The UK government's plans to intercept, store and study details of what you're reading and who you're talking to online continue to be discussed in the press, as the government moves ever closer to beginning their consultation process - apparently undismayed by the continuing opposition of the Information Commissioner, and the warnings from within their own ranks that the project would be 'fraught with technical difficulties'.

Although the proposed legislation does not require the content of every message to be stored by default, it does allow for this to happen once the 'who is reading what' data catches somebody's interest. Who is 'somebody' in this context? Well, we've seen how the government tends to gradually increase the pool of people with access to such data sources, so we'll start with it being senior police officials and ministers only, and probably end up with it including people who empty the bins in local council offices.

Of course, monitoring such a vast data source (and I do mean vast, the amount of data here is mind-boggling) is not a task for human eyes. Instead, some smart people will write some programs that sift through this data looking for 'interesting patterns'. The 'pattern' for organising a secret paramilitary activity such as a terrorist strike is probably superficially similar to the pattern of people organising a secret birthday party, so I'm sure we can look forward to having lots of our personal correspondence read by police and related officials as part of their epic quest to ensure that nobody in the UK is doing anything that they might want to keep private - after all, if we've done nothing wrong, we have nothing to hide, right?

Although senior law-enforcement officials are generally happy to be quoted as saying that this intelligence will make their jobs easier and therefore be of benefit to us all, this really relies on us (a) believing them (in the absence of any actual evidence to back up their assertions), and (b) trusting them. Unfortunately trust in the police and the legal system in general is falling sharply of late in many sectors of the public (not just the anarchists and hippies), largely due to their own misconduct - the use of anti-terrorist police to suppress and intimidate public opposition (the 'rioting police' at the G20 protests) and political opposition (the arrest of MP Damian Green), and their systematic abuse of anti-terrorism laws to prevent any evidence of their wrongdoings from being gathered (see various stories regarding people arrested or threatened with arrest for photographing police reversing the wrong way up one-way streets, or parking on double-yellow lines, for example).

It's also interesting to note that several of the people who've spoken out against the increasing swathes of surveillance and legislation in our society are senior ex-law-enforcement or senior ex-government officials themselves - including a former head of MI5. If people who were part of the system only a few short years ago can see it sliding across the line of what is right in a free society, surely that should be a cause for concern to those currently trying to push the system still further in the same direction.