And now they want to know who your friends are...

In the lastest twist in the attempts by the government to monitor every aspect of our lives, we now learn that they want to force social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to reveal who peoples' friends are. As well as wanting access to all our e-mails and phone records, the Home Office has indicated it would find it useful to be able to get lists of peoples' contacts on the internet. However, we are 'assured' that the Government would not be interested in monitoring the content of any communications between people (yeah, right!).

Some people would say "if you've nothing to hide, then why not?". But on that basis, let's have a little camera in the corner of every room in our homes, just in case any illegal activity takes place. After all, if you've nothing to hide....

What this increasingly authoritarian government doesn't seem to understand is that there is such a thing as 'private space'. What sounds like a modest request to aid the fight against crime quickly turns into a dirty great loophole which allows all arms of the state to intrude into your private life. Every time the Government asks for new powers of intrusion in our lives they always assure us that its use will be proportionate and restricted. But after the circus moves on we suddenly find that these powers are being used for all sorts of reasons that we were not warned about at the time - witness the eviction of someone who heckled Jack Straw at a Labour conference by means of 'anti-terrorism' powers.

The present government - and its predecessors - are too cavalier with our personal freedoms. Each addition to the powers of the state can seem modest on its own and justified in isolation, but put them all together and you quickly end up with a snooping state and it's time that we said 'enough is enough'.