News Government proposes internet snooping laws

I'm with Landy_Ed on this one.

Just think about what GCHQ's current mandate is... Taken from Wikipedia:

And this, taken from a recruitment website, summarising the role of GCHQ:

The second site may not be as reliable a source, but it does serve to illustrate my point: GCHQ is the home of this country's intelligence gathering operations. Therefore, they must already be monitoring communications. GCHQ was formerly the Government Codes & Ciphers School (GC&CS), which was based at Bletchley Park during WWII. The very same organisation which broke enemy encryption schemes, monitored communications and on D-Day knew the location of all except two of the 58 German divisions on the Western Front. And that was nearly 70 years ago...

It was only in the mid-70's that the world first started to learn just how much Bletchley Park knew during the war, and even now many former staff still feel bound to remain silent. You'd be fooling yourself if you think that "intelligence gathering" operations today do not include the need to monitor domestic communications. *Every* developed nation is gathering intelligence on each other, make no mistake about that, and that will include the need to monitor domestic communications - "enemy" agents don't just operate in their own countries.

That's not to say that I don't think that the appropriate protections or accountabilities should be in place; all I'm saying is that this is probably already happening to at least a small proportion of innocent people.