One of the really badly communicated things, in my opinion, is that the traditional police state measures as surveilance, data collection, the data retention ideas you refer to, can't and won't work on the current and future internet, if somebody wants to trap information, which the 'bad guys' want to keep secret. The fact remains that there are widely available military stregth ciphers, anonimizing technologies, various p2p tools, should I continue counting, which make it virtually impossible to gather intelligence grade information in operational time. Ask yourself the question, why hasn't the agencies, at least it is not known publicly, tracked down any script kiddie controlling his zombies via botnet? Why all virus writers who were apprehended, were caught, because someone grassed them to the old bill, or their duch colleagues? IMO, it is good that technology has already made futile the intelligence measures proposed. With risk of being seen as a conspiracy theory geek, I would just ask - what is it which drives the propositions like the data retention. Is it incompetece? Is it the "Let us be seen doing something" mentality? Is it a genuine will for going towards a police society? Is it naivety? Maybe salad of those and more. It is a pity, that things like that need be even discussed.