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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

It is getting at the process. If, as the Bill states, you are trying to limit, ""gaining access to particular material"," the only way that you can tell whether someone is gaining access to that material is to read their traffic. That involves a complete loss of privacy, which is a considerable step. To my mind, as we had an entire Act on that subject and took it extremely carefully, we should not give the Government a blanket power to do that subject only to affirmative resolution. In terms of the technicalities, if I am downloading a file from the United States somewhere, that file may be going simultaneously through 20 or 30 different routes and be reconstructed only very close to me—a mile or two away. You have to go in for a level of technical surveillance that is available, under particular circumstances, to the security services, but should not be there to protect EMI.