It's a matter of public record that MI5 staff have been abusing their powers and had to be disciplined:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mi5-misuse-of-surveillance...

That's before some idiot walks out the door with the entire database for an ISP and leaves it on a train.

Because you are not a unique and special snowflake. If you regularly go to /r/The_Donald, it says something specific about your politics (probably). Same for /r/LateStageCapitalism or /r/trees. It might not say much, but it adds up to a profile of who you are and what you think about.

If you are emailing certain people, or tweeting them or whatever, GCHQ can build a social graph of people you know, who they know, etc. If you are the friend (or friend of a friend) of a person of interest, you're more likely to be of interest yourself. There are not many criminals like the una-bomber working entirely on their own - most of us need encouragement and/or provocation, and nowadays much of that happens online.

If your search phrases include things like "how to make a bomb", you're probably going to be on a database somewhere. There have been numerous serious court cases (e.g. murder trials) where the prosecution have presented evidence that the accused's search history included phrases like "how to dispose of a body" or "how to poison someone". In other cases, jurors have been dismissed for using Google to research the background to the case they are serving on. I wonder where the information about these searches came from?

Metadata is important for identifying "interesting" people. When you have found them, you "zoom in" and start hoovering up all the information you can find, not just the metadata. It's the greatest spying tool ever, and a way to implement highly repressive government too - just start monitoring people with different lifestyles or "way out" opinions.

http://ghanadailies.com/2016/11/22/uk-government-plans-porn-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/23/niche-...

They won't be collecting that information though. They'll only see that you visited reddit.com in all those cases.

And from another site on the same issue: "When you visit a website you usually start at the websites homepage such as www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/ the Government define this part of a website address (the part before the first forward slash) as communications data which they consider to be non-intrusive information." (https://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...)

Given that the ISP's have now been given cart blanche to collect data that is very commercially valuable I can see some of them doing it with the hope they can sell it later.

For https sites (green lock icon) they only know domain name, for example reddit.com

I suppose they already have that power, otherwise we wouldn't have what you describe.

But the article says they're only gathering connection metadata, this law anyway. I guess they're already doing even more intrusive things, at least as a way to know who to get "legit" evidence on.

It's about profiling, how that profile is determined, and who accesses it under what circumstances.

Google tracks it.

It's amazing how bad some people are with computers, like astoundingly bad, It's easy to forget as techies/developers that not everyone even understands crudely how a computer works.

Or even better start using it to monitor opponents and discover their weak points and alliances. If you wanted a recipe for tyranny when a vindictive leader comes to power, this is it.

This is really a legalisation of the law-breaking that has been going on for decades from GCHQ, and the expansion of their data out to a huge number of government departments. There will be abuse of this system at all levels.

I've also wondered about that. Presumably it could simply be from the browser history of a seized computer. But now, who knows?

Will it become standard practice to look up the internet history of anyone accused of any crime? Who decides whether this stuff is admissible as evidence?