Q636 Lord Strasburger: I am still in search of this elusive 25%. If representatives from the Home Office were here today—and we asked them—they might say that telephony was not all on landlines or even on mobile phones but is now over the internet, and they might point at Skype or Tor as developments that have reduced their capability to capture and retain information. Would it be true to say that, in the case of Skype and Tor, even after the Bill is passed the Home Office will be no further forward, because you do not hold in your organisations the information that it would need to make any sense of those communications? In the case of Skype, it is peer-to-peer encryption and you do not hold the keys, so you cannot help the Home Office. Am I right in saying that?

Stephen Collins: That is correct. That is a content issue, but Skype does not operate like a telephony service. Those data are not generated, and we would have to make incredible architectural changes—rewrite code—in order artificially to generate some kind of telephony-like data.

Q637 The Chairman: If you were ordered to do it?

Stephen Collins: I guess there would be a question whether a Luxembourg software provider could be ordered or compelled under the terms of a UK Act that applied to communications service providers, which Skype clearly is not when you read the definitions. So there is both a definitional piece and a jurisdictional piece that I would say exclude Skype from the RIPA terms.

The Home Office did not turn up to this session?

What on earth were they doing? Were they perhaps scared of hard questions?