I suggest you go and read my link to the evidence given to the House of Lords and House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights by Peter Clarke, head of the Met’s Anti-Terrorist Branch and Ken Jones, head of anti-terrorism at the Association of Chief Police Officers, that I linked to in a previous post.
Here are a couple of quotes:
"What we are seeing is that the increased use of high technology, of computers, of the internet and of mobile telephony as a means of communication between members of these global, loosely-knit networks, is such that in order to gain a picture of what we are dealing with and to gain the evidence we need much more time than we had in the past. Every investigation seems to push this trend forward. If I may, and I have to be very careful because there are sub judice issues, only this weekend we arrested three individuals who are currently in detention and I am told by my officers that we have recovered some 750 gigabytes of data. I do not know what that looks like. I asked what it looks like and they said, "If we printed it out this would be a pile of paper 66,000 feet high". Obviously, we are not going to be able to go through all of that but we have to investigate as much of that as possible and this we have found repeatedly is where our evidence comes from."
"It is not about resources, as is frequently put to me, "If you had more officers doing this could you not get through it more quickly?". It is about sequencing. If I could give an example, we often seize large numbers of mobile phones and SIM cards in a search. To conduct a search of an average domestic dwelling to the standards demanded by terrorist investigations takes two to three days on average. We frequently find SIM cards and very often, obviously because of their size, they are easily concealable, so we retrieve them. They are then sent to the laboratory where they are downloaded and the data is drawn off them. From the service providers we then have to get the subscriber details and the billing details. Quite often that information is held abroad and so it takes time to get that material back. Once we have received that material we have to analyse it and that involves a lot of charting and cross-checking, going through databases and then trying to make sense of the connections that evolve from this. The relevant parts of that then have to be put into a form of interview strategy to be put to the suspects who are being held in custody. At the same time the material that we hold, the parts that we intend to interview people about, have to be disclosed to the defence. The defence then have to consult with their clients and take instructions and at the end of that process we can get round to asking the questions. That, understandably, takes a particularly long time. Then, as a result of the answers to those questions or not, we have to start the whole process over again. That is just one example. The same applies to all sorts of other data. Quite often material has to be translated as well. It is not simply about resources. Obviously, I would not sit here in front of you and say that we do not want more resources; of course we do, but it is not simply a matter of resources. It is very much about the sequencing of the activity."
