Tomorrow letters are going to be issued to all ISPs, large and small, demanding that details of emails, internet phone calls and browsing history be retained for 12 months.

I don’t need to say that this is unspeakably diabolical. Truly, this is the most terrifying milestone of them all. Available to the Government, for the first time ever, will be the ability to build up detailed profiles on individuals, their relationships with other people, their personal information, their sexuality, their membership of organisations, their shopping habits and in some cases their political beliefs and affliations.

Once the ISPs begin doing this, we’re all going to have to make sure we don’t look at the wrong sorts of websites – anything that might be compromising, anything, in short, you might need to explain when a Police officer or Government official pulls out a file and asks, “so what were you doing looking at this?”

I’ve looked at Mein Kamph on the internet. I’ve read Das Kapital on the internet. I’ve watched Ken Bigley being decapitated. I read political blogs from across the specrum, and occasionally that’ll include looking at stuff from fascists, Trotskyite revolutionaries, Eco-Warriors.. a full gamut of extremists and freaks in politics, religion and anything else. I like reading and discovering things in all walks of life, but how do you tell the difference between harmless intellectual curiosity and dangerous obsession that might indicate a deviant or seditious mind? 

For example, people convicted for looking at Child Porn on the internet have never successfully argued that they were ‘just curious’ about it (to my knowledge).  The crime is to look – your motives do not matter. We accept this as a society because Child Porn is one of those unforgivable, unspeakable horrors for which no succour for suspects can be tolerated. 

The prescedent is set, however, and the Government is empowering itself with the ability to find all anti-Government related activity on the internet, both producers (like me) and consumers (like you). We have to put it on blind faith that this Government or no Government after it will ever consider pushing this particular Nuclear Button. 

Of course, trying to record our browsing history for 12 months was, itself, an unspeakable Nuclear Button – and they’ve pushed that. Labour can’t stand this idea of something so huge and important they’ve got no control over, no access to and no ability to tax or regulate.  It makes me feel physically sick such is my impotent rage. 

So we face the prospect of having to try to guess what might, or might not, be compromising to look at on the internet, or who might or might not be compromising to email. I say this is a cruel and unusual punishment indeed.  It’s diabolical. It’s Machiavellian. It’s cutting the British off from a free, uncensored internet in an even nastier and more monsterous way then the Australian or Chinese  scheme. Our version uses uncertainty and fear to police the internet. Thought Police. 

What are the wrong sort of websites? Who knows. I certainly don’t. Is it better to be safe than sorry and simply not use the internet at all? Does using ‘the internet’ make us like those ‘outer party’ members who are subjected to extreme scrutiny, while the ‘proles’ who have no access to the internet are allowed to wallow in filth and muck unmonitored because they simply don’t matter enough for anyone to care what they do? 

How long it will take ISPs to implement these rules, and whether or not they will fight the Government (presumably a legal battle that lasts until, oh, say, after the next General Election) is as yet unknown.

The cost is mindboggling. An independent review suggested that something in the region of 40,000 terabytes of storage would be required by the largest ISPs. The Government’s promised to use taxpayer’s moneys to reimburse them for the costs, but 40,000 terabytes of enterprise level storage would set you back. according to my rather brief research, approximately £1.5 billion, with astronomical power and running costs requirements. Multiply that by the number of really big ISPs, and consider the effect on small ISPs and, once again, the Government’s created a mammoth barrier to entry for the ISP business and is about to dump billions and billions into storage providers. They’ll soon rethink their promise to fund all this when they discover how much it costs – or the public finds out – at which point the cost of the internet is going to rocket, ISPs are going to go bust and someone will come up with the clever idea of nationalising BT Broadband for the purposes of making it a universal public service. 

And so on.

We have to hope that this becomes a protracted legal battle and that the Tories overturn it, assuming they win. The alternative doesn’t even bear thinking about. There’s nothing that Labour do that makes this okay, that makes us happy to live with it because of all the other good things they do.