A nice coincidence last Tuesday. As the joint select committee of peers and MPs met to hear evidence on the draft Communications Data Bill, which will give police and intelligence services the power to access all your email data and internet connections, the hacking group AntiSec published a sample of 12 million unique Apple device identifiers.
These device identifiers may have included details of President Obama's iPad and almost certainly came from an FBI agent's laptop, which goes to prove that wherever you have a big database, someone will find a way into it, even when the information is trusted to one of the most sophisticated intelligence agencies on Earth.
The point was not lost on the committee chairman, Lord Blencathra, formerly the Conservative chief whip David Maclean, who called it "fatalistic". Not that you heard much of this last week in the coverage of the rituals of a tribe of pygmies, otherwise known as the cabinet reshuffle.
However, two of the most respected figures in the history of the web – its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales – were vehemently against the proposals, not just because they were anti-democratic and represented a mass breach of privacy but, in Wales's view, because they are unworkable.
Just about everyone from the London Internet Exchange (Linx) to the Law Society is opposed to the "snooper's charter" on the grounds of privacy. But let's forget that core issue for a moment and focus on the bill's origin, which happens to be the seething breast of a man named Charles Farr, formerly of MI6, now the head of the office for security and counterterrorism at the Home Office.
The home secretary, Theresa May, promoted the bill, but it is Farr's baby and, in effect, is simply a version of the vast data-gathering machine that he conceived in the interception modernisation programme under Labour. That this anonymous, unelected agency man persists with the creepy agenda should be enough to alert even the most complacent to its dangers.
The evidence heard last week by the committee in front of which I am due to appear later in the autumn was pretty persuasive on the many basic flaws in the draft bill. Just about every area seems poorly conceived or vague. This includes scrutiny, security of people's data, cost, the effects on business, unacknowledged technological difficulties and actual effectiveness as a tool to make the public safe.
The most obvious problem is that the internet is international but the law could only apply in this country and Britain cannot guarantee foreign companies will store the data of British users. Jimmy Wales said that Wikipedia would easily thwart attempts to track what his site's users were reading by encryption.
One of the interesting points of the proposal is that data passing through this country would be liable to be monitored by the government. Foreigners being unwittingly subjected to British surveillance is one thing but if Facebook, say, agrees to collect data on British users, Professor Ross Anderson, the digital security expert from Cambridge, says: "That data will be made available to the FBI, like it or not." Thus our government will be exposing citizens to unwarranted intrusion from foreign agencies. It is difficult to see how the coalition could go along with that.
Mass surveillance of everyone, using special filters installed at more than 200 internet service providers, is bound to miss the bad guys. Professor Peter Sommer, an academic and expert witness on digital issues, suggested to the committee that surveillance could easily be avoided by buying a data SIM card, using an internet cafe or by means of draft emails on a web-based email service, where all the members of a conspiracy share one identity and so can access the same email account. Because the emails are saved as drafts only, they escape surveillance and so the email account acts as a discreet communications channel. The bill would obviously stimulate more and more ingenuity among those who want to break the law.
What are we buying for £1.8bn over 10 years, if not 100% security? The answer includes mass surveillance of innocent people, a worrying change in the relationship between state and highly monitored public, and a chill in web innovation and business activity. There is evidence that companies would not choose to operate under a regime of such scrutiny and an enhanced risk to our personal information. The case of Apple users and the FBI couldn't be more eloquent of that. But you have only to think of the recent instances of police selling information to newspapers, of journalists hacking email accounts and the abuse of the police database to realise the risks of vast databases with so many weak points.
Glyn Wintle, who is paid to break into systems to test their security, told the committee that he once kept a log of data losses reported in the British media. It worked out a loss every two days of up to 200 million personal records, which underscores Anderson's rule that no large database can be secure and functional at the same time. That will apply to this Home Office system, however much money is spent.
Most expect the costs to rise above £1.8bn, as the Home Office chases the impossible goal of total surveillance. But the real wickedness is not the expense in straitened times but the pretence that there is little value in a person's communications data, whom they are communicating with and when, compared to the content of the communications. Malcolm Hutty from Linx told the committee that the data alone could tell authorities about associations between people, their characteristics and, in the age of smart phones, their position from minute to minute. Search engines would begin to trawl the data for patterns of behaviour to discover who was in a particular location at certain time, for example.
Given this astonishing power to monitor law-abiding citizens, the draft bill is remarkably weak on safeguards, proposing that the opaque and more or less unaccountable Intelligence and Security Committee will ensure against abuse of the system. One of the most worrying aspects is that if this bill becomes law, we will never learn how this vast expansion of collection and retention of our data actually affects our lives and distorts the nature of our democratic society.
Everyone accepts that the police and intelligence services need to be able to probe the internet for evidence of wrongdoing – they are already making 500,000 interceptions a year – but to spend £1.8bn on Farr's megalomaniac dream is not only morally wrong, it is plain daft.