Snooper's Charter will extend GCHQ's surveillance powers to all levels of law enforcement, say campaigners

Request filter will be used for "fishing trips and profiling people" says Jim Killock of Open Rights Group

The Investigatory Powers Bill, which was passed by the House of Commons last week, will effectively give the police and other authorities the same powers of surveillance that are currently enjoyed by GCHQ.

That's according to Raegan MacDonald, senior policy manager EU principal at Mozilla.

"It's about legally justifying the previously secret practices of GCHQ and also allowing those powers to go to all levels of law enforcement," she told the audience at a Mozilla Privacy Lab event in London.

The IP Bill, commonly known as the Snooper's Charter, requires telecoms companies and ISPs to store records of telephone and internet communications for one year. What is less widely known is that the Home Office is also building a search engine for all this data known as "request filter", which will allow authorities to conduct detailed searches across all of this data. These queries will be subject to the "filtering" oversight of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, and for this reason request filter is being sold by the Home Office as a privacy enhancing measure.

"The request filter, when used, acts as an additional safeguard for communications data requests made by public authorities, to ensure that the data they acquire is limited only to that which is absolutely necessary," says the government in a fact sheet.

But pointing out that the Bill is short on mechanisms to ensure that oversight is effective, Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group, questioned how this will work in practice.

"Request filter is being sold as a privacy enhancing measure because the police will only see the information they need," he said.

"That sounds plausible at first but let's say the police say, 'someone in Shoreditch has been looking at this dodgy website but we don't know who', where is the search going to start? They're going to look at all the people in Shoreditch and all of the people who have accessed that website and narrow it down."

In reality such requests are likely to be waved through by those supposed to scrutinise them, and because this is an "easy and cheap way to gather intelligence" it will be used for "fishing trips and profiling people", Killock suggested.

Killock added that request filter is the latest incarnation of a plan for a national police database to centralise electronic communications that was mooted by the Labour government only to be abandoned in 2009 once questions started to be asked about costs and utility in Parliament.

Rather than a single, central database, the idea for a filtered search capability across multiple datasets emerged in Theresa May's draft Communications Data Bill under the coalition government. The draft Bill was eventually squashed by coalition partners the Lib Dems, but request filter is retained in the current IP Bill (Clause 51: Filtering arrangements for obtaining data).

While recognising the value of analytics to law enforcement agencies, MacDonald said "the powers are too broad, they are not defined and they are not proportionate".

Following an intervention from Labour, aspects of the bulk collection powers in the IP Bill will be examined by terrorism watchdog David Anderson QC. However, since it has already passed through the Commons any subsequent changes to the Bill are likely to be minor. It will be passed to the House of Lords on 27 June. The IP Bill is likely to become law before the end of 2016.

Last year it was revealed that through its "Karma Police" programme GCHQ has been logging the browsing habits of internet users worldwide since 2009 - including visits to all websites, posts on social media and news sites, search engine queries, and posts on chat forums and blogs.