Ministers are pushing ahead with contentious plans to give police and security services increased access to communications data because of fears they are failing to keep pace with the use of the internet by terrorists and criminals.

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, said yesterday a public consultation was planned for next year on the nature of such powers and a new legislative framework that would "seek [1] to protect civil liberties".

Ms Smith insisted that there were no plans for an "enormous database" [2] containing details of every e-mail, internet search, or phone or online conversation. She also ruled out giving local authorities powers to trawl [3] through such data.

Translations:

1. We'll give it the old college try, but we're not making any promises.
2. Our experts say an enormous number of smaller databases is more scalable.
3. Disks are cheap, so we're just going to FedEx them the whole thing.