In the fight against crime and terrorism, many governments are gathering
communication data in order to gain insight into methods and activities of suspects and potential
suspects. Tapping, or wiretapping, has been used for a long time and nowadays most countries are
extending this to data retention, i.e., large-scale storage of various kinds of data available on
communications. At the same time, however, efforts are being made in the field of technology to
develop a new generation of communication networks, based on ultrafast optical and wireless
communication. This is likely to result in a significant increase in the speed and volume of
information transfer on communication networks such as the Internet. These increasing amounts of
information require increasing storage and analysis capacity, for which automated solutions are
being developed. In this contribution, the way in which these technological developments influence
the possibilities of tapping and data retention is discussed and some suggestions are made on how to
deal with this.