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Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I have had a certain amount of e-mails and discussions about these clauses. In general I think they are a good idea, so they should go through. There is very little difference between the Government’s amendments and those of the noble Earl, Lord Northesk. The only thing I would add is that it has always worried me how you define the difference between a denial-of-service attack where it comes from one point or a set of netbots, and someone demanding that everyone lobby their MP on a particular issue so suddenly that 100,000 e-mails are sent from different single points to one central server. Actually, maybe the latter case should be made illegal, although I cannot think how it could. I apologise for hesitating; I had not thought this out very hard. There are problems around it that probably need to be addressed, as the noble Earl was saying. With the general proviso that we need to think further about the issue, I welcome these amendments.