As far as I can tell, ICRs (Internet Connection Records) will be subject to the same availability restrictions as "communications data".
So no warrant would be needed to get a list of domains a person has visited.
So no warrant would be needed to get a list of domains a person has visited.
Which is a great idea, because what you really want is people in high stress jobs not turning to organisations like mental health charities or alcohol support groups for help because they fear being outed, or people concerned about medical conditions not using on-line services provided by the NHS for fear of putting up insurance premiums, never mind the obvious things like compromising the high profile, married political candidate who visited bestgaypornevah.com every day last month.
The idea that any information that would normally be effectively private should be subject to government snooping without a good reason and proper oversight is inevitably a chilling effect, and it's all too likely that in the worst cases some people in the kinds of situation I mentioned before will literally die because of it. As much as I hate over-the-top political rhetoric, if we're going to have this debate for real now, I suspect the civil liberties groups are going to have start making blunt, bold statements like that to make their case.
It would also help if the people debating these issues in Parliament better understood the technical implications of some of the proposals and therefore why some of the safeguards also proposed in this debate won't or can't actually work. For example, even if we accept that logging visited web domains and making those logs subject to warrantless examination is justified, I'd like to know what technical mechanisms the average MP believes to exist for identifying and recording the domain name of all visited web sites reliably but nothing more, and how much they think it would cost ISPs to implement those mechanisms across the board.