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Terrorism Bill

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving way. I have discussed precisely this point with a number of senior officials in the Metropolitan Police. They report that some of the material—in one instance 650 gigabytes of material was seized—is so heavily encrypted that the best code-breaking experts in the country cannot find a way of getting into it on the sort of timescale that is required. It is a very slow, long and laborious process. The technical skills that are now involved and the technical skills that are now available to those who are planning and organising terror are of such a level that it is not simply a question of applying the crossword-solving brain that may have been appropriate in the past. This is about very high levels of encryption with very complicated keys that cannot simply be broken on the basis of a few hours work.