How Royal Prerogative??
How is that Royal Prerogative? It's not one of their discretionary powers listed, like calling an election, or granting of honors.
It was simply "We have budget for Mastering the Internet / Parliament says no / so we apply the law we've been using for tapping international phone calls to the Internet / We'll fix Parliament later".
It's not within their discretionary powers to do that. They just decided they were bigger than the pesky democracy, and the inconvienient Parliamentary decision could be ignored.
Lord Blair (not that one) had his go at fixing it by slipping in an amendment to a bill (he was in on it, as ex MET anti-terror Police, he would know there was a split between Parliaments laws and Charles Farr's actions). And this is the latest attempt to bring Parliament to heel.
The protections against an abusive GCHQ was "GCHQ cannot spy on Brits". In exchange they got relative free access to surveillance data... but not *British* surveillance data.
If you say they can spy on Brits, then each and ever piece of data has to go through judicial warrant with the right of the Brit to challenge it. That is the RIGHT we are ENTITLED to.
And as for classifying some data as "content", as a means to strip privacy rights for all the other data, yeh, its a trick, we get it, you're very good lawyers and scheming politicians, but that will just be abused in secret.
This "well its only websites not pages", bullshit, if knowing (hypothetically), that Andy Burnham visits BackdoorMilfsGaped.com it would give extraordinary leverage against Burnham. Sure we might not the exact milf he ejaculates too... for that we'd have to ask GCHQ, which would have grabbed that data as part of their UK fishing trawl, and could hand it to a (hypothetical) Charlie Farr figure without any process or limit.
So you'd have an enormous among of leverage over the political system by a few bad actors in Government. Exactly the thing a judicial system is meant to stop.
But we're not talking about some future "hypothetical" system are we? You did it in secret and now its being abused.