[pbhjpbhj]

Is this just the first offer in a bid to get police access to data for investigation purposes - like ask for the world and then asking just for a mountain sounds reasonable.

In this case it would be asking that service providers monitor everyone; but, the actual desire is to allow investigative authorities (police, MI5, ...) access to suspected terrorists online dealings via the service providers at the back end.

In the Lee Rigby case it seems that the exchange about murdering soldier would have been sufficient to push the suspect in to the camp of making terrorist threats and allowed for an arrest.

It's curious in some ways as Adebowale had been the focus of investigations and yet GCHQ clearly didn't have information on all his online exchanges (that could be tied to him), yet a company in the USA did have access. This suggests that the level of integration in to online communications that GCHQ has is far less than we've recently been led to believe. We're being told left-and-right that government spooks know our every move and whisper - this seems not to be true, not even for people associated with terrorism investigations.