The government’s proposed new surveillance laws go so far that that they could even allow various agencies to look into your banking and online shopping habits, it has been revealed. 

The Investigatory Powers Bill is currently in the draft stage, but it is a plan to monitor and store the online activity of everyone in the UK. This is the more public face of this intrusive new bill, but one clause tucked away allows the security services to download people’s details from so-called ‘bulk’ databases. 

Of course there are legitimate reasons for this, as Operation Ore revealed the credit card details of a number of UK subscribers to illegal pornography sites more than a decade ago. The wording of the new bill is so loose, though, that internet privacy campaigner Jim Killock has suggested it could just as easily be applied to the Tesco Clubcard membership scheme. 

Of course private investigators can access a good portion of an individual's online habits through legal means, and can often uncover corporate fraud, matrimonial and infidelity problems and even locate missing persons through internet records. The government having blanket access to our internet records, though, is another matter altogether.

GCHQ has started downloading large amounts of personal data under old legislation and there are opponents to the scheme as it stands, as it looks to be the precursor to total mass surveillance. The Home Office has pledged to order specific warrants that will be limited to six months and a process of judicial oversight.

Open Rights Group director Jim Killock is not convinced. "In this country, just about every major business operates a bulk database with personal information on it and that includes Tesco, Experian or even the banks,” he said in a parliamentary briefing. “So where does the surveillance end when you start to get into this bulk data?”

The bill as it stands will ensure that all internet records are retained for 12 months and grants investigators the right to collect information about huge swathes of the population, rather than any kind of targeted approach. Civil liberties groups are up in arms about this level of surveillance and are concerned about the wide ranging powers that will be granted by this bill. 

Shami Chakrabarti, of Liberty, said: “My fundamental objection is too much of this is about sanctioning mass surveillance of entire populations and departing from traditional democratic norms of targeted, suspicion-based surveillance for limited purposes, and there are insufficient safeguards against abuse."