There were three really shocking things about this. Firstly, how little any of the politicians who voted for it understood what it was. Virtually none of them c

There were three really shocking things about this. Firstly, how little any of the politicians who voted for it understood what it was. Virtually none of them could even define what "meta data" meant, yet were casting judgement on the privacy implications of retaining it. Secondly, how poorly drafted the actual legislation ended up being. Since nobody involved understood it, the law itself is a series of self contradictory statements that make very little sense. At some point they decided to exclude "web browsing history" but nobody obviously knew how on earth to write that in, so it became its own section that overrode the other sections to say that "nothing else in this bill requires retention of anything that could be interpreted to be web browsing history" - despite the fact that the rest of the bill very explicitly details retention of web browsing history. As it stands, the law is unimplementable, and thus what is now happening is that ISPs are going through a process of getting "guidance" which is a euphemism for "since we can't legally operate any more given this law is unimplementable, just tell us what you want and we will do it". Finally, the fact that there was a sudden and inexplicable spike in terrorism raids in the weeks when the bills were debated. There have been almost no raids since, and there were almost no raids before. Yet in those critical weeks, law enforcement just happened to decide that it was timely to execute a bunch of "raids", which have had no material outcome. In other words, law enforcement appears to be transparently corrupt and willing to abuse its powers for political ends. Which means we are very much well on the way to being a police state.