…it may just land you with a visit from Plod.

The BBC’s Five Live Breakfast sparked a flurry of anti-surveillance texts this morning following their story on internet companies being forced to keep records of our emails.

From March, new legislation will force ISPs to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for one year. Crucially, says the Government, the content of emails will not be retained. The justification is, of course, that it will aid in fighting crime and terrorism. That’s of course assuming the police can wade through the hundreds of millions of emails offering them discount Viagra and a bigger ****.

Although content will not be retained, it still allows the police (or in fact, any number of public bodies from Councils to Health Authorities!) to pinpoint your location at any time, understand your friendships, your work relationships, even how and where you access a computer. But the benefit of this information is questionable without the content of the emails. So it is pretty clear to all this is the first step on the road to an immense communications database. Once the systems, policies and protocol are in place for this first step, it will be virtually impossible to stop.

Did I mention this “first step” is costing somewhere in the region of £25-70m of public money? Someone should tell the Government there’s a recession on.