This is truely a bad week for those of us who value our privacy. The UK government has used the terrorism excuse to put in place several new measures to spy on those of us who live here.

For a start the government has allowed a whole range of organisations to look at who we phone and when. This includes the location of the nearest cell site when we do it from our mobile phone. There is no oversight of this by the courts. They can just log in and download our itemised bill.

Then the government has told us that we must give up encryption keys when asked. If not we face 2 years in prison. And if you have really forgotten the key thats two years in prison mate. So better write it down somewhere.

The majority of people have been convinced by the argument and I continually hear the refrain "I have nothing to hide".

That is possibly true of all the people I know but they have all failed to realise that some government employees can't be trusted, and will reveal what they know about someone for a fee. Lets face it goverment jobs don't pay a fortune and criminals are likely to offer money and the chance are someone will be tempted.

I can't wait for the first case to come up where a local council officer has used it to spy on his girlfriend/wife/enemy.

In a state where Police now rgularly prosecute people who defend their homes from burglars what do you expect?

The UK Government is planning to make a big Database that contains all our data. Health, Social Security, Tax and everything else the government knows about us will be consolidated into one big database. This raises three big questions.

Since the Government has such a poor record on big database projects will this just become another gravy train for companies lile CAP Gemini and Accenture?

The next question in my mind relates to the security of this data. How can they possibly keep it secure?

Holding all this data in one place makes it especially attractive to criminals who will want access to it to steal our identities. No matter what physical security is put in place some people will alsways be amenable to large amounts of money. So we can never be sure our data is entirely safe.

The third question is use of that data by a future government.

Many people in the UK really have no understanding of history. I read in the paper that people who were asked about ID cards said they had no problem with ID cards as they were not planning to be criminals.

Maybe they also don't realise that many people in Nazi Germany were not planning to be criminals either but the Government made them so. We might trust this Governament not to abuse the data it collects but what about a future Government perhaps one rules by a BNP or a Muslim Fundamentalist Prime minister. Could we trust them too?

Should we risk giving this tool to anyone even someone we trust?