And this is why this charter is a bad idea. Once these things are on the statute books, who knows what they will be used for. I suspect Theresa just wants this pushed through in a hurry to legitimise what they are already doing via PRISM.

@Lasercow - There are One Hundred Million criminals out there who want to do everything from steal your children to blow you up. There are not enough security service or police staff to deal with them, never mind having to deal with yours or my trivia on the internet.

I was reading about attempts to blacklist dodgy illegal websites (real nasty stuff), another unworkable issue the Gov are banging on about at the moment. Wikileaks had revealed the Australian Governments blacklist. As well as sites you might expect, there were also fringe political parties, small religions and for some reason, a Brisbane dentist.

Give them these powers, and who knows to what ends they will be used.

Most posters don't use their real names here, for good reason. Is it that far fetched for certain councillors to contact a friendly policeman to find out the identities of the posters? Shouldn't be hard to do at all, if you can see what IP addresses are accessing different services....

In a democracy should we not expect a general right of privacy.

Ah yes! The whistleblower ex-CIA operative Edward Snowden who has since fled to Hong Kong whose overlord is China currently the world's biggest indulger in cyber-attacks, patent and copyright violations and systematised hacking of other country's computer software.

So I don't think we'll be taking too much advice or empty pontificating from this latter-day Kim Philby.