Will it ever stop? Great Britain may build a database of all telephone and e-mail traffic in the country, the New York Times reported on Thursday. The objective is to fight terrorism.

The database will be of traffic only—phone numbers dialed, Web sites visited and e-mail addresses, the Times wrote. But civil liberties groups are against the idea, and I’m with them.

Yes, it’s important to fight evildoers. But ask yourself this: Would you trust any government with that information?

Not me.

For starters, there’s simple human incompetence. “The U.K. is careless with citizens’ data,” said Alastair Tempest, director general of FEDMA, said the other day at DMA08. “It keeps on losing it.”

It has also lost laptops with atomic secrets on them. “The Iranians were very appreciative,” he joked.

Tempest added that most privacy laws are not properly enforced because “government bodies are some of the worst offenders when it comes to breaking them.”

But there’s a bigger issue—the propensity of governments to misuse information on citizens.

Read Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” if you want to learn how technology can be put to evil use. In this novel, Stalin-era scientists are sent to a special prison camp and put to work creating a telephone voice-recognition system that could identify any citizen.

Or check out “IBM and the Holocaust,” by Edwin Black. According to Black, the Nazis used IBM’s punch-card sorting system to find Jews, gays and other despised persons, and meticulously code their deaths.

No wonder Europe has been more aggressive than the U.S. in protecting personal data.

“The concept of privacy as a fundamental human right came directly out of the Holocaust, and also out of Eastern Europe, and right-wing regimes of Southern Europe,” U.S. privacy expert Marty Abrams once said. “Spiros Simitas [the father of Europe’s data protection movement], was sensitive to the fact that technology is absolutely repugnant and terrible when applied in this fashion.”

(Unfortunately, the laws that exist are tougher on businesses than they are on governments).

U.K. officials told the Times that the database would not include the content of messages. But how difficult would it be to add that?

Lord Carlile, an independent reviewer of British terrorism laws was right when he said that the U.K. government should not be permitted to create a vast “data warehouse.”

Will it ever stop? Great Britain may build a database of all telephone and e-mail traffic in the country, the New York Times reported on Thursday. The objective is to fight terrorism.

The database will be of traffic only—phone numbers dialed, Web sites visited and e-mail addresses, the Times wrote. But civil liberties groups are against the idea, and I’m with them.

Yes, it’s important to fight evildoers. But ask yourself this: Would you trust any government with that information?

Not me.

For starters, there’s simple human incompetence. “The U.K. is careless with citizens’ data,” said Alastair Tempest, director general of FEDMA, said the other day at DMA08. “It keeps on losing it.”

It has also lost laptops with atomic secrets on them. “The Iranians were very appreciative,” he joked.

Tempest added that most privacy laws are not properly enforced because “government bodies are some of the worst offenders when it comes to breaking them.”

But there’s a bigger issue—the propensity of governments to misuse information on citizens.

Read Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” if you want to learn how technology can be put to evil use. In this novel, Stalin-era scientists are sent to a special prison camp and put to work creating a telephone voice-recognition system that could identify any citizen.

Or check out “IBM and the Holocaust,” by Edwin Black. According to Black, the Nazis used IBM’s punch-card sorting system to find Jews, gays and other despised persons, and meticulously code their deaths.

No wonder Europe has been more aggressive than the U.S. in protecting personal data.

“The concept of privacy as a fundamental human right came directly out of the Holocaust, and also out of Eastern Europe, and right-wing regimes of Southern Europe,” U.S. privacy expert Marty Abrams once said. “Spiros Simitas [the father of Europe’s data protection movement], was sensitive to the fact that technology is absolutely repugnant and terrible when applied in this fashion.”

(Unfortunately, the laws that exist are tougher on businesses than they are on governments).

U.K. officials told the Times that the database would not include the content of messages. But how difficult would it be to add that?

Lord Carlile, an independent reviewer of British terrorism laws was right when he said that the U.K. government should not be permitted to create a vast “data warehouse.”