Here we go again. The government wants to get more data about us. And store it in a monumental database. Although a Home Office spokesman has said, "Ministers have made no decision on whether a central database will be included in the draft Bill." That's probably just a way of keeping troublemakers, like the press, at bay until the inevitable decision has been made.

Dig a little deeper and you find embedded in the proposal for a Communications Data Bill and you'll find that a main element is to "Transpose EU Directive 2006/24/EC on the retention of communications data into UK law." This data retention law has already been challenged for breaching human rights. Yet our lot press on regardless. I'm never sure whether our government decides what snooping it wants to do, then finds a handy European directive to cover it, or whether it is just utterly supine.

Anyway, the ball is rolling. If the plans come to pass, our communications and ISP networks will sport the equivalent of street cameras except they will be black boxes snooping on our telephone and internet activities and feeding them in real time to the database. It will know how long we spend online, who we talk to, what web pages we connect to, what emails and IMs we exchange, with whom, and so on.

The government's proposal reassures us that, "ensure strict safeguards continue to strike the proper balance between privacy and protecting the public." In other words it is using the threat of crime - terrorism specifically - to snoop on us all. If the past is a good guide to the future, it is likely cost a fortune, be late, cost even more than planned, be insecure, run up huge carbon debts and fail in its primary task.

Seems to me that the government really is biting off more than it can chew with this one.