Blogs: A log of *everything*

The UK Government wants to have a log of every email and phone conversation you have made - just in case it needs to check you out for anti-terrorist investigation.

Well, we all know how well government departments are at keeping data secure. It's now around six months since the UK Government lost CDs with details of every family claiming Family Tax Credit in the UK - nearly every family with a child under 18 - after they were sent in unsecure snail-mail.

Given that function creep affects monitoring schemes, and CCTV cameras installed to stop violent crime are now used for catching dog fouling, can we trust the government with a log of all emails and phone conversations?

Given that the police were only too happy to use new anti-terrorism laws in 2005 to straight-arm a heckling pensioner out of the labour conference, can we trust the latest "anti-terrorism" laws?

How long will it take for the information to be hacked or leaked due to poor security or rogue employees?

I advise anyone who wants to see the 1984-esque possibilities of the collection of personal data (by business as well as government) to read Simson Garfinkel's book "Database Nation".

The only positive light I can see is that the IT systems to handle this will probably never work and will drown under the amount of data sent to them. More bad news is that if this became law, ISPs and telecom companies would increase their charges to customers to implment their part of the deal, and taxpayers would of course foot the bill for the failed system. Oh well. At least we'll be free (apart from being tracked by our mobile phones, possibly our cars, or, of course, by CCTV, that is).