The government promises not to look at the content of messages themselves, and restrict itself to who communicates with whom. This seems ludicrous. If two terrorist suspects are emailing each other frequently, on Facebook or anywhere itself, it's difficult to believe security services won't try to discover the content of the messages. Somewhere in the legislation – either in an amendment to RIPA or a clause of the communications data bill – there will be a power, in 'exceptional circumstances' to read content. And 'exceptional circumstances' tend to become much less exceptional than originally intended.