive them and keep them like that. It's called a dormant stage, it's called a sclerosia and you can keep them like that for more than two years. And you can wake them up just by adding some water. So it's good. You can still go on holiday or in conferences. So slime molds are pretty interesting when you want to study decision making because they sense a lot of different stimuli such as light, humidity, temperature, osmolarity, mechanical stress, chemical signal, whatever, lots of stimuli that they can sense. So it's a very nice organism to study decision making. So the pioneer studying slime mold was Toshiyaki Nakagaki by these two very famous work. One was published in Nature and he shows that slime mold can solve a maze and can take the shortest path in this maze to link to old flakes, for example. And the second experiment he was famous for was the network experiment where he shows that slime mold can build network that are smarter than railway network in Japan. So he got two ignoble price for these two experiments and he was very proud. So I will present some of our work we've done so far in terms of decision making. In different contexts I will talk about nutrition, navigation, phenotypic plasticity and social interaction and lastly the last work we've been doing about learning and social interaction. So first of all nutrition, I will show that slime mold are able to solve complex nutritional challenge and maximize their growth. So first of all you need to know that we don't feed fungi to the slime mold in the lab because we need to rear fungi. So in fact somebody in the 60s found that slime mold feed very well on old flakes. But for these experiments we needed to design a proper diet that we could manipulate. So we designed by adding like protein powders, sugars, mineral salts, vitamins, etc. It was a work done with Steve Simpson, Chris Rayden, Tanya Latte. So we were growing our slime molds on different diets like that and we were looking at the growth, how they developed and we also weighed them at the end of the experiment to see the growth in term of mass. So here are the results. So you can see here's the proportion of carbohydrates in the diet and here's the proportion of protein. So we made a lot of different diets varying in the concentration in the ratio of protein to carbohydrates but not in the concentration. So we made 17 diets and you can see here so the slime mold on the diet and you can see here the results in term of growth. So here it's optimum for the growth and it's twice more protein than carbohydrates. If there's too much carbohydrates in the diet it's very bad for the slime molds. So knowing what the intake target was we looked at different kind of Bivouan also. So here it's landscape, here you have the amount of protein in the food, here you have the amount of carbohydrates and here it's a number of fragments of slime molds. So funny thing happens, it never happened usually in slime molds, they separated on a high protein diet, they make different individuals, they cut themselves in different colonies of individuals. So after we challenged them with first concentration so we manipulate the amount of food inside the diet, not manipulating the ratio and we look at how the slime mold was growing in term of mass and in term of area. So in fact all the slime mold was the same mass on all type of concentration but the difference was in the area. You can see that on a very diluted diet the area was very large in comparison with a highly concentrated diet. So in fact the slime mold was coping with the deletion by spreading a lot but it was not growing more in term of mass. After we played with a binary choice where we offer the slime mold two diets, a high protein diet and a high carb diet, none of them were good for the slime mold, so we had to pick both of them to make like a perfect ratio. And we show that so here you have all the binary choice we tested and you can see that all the slime molds come here at the optimum at twice more protein than carbohydrates. So the slime mold were able to really take a bit of each food to create the perfect diet. So we went a little bit further and we go with a more complex decision making problem where we put lots of different diets and we look at how the slime mold was choosing the diet. So all these diets are equi-caloric but they're just a protein and carbs ratio changing. And we could see that all the slime mold in average focus also their activity here on the protein, on the diet offering twice more protein than carbohydrates. So they were able to regulate the intake and maximize performance. So this was the first example of decision making in slime mold. A second example is navigation. So if you look at the slime mold growing on a negar plate, you will see that he makes all these soda pods and he's moving around so there's nothing to eat there. And you can see that when he has been somewhere and he left, he leaves a trail behind him. So he's here. It's a mucus. It's an extracellular polyionic glycoprotein that you can see here. And we were wondering if the slime mold could use this kind of trail like ants can do for exploration. So first we look at if this trail was attractive. So the setup was simple. You put the slime mold here and here there's a trail and here there's nothing. And we let the slime mold choose. And there's two food source at the end to motivate him. So you will see that most of the time, in fact in most, almost 100% of cases, the slime mold would pick the branch without a trail. So he would avoid the trail. So we looked at if he could make a difference between different trails coming from different strains, same species but different strains. So here we had a Japanese trail against an Australian strain and we tested Australian slime mold and Japanese slime mold. And we could see there was no preference for any. So slime mold would pick randomly one of the trail. So after we changed species, we wanted to see if he could differentiate trail from different species. And we show that if we use these new species called Lepidoderma here. So you put the trail here, here's a trail of fissarum. If you test fissarum, it would always pick almost always, not always, the Lepidoderma trail. So it can make a difference between trails from different species and go for another species. So after, with Chris, we came up with this idea to study how these trails can be used in more complex problems. So this is a common used shaped bridge problem. So here you have the slime mold, here you have the food. So the slime mold is attracted to the food but here there's a maze and it cannot cross this barrier. So here is a video. So you can see the slime mold is falling into the trap of course because it can sense the food but it will avoid it and you can find here the food source. So you can see that the mean distance travel is 20 centimeters and almost all of them succeed in this task. Now next we put trail everywhere to mimic an explorated environment already. So you have the slime mold here but you have trail everywhere, a mucous everywhere. And so here that's what happened. So the slime mold is going here, so you go up first. So I show you the best slime mold. So you go in the trap and it's a bit lost, completely lost in fact.  So it takes a while and it crosses in average 45 centimeters or so twice the distance of the controlled slime mold. So we were showing by these experiments that slime mold use their trail to navigate. It's like an external memory. Next I wanted to show you like phenotypic plasticity. When you study ants like I was doing before you would always use lots of different colonies but in the world of people working on slime mold they always use one clone lineage. So I wanted to try just to compare different clone lineage to see if there was a difference. I show you just in a simple experiment where slime mold have to explore just a plate of agar and you will see straight away the difference in term of exploration. So you can see that the Japanese strain is far quicker than the other strain. The U.S. strain make these very tiny pseudopods and the Australian strain grows in an isotropic manner for a very long time before doing pseudopods and it's very, very slow. So we measure these differences between strain and we show that irregularity was like, so in fact the U.S. slime mold was very irregular while the Australian slime mold will grow isotropically for most of the experiment and you can see that the speed, the Australian slime mold was very slow and the U.S. slime mold was the fastest one. So we wanted to see if these differences were just in term of exploration so we moved forward and we noticed that there was not just avoidance between slime mold using the trail but there was also attraction between slime molds. So what we did was a very simple experiment where you put the slime mold, there's another slime mold, a cue left by slime mold feeding so it's very happy and here is nothing and you will see that in fact most of the slime mold are attracted to this cue left by a congener that is feeding and this attraction is stronger for Australian slime mold and the attractiveness of the slime mold when it's an Australian is more attractive too. So Australian are more attracted to a congener and they're also more attractive to the others in comparison with the U.S. U.S. strain. And after so we offer them a choice between a congener and food. Do you prefer to go to a congener or do you prefer to go to food? And Australian slime mold would always pick the congener while the U.S. S.S. slime mold would always pick the food. So we were wondering what was the slime mold releasing in the environment that would attract the others. So we found out that in fact when a slime mold is feeding is releasing calcium. So we measure this level of calcium and we show that Australian are releasing a lot of calcium in comparison with the U.S. S.S. H, U.S. H strain. And we also look at the attraction for a source of calcium where we manipulate the concentration and we show that Australian could pick very tiny amount of calcium in the environment while the American strain was very bad at picking calcium inside the environment. So and if you block the calcium in cues left by congener while feeding using EDTA, you will see that there's no attraction anymore. So it was really the calcium that was playing the was responsible for this attraction. So after we wanted to see this difference in signaling and behavior. So the fact that for example the slime mold is releasing a lot of calcium and can pick very tiny amount of calcium in the environment. And the fact that it's slow would play a role in the way they explore an environment with another slime mold. So this is the setup was like that that two food source and two slime molds. And so here you see what the Australian are doing. Usually they would always pick the same food source. So it was kind of collective decision by two slime molds. And they would always find it quicker if you compare when you put a slime mold alone. So there was some sort of cooperation. But if you test the USA strain, you will see that they have a complete random distribution that would pick the food randomly. So there was no effect of social interaction. So by this experiment we were showing that we have like an interaction between the fact that you release a lot, that you attract it to a stimulus. So the difference in attractiveness can be responsible of different social strategy in slime molds. So it was a very simple mechanism. And so we use a model to prove these results. So lastly, I want to spend a bit more time on learning and social interaction. So the question, because I work in a lab, we're working on animal cognition, I was wondering, because we've seen that most of animals can learn something, I was wondering if slime molds, even if they don't have a brain, could learn something. So I came up, I started to study the simplest form of learning because we are with slime mold, no brain. So I think it was a bit easier to start as simple. So we study habituation. So it has been shown in Aplasia and Eric Kandel got a Nobel Prize for showing this behavior. So in fact, if you touch the siphon of Aplasia, she would retract a gill straight away. And if you do that a lot of time, she would stop doing it. So habituation is a phenomenon that is very common. So I will give you another example that is more understandable for us. So habituation is when you enter a room and it smells very bad. So at the beginning, of course, you notice it, you say, oh my gosh, it smells very bad. But after a while, after one hour, you say, well, that's not so bad. So habituation, in fact, is the ability to ignore irrelevant repetitive stimulus. And so this repeated application of the stimulus results in a decreased response. You stop responding to these stimulus because you know it's armless. The second criteria to define habituation is specificity. So imagine you are in this room that smells very bad and suddenly there's a new order in this room that is also very bad but different. You will notice it. In fact, you have to prove specificity to prove habituation because it precludes the fatigue of mortal or sensory response. So in fact, the specificity allows organism to respond to novel and potentially harmful stimulus. So it's very important this criteria to define habituation. And the last criteria is recovery.  Of course, you're not habituated to bad order for life. And so this is what makes habituation different from adaptation. So we wanted to see if the slime mold could habituate it. Because habituation has been shown in lots of different animals but never in unicellular organism except in this particular science, called stentor, right? So it pieces a unicellular organism. And when you touch it, you will see it will retract up like that. And they show that if you do it again and again and again, it will stop doing it. But in these papers that didn't check for specificity or recovery. So we wanted to check what kind of stimulus we could use to show habituation in slime mold. You cannot touch the slime mold. In fact, you can touch a slime mold but it doesn't do anything. So we use more like chemical repellent to really use a kind of strong response from the slime molds. So the experiment was simple. You add a slime mold here, you have a bridge, and here you have a food source. And so we will look at the first time the slime mold contacts the bridge. The shape of the soda pod when it's contacting the bridge. And after 24 hours, we would transfer the slime mold and offer the bridge again. So this bridge was even a control bridge. So it was just plain agar for five days. And on day nine, we will test the control slime mold with agar, quinine with a very bitter substance, slime molds hate it. And caffeine is another bitter substance like slime or hate. And after we had a resting period and after we would test them again. So and after we had two treatments, the quinine group. So if they had to cross a bridge with quinine five days in a row, they would be tested for habituation with quinine, tested with caffeine for fatigue, for specificity. And after they would be allowed to rest and we would test them for recovery. And we would do the same with the caffeine group. So repulsive behavior in slime mold is quite obvious. First, it took a long time to go on the bridge. As soon as they can smell a repellent, they don't want to go on it. And after when they would cross, they would cross very slowly. And lastly, they would make these tiny, tiny soda pods to cross the bridge. So I will just show you the results about the shape of the soda pods. So here is a control group. So we measure the shape of the soda pods and we calculated a circularity index. More it's close to one, more you like spreading on the bridge, less it's close to zero, more you like very digitated soda pods. So here are the results. So you can see that a slime mold would not have any repellent, will really spread on the bridge. And if you offer them quinine on day six, they like it. You make these tiny, tiny soda pods. And after you can rest and you can show this response again. So the control group was fine. So let's look now at the treatment. So the one with quinine, you can see that first, they don't like it at all. They make these really tiny soda pods in these very slow soda pods. And after you can see that through the day, the soda pods spread more and more and more and you have habituation on day six. You have specificity because the slime molds still react to caffeine. And you have recovery because if you allow the slime mold to rest, it will respond to quinine again. And we have exactly the same results with caffeine, habituation, specificity. So it tricks, it reacts to quinine, and it recovers. So this is in picture because usually picture works better. So you can see here control. So you see spread very widely on the bridge. And when you give him quinine, he makes these very tiny soda pods. And after on the resting period when he gets agar, he spread again and here. And so he has a quinine group. So he gets quinine the first day, he really tried to avoid it. And after you can see the soda pod growing and growing and a full habituation on day six and a recovery on day nine. So this experiment was one of the first time we were showing a simple form of learning in a unicellular organism by following exactly the criteria given by the neuroscientists, meaning decrease of respite, specificity, and recovery. So after, we move to social interaction with learning because there's a particular things in slime mold that is quite interesting. You can take a slime mold and cut it into pieces. And if you put these pieces next to each other, it would fuse again and form a new slime mold. So it's really difficult to define what is an individual in slime molds. So we took this advantage to study how slime mold could transfer what they learned to another congenial. So first, we changed repellent. We didn't use quinine for this experiment, but we used salt. So we had to show first that a slime mold can show habituation to salt. So here, it's the meantime to cross the bridge. And here you have the day, here's the control group. And here you can see that the slime mold habituated quite quickly to the salt. And we also did a test for specificity in this case with quinine. And the slime mold was still reacting to quinine. And we also did the test for recovery. So it was just to show you that they can habituate to salt. Now we can move to the proper experiment. What we did was to train more than 2,000 slime molds to habituate to salt. And we trained 2,000 to be habituated to nothing, just to cross another bridge like that. And that for five days. And after, what we did was to mix the slime mold. So we would take an habituated one with an habituated one, let them fuse and test them together with a bridge with salt. So we will look at the time to reach the food and who reached the food first. Because we did a lot of experiments, we had to compute an habituation index to be able to compare all the experiments together. So in short, when the habituation index is zero, it means that you are repelled by the salt, so it means no habituation. And if it's far larger than zero, it means that you habituated to salt. So here are all the combinations we did. So we had either two slime molds and our control was the two unhabituated slime molds. And so we had either three slime molds and also a control with three unhabituated slime molds and here four slime molds and also a control. So we did all the combination possible and we tested them for habituation. So here you have the results for two slime molds. So if you put two unhabituated slime molds, of course they don't know anything and they're repelled by the salt. So that was good. And if you put like two habituated slime molds, they're still habituated. So the fusion with the congenials didn't affect habituation. And if you put an habituated with an unhabituated one, the entity is habituated to salt. We did the same with three slime molds and you can see that all of them, all the groups show an habituation index. That is far bigger than zero. But all habituated are a bit more habituated than the other one. But still all entities, all merge entities show habituation. And if you look at four, it's exactly the same results. You have all the configuration here. So you can see that all the entities are habituated to salt. Even if there's just one little habituated slime mold in the merge entity. If you put these results as a proportion of habituated slime mold in the entity and the habituation index, if it was just a dilution of the information, you would have the yellow line. But in fact, you don't have, it's a bit like that. So it means that there's something happening when the information is transferred from one slime mold to another. Something that was interesting in this experiment, it's when you put like three slime molds, for example, habituated, unhabituated and habituated one. It was most of the time the unhabituated one would cross the bridge and touch the food source. And not the habituated one, we would have expected the opposite. But it was in 72% of case, the unhabituated slime mold that was crossing the bridge first. So we looked a bit closely what was happening when the slime mold was fusing. So it is this really little video at the bottom. So you can see here, I don't know if you will see it properly, but there's a vein forming between the two slime mold quite quickly. So in fact, this vein appeared three hours after fusion. And here, there's nothing. So we decided to do a fusion, but for a short time. So we put an habituated slime mold with an habituated one and we leave them in contact for one hour here. So when there's no veins, or three hours when there's a vein forming. And we separated them and tested them individually. So these are the results. When you leave them in contact just for one hour. So the two unhabituated slime mold of course show no habituation. The two habituated ones show habituation, so that's fine. But in the merge entity, if you take just an habituated one and you test it alone, it show no habituation. But if you take the habituated one, it still show habituation. So one hour of contact, the information was not transferred from the habituated to the unhabituated one. But if you look at the result now for three hours, this is very different. You can see that the slime molds unhabituated one this time, gets the information and show habituation to salt. So this shows that there was a proper transfer of information, of learning information between the two slime molds. So yeah, so this adaptive like behaviorist response via self fusion provides a rapid and efficient means for slime molds to adapt to the environment. Because the recipient slime mold become pre habituated to the environment repellent before the repellent are even encountered. So fusion can confer resistance to naive slime mold that otherwise would be susceptible to this repellent. You have to think that slime mold get separated often in the field, so this behavior could be very efficient. So lastly, in the last five minutes, I wanted to show you the last result we got in the lab. So we wanted to show if there's long term habituation in slime molds.  So here is, we have a group of slime molds that is trained to salt, and here you have a control group after five days habituation. And what we did this time, we drive them. We put them in a dormant stage and we take a peek and we work them up. But we work them up one year after doing the habituation. And so what you can see that first, there's lots of slime molds that didn't work up, but that's normal in slime mold. But 50% work up in the habituated slime mold, but just 10% on the control slime mold. So this was first our results. And second, if you look at the latency to explore an arena full of salt, you would see that the control won't go out of this paper. Usually they would stay there and they would explore after a very long time. But the habituated slime, although one was habituated before going to dormant stage, explores the area quite quickly. So they could keep this information for a dormant stage for one year. So we were wondering, we are now in trying to find the mechanism behind this habituation. What we did was to, in fact, just a little story. In fact, we put an habituated slime mold to queen in with an habituated slime mold to salt. We make them fuse and they didn't want it to fuse. So we found it strange. They ended up fusing that there was something going on. So we were wondering if the slime mold was not in self-repellent. So what we did, we trained slime mold to salt like before. And this time, we grained them and we dosed the level of sodium inside the slime mold. And this is what we found. In fact, the control slime mold has a very small amount of sodium inside the cytoplasm, but the habituated slime mold is full of sodium. So in fact, it's taking up the sodium while it's habituating to salt. And if you look at the amount of sodium, and you look at its performance in term of habituation, you can see that it's completely correlated. More it has sodium, more its performance in exploring or crossing a bridge with salt. So the level of sodium was a very good predictor of its performance. So we wanted to see, so what happened during recovery? It take up the salt, but what is it doing with this salt? So what we did was to train slime mold. And after we put them in a piece of a humid paper with distilled water, we let the slime mold explore this environment. And after we cut this paper and we analyze it for sodium. And what we found is that a paper explored by a control slime mold would have a very small amount of sodium, but the paper explored by an habituated slime mold would be full of sodium. So the slime mold during recovery process was just spitting out the sodium. And of course, to understand why habituation could be kept for such a long time, we look at the level of sodium in sclerosia. In sclerosia habituated to salt in sclerosia, in control sclerosia, and we saw that the amount of sodium was twice more important in an habituated slime mold. So the slime mold was keeping the sodium inside. And lastly, a very tiny experiment we did like two weeks ago. We applied topic in kind of an injection, but it's a passive injection. So you put salt, in fact, a droplet of salt. We control the concentration on top of the slime mold. And we looked at how this slime mold was reacting in two substrates. In a control substrate where there's no sodium, and you can see that the control received a drop of distilled water. And the habituated one explore the dynamic of exploration is exactly the same. But if you put them in a salty substrate, you can see that the control slime mold is very affected by the salt. But the ones that receive just a droplet of sodium on top of his head two hours before the experiment can explore quite quickly the substrate with salt. So we are putting this idea out there that perhaps the slime mold is using kind of circulating memory by keeping the repellent inside this vein network as a memory of the habituation. So I will leave you with this last slide. I hope that I'll show you that unicellular organisms, even if they are not collective, are quite interesting to study cognition and decision making. They're perhaps not collective, but they're really distributed, especially the slime molds. And I'm moving very soon to this kind of organisms to study how they deal with learning protocols. Thank you very much.


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