Once again, a home secretary is pushing forward legislation that doesn't appear to cope very well with the actual realities of what it is supposed to be doing.

The issue I have is going to be tying traffic to an indivdual. If the family home is covered by wifi, there's a laptop for each of the parents and several mobile devices some of which are shared, they're going to really struggle to say 'this website was visited by that person' with any degree of confidence at all.

Once again, a home secretary is pushing forward legislation that doesn't appear to cope very well with the actual realities of what it is supposed to be doing.

I think this is more to do with legitimising the mass data collection programmes they already have in place. Everyone knows this has no hope of detecting/stopping individual serious criminals and terrorists.

Clegg writes: “When I became deputy prime minister in 2010, I was the leader of a party that had been out of government for 65 years. There were a lot things that we had to re-learn, and a lot that was surprising and new.

“When a senior official took me aside and told me that the previous government had granted MI5 direct access to records of millions of phone calls made in the UK – a capability that only a tiny handful of senior cabinet ministers knew about – I was astonished that such a powerful capability had not been avowed to the public or to parliament and insisted that its necessity should be reviewed.

The government insists, as it tries to scrap the Freedom of Information Act, that only people who have something to hide should worry. People who run for public office will be afforded privacy, while our private lives will become public property. Having our privacy exposed is particularly crushing for the British – a nation for whom the phrase: “How are you?” really means: “Please say one word, then leave me alone.” So why have they just accepted this? Well, for a lot of people it’s the only hope that anyone will ever read their tweets.

Of course, the government has been reading our social media messages for 15 years. Imagine the celebrations at GCHQ when they see a young couple they used to watch sexting, then wanking on Skype, post their first kid’s school uniform pics on Facebook. In its own way, it must be quite touching.

and of course anyone who wants to hide anything will just use VPN / TOR etc

But the dark net won't stay dark for long. Because of a demand for secure internet access and user privacy, soon enough big businesses, newspapers, internet companies - and then all of us - will join the dark net. Within five years, you'll be able to choose to access your favourite brands on either the dark or the normal net.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned the UK faces "dire consequences" if it passes the government's recently revealed draft surveillance bill.

The Investigatory Powers Bill seeks to give officials permission to capture web browsing metadata of every UK citizen, and would introduce sweeping reforms to oversight procedures. It would also force internet companies to assist investigators in bypassing encryption on messaging apps and other services - the so-called 'backdoor' requirement.