While I strongly doubt that the final result will do anything but suggest that parliamentary supporters of the Great Firewall of Cameron are anything but hypocritical blowhards, I would be curious to know what an ‘access’ is for the purposes of the censorware system they use on that network.
Having examined more log-spew than I care to think about from the (legally mandated, CIPA-compliance, not my idea or my idea of a good idea) censorware device at work (in the course of diagnosing and correcting false-positive blocking of all kinds of stuff, those things are crazy immature and largely about CYA), an ‘access’ could potentially mean a single HTTP request that gets denied. Loading a typical webpage can involve anywhere from a handful to hundreds of those. Depending on where in the loading process the censorware halts things (eg. does ‘GET goatsandstoatsandsaucyhuntresses.com/index.html’ get shot down immediately, or does index.html get loaded and then the GETs for each image and script on that page get shot down?) you could log anywhere from one to dozens of ‘accesses’ for a single action that a human would call an ‘access’ (ie. clicking a link or typing in a URL). On a browser that does some link prefetching this effect would be amplified.
I have no wish to defend parliament(even if you are going to be a bunch of dirty old men while on the clock, haven’t there been enough scandals around your creative interpretations of your expense accounts that you can afford your own damn cellular data plan?); but one should be skeptical of ambiguous wording in contexts where words are likely to mean domain-specific things rather unlike their common everyday use, whether the conclusion be a flattering one, or a piece of NSA whitewash.
