NET RESULTS: Let me make this clear from the outset: I am not a conspiracy theorist. Nor am I particularly paranoid, writes Karlin Lillington.

My evidence: I don't encrypt my email though there are times when I should; I don't worry too much that someone might be listening in to a mobile phone or landline call, though they would be easy to snoop; and I still believe that astronauts landed on the moon in 1969.

But I am ardently and adamantly opposed to the Government's sneaky attempts to inflict legislation requiring information about all of our phone and mobile calls, emails, Web activities and faxes to be held in giant databases for several years.

You can first blame the Irish members of the European Parliament - all except the Greens, who opposed it - for having created the legal framework in which this grotesque, surveillance-enhancing law will be introduced. The MEPs gave their ill-informed "yea" during a summer vote that allowed individual states to "interpret" the EU's existing data protection directives and, therefore, the human and privacy rights reiterated in them.

But this odious law will be the Justice Department's baby. Last week, the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, whose department has been drafting just such a proposal since the EU vote, denied that it was anything other than a reasonable attempt to catch truly evil criminals, such as terrorists. He also emphatically stated that such a proposal would not turn the State into Big Brother.

But it absolutely does. Because the point at which the State decides that it must hold potential evidence for years in anticipation of as yet uncommitted crimes is the point at which the State has decided that all of its citizens are potential suspects and criminals.

It's the point at which the State decides that the privacy, the decent-mindedness and - yes - security of the many can be sacrificed to allow the State better control the acts of the evil few.

It's the point at which - even if we forget the State's admission in the past that it has abused its unmatched ability to obtain and use information about us - the State expects us to believe that vast repositories of personal information will never, ever, be misused - not by the State, not by its agents, not by the many people in private companies who will have the ability to access your records.

Even the United States, hell-bent on dumping decades of civil rights and privacy laws, has not dared to introduce a data retention law. It wants to create enormous databases, yes, through its Total Information Awareness proposal, spearheaded by good old Admiral Poindexter (he of Iran/Contra scandal fame). But the US would use data already held legally by businesses, not retain more data for longer periods than currently allowed.

Those who object by using the "you don't need to worry if you've done nothing wrong" excuse, or the "if it helps make the world safer, then let's do it" line, simply do not understand the data gathering and processing capabilities of digital systems like computers and telecommunications networks, nor their complexity.

Their complexity means these systems always remain vulnerable to an elite who can bypass even the very best security (governments in particular have poor security systems - just witness the number of successful hacks into international government targets, even supposed bastions of security like the Pentagon). They also remain vulnerable at the lowest common denominator - the guy in charge of a particular set of files who might be bribed or curious or malicious.

But far more worrying is the data gathering, collation and processing abilities of digital systems. Some have scoffed at the notion that data retention allows for a regime of global surveillance. It's easy to laugh at what seems a conspiracy theory - that a small evil gathering of clandestine organisations might be plotting to keep us all under constant surveillance. The reality is much more mundane. The devices we use every day -- our computers, phones, fax machines - have the ability to churn out details about our lives simply as a side effect of their operations.

Organisations including Europol, the CIA and MI5 have clamoured publicly for years to create databases of information from the digital footprints these devices leave behind. The "war on terror" has given them an environment in which otherwise right-thinking people are persuaded to let them have such information.

Information held in long-term databases can be digitally altered. "Evidence" that was never there can be put there, with some ease. Those with access rights can use data for spurious reasons (witness the five senior executives of Finnish incumbent telecom operator Sonera, charged with misusing the private phone records of individuals and employees in an attempt to root out a mole).

As for needing the information in order to stop heinous crimes: the Department of Justice was asked - in a secret questionnaire on data retention from that most secretive EU body of all, the Council of Ministers - whether a single investigation had ever been hampered by lack of access to the kinds of data proposed in this law (read the full document at www.effi.org/eu-2002-11-20.html). The Department's one-word answer? No.

This is a Big Brother law that must be strongly opposed. Don't let the Government try to tell you otherwise.

Note: I was in error when I wrote recently that Vodafone had issued information in its current bills about an agreement it is negotiating with the Data Protection Commissioner, to curtail the period in which it can retain mobile phone caller data. The agreement is still being finalised, according to Vodafone.

klillington@irish-times.ie

Karlin's weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/