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A Surveillance Society?

I accept to an extent the hon. Gentleman's point that it is not just the retention of data that matters, but access to them. If he reads Hansard, he will see that I was making the point that although he was going to vote against the EU data retention directive, he asked me whether that directive included such things as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, and when I said that it did not, he expressed surprise. In turn, I expressed surprise that he was going to vote against the directive but was almost criticising me for not including such things, which would have resulted in a much bigger database.