George Kerevan - Big Brother is watching … for real this time

So Mrs T announces that from now on the Post Office will open and photocopy every letter sent by anyone in the country. These photocopies will be kept in perpetuity. There is an immediate outcry in the left-wing media about invasion of privacy and the rise of a Big Brother state. But Mrs T defends her action, saying that innocent folk have nothing to fear and can steep easier in their beds because of her actions.

Next, Mrs Thatcher says that every phone call made in the UK is to be monitored and taped. These records will also be kept indefinitely. She justifies this by saying it will help catch crime bosses, IRA terrorists and trades unionists seeking to overthrow democracy. Airily, she dismisses a march of one million protesters opposing this infringement of civil liberties by claiming that an opinion poll shows a clear majority of Britons support her actions.

It's OK, you can wake up from the nightmare now. None of this actually happened. Even Mrs T – bombed out of her Brighton bed by the Provos and with her closest political ally, Airey Neave, blown up in the precincts of the House of Commons – was not up for such a drastic curtailment of civil liberties. After all, everyone from right-wing libertarians to left-wing human rights activists would have risen up as one to denounce the advent of an Orwellian state which monitors every thought of its citizens.

It may come as surprise, therefore, to discover that since last October every internet service provider and telecommunications company in the UK has been required by the Labour government to keep a record of every phone call, text message, e-mail and internet use made in Britain, so that the security forces, the tax man and other assorted agencies can see what we are all getting up to. But where is the public outcry?

You might be tempted to say there is no mass resistance to this dramatic extension of the state's right to snoop into the life of the citizen because the sheer volume of data is far too large to ferret through unless you are after a known suspect. For a start, we sent more than 57 billion text messages last year. Well, think again.

The Home Office has announced it has set up a team to create a centralised, government-run "super" database to hold the details of all our telephone and internet communications. Special software would allow instant data mining, letting the police and security agencies build a profile of any individual and their network of personal contacts.

Furthermore, the state could keep this information indefinitely, rather than the statutory 12 months imposed on private telecoms companies. The government's legislative programme for this autumn promises a Data Communications Bill which the Home Office admits may include the legal power to set up this central database and a public authority to administer it.

So far, these stealthy moves have provoked only limited resistance. One exception is Richard Thomas, the official UK information watchdog, who this week denounced the whole project, saying: "I am absolutely clear that the targeted, and duly authorised, interception of the communications of suspects can be invaluable in the fight against terrorism … But there needs to be the fullest public debate about the justification for, and implications of, a specially-created database holding details of everyone's telephone and internet communications … Even the possibility of such a controversial scheme needs the fullest debate."

The government will respond that – as with the present, more limited system of surveillance – only a record of names, internet protocol addresses and telephone numbers is kept for official scrutiny, not the actual content of calls or websites. So if you were texting sexy messages to your mistress, or viewing porn, no-one will be able to find out.

Please pull my other leg. Google maintains page impressions of everything called up by its users, so it would be no problem to match your name to a particular site and access its contents.

In fact, Google is currently resisting a subpoena from the US government which is demanding access to the records of a million American citizens drawn at random, plus the sites they viewed. This is an attempt by the Bush administration to prove how American society has been sexually perverted by the internet. I suspect Google will win, but given how it cravenly submitted to Chinese pressures to censor the internet, I won't hold my breath.

Earlier this month, Google was ordered by the US courts to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to a company called Viacom, which is suing the search engine for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear. That includes you, by the way. The two companies now seem to have worked out a private deal to protect the names of downloaders, but don't expect such good manners from the Inland Revenue or your local council, which will have access to the Home Office super computer.

It is possible to argue that the ease of global communication afforded by mobile phone and the internet has bred a new kind of terrorism and organised crime – so it is nave to imagine we can avoid trailing them through the electronic ether. I totally understand that argument.

However, as Richard Thomas points out, targeted interception is a very different thing from compiling an Orwellian database on every citizen's private communications.

Add this new database to the plan for ID cards (with all our personal and biological details on file) and 1984 is already with us. And no-one is marching in the streets.