(like I didn’t call this one)

Q635 The Chairman: But if people are to comply with the Bill, you as service providers cannot introduce a new service and then wait a few months or a couple of years for the DPI technology to catch up. Would you be under an obligation not to launch your new service until there was the DPI to analyse, record, check or store it?

…my emphasis; I hope it’s rhetorical and Blencathra is being ironic, but I cannot imagine the question being considered by anyone who truly cares about the progress of industry – perhaps you should not be permitted to innovate until you can be wiretapped?

I could stop there and let you just stew upon the implications of this question, but I’ll let the Government off the hook a little:

Simon Milner: If I might say so, one of the issues that this raises is how these orders are going to be determined. From our conversation with the Home Office, the clear sense was that it expected them to be negotiated; the Home Office would not simply write them and turn up on day one after Royal Assent with the order written. To some extent, there is a degree of comfort in that in that it recognises that it is going to have to take account of some very different services and situations. The Home Office also indicated that it saw imposing these requirements on the CSPs very much as a last resort. To our mind, that again is recognition that the Home Office has not really thought this through very well if it is a key part of the legislation but it is telling us about it only after the Bill has been published. It makes us feel rather worried that there is a sense of, “Don’t worry, we’ll sort this all out in the end once the Bill is passed”. By then, though, parliamentary scrutiny is finished, and from our perspective that is not a good place to be. We would much rather be having those conversations well before any draft legislation is published.

Ah, so the Home Office is guilty of shoddy thinking?