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Home Affairs and Justice

My question is closely related to the one that my right hon. Friend has just answered. The only other aspect of the Government's case which we keep hearing is that vast quantities of computerised material have to be gone through. However, it is not at all clear whether such quantities, assuming that they are not encrypted, are vast quantities of rubbish concealing a few important nuggets of information or vast quantities of vital information. It is hard to see why there have to be gigabytes of vitally important information, let alone anything larger. Therefore, the vast quantities of material are presumably rubbish covering the important bits. In that event, it would always be possible for terrorists to pile on more and more gigabytes to conceal the bits that matter. There might therefore be no end to the amount of time for which the Government could require people to be detained in order to go through it.