A senior civil servant in the criminal justice system told me recently that we could dismiss any fears about a Big Brother Britain.

What the public needs to understand, he suggested, is that government is largely a disorganised hotchpotch of vested interests and Luddite old buffers.

I'm not sure it's a great comfort to know that we are far too incompetent to be a police state.

You get his point though.

Monitoring the huge amount of data now produced is theoretically much easier than before - just take a look at the Butler report or the US 9/11 inquiry.

We can't even decide what we should monitor.

One lot of legislation tells us we have to keep every bit of communication to ensure we're not on the fiddle another tries us to get us to throw it away to ensure we're not invading privacy.

The confusion can have tragic results as Soham illustrates.

What, how, why and when we collect data is one of society's biggest issues but we're all too busy staying afloat in the floods of emails and bloody texts to see it.

The difficulties will become apparent when they touch our lives. My prediction is that we will all eventually have reason to rue the obsessive policies of our dataholic Home Secretary Mr Blunkett.

Every time the Daily Mail writes a headline, he sees a database.

I don't believe that anyone has a clue how the data will be effectively managed or accessed, what the political and legal implications might be, how much money we will have to spend feeding the beast, or how many ghastly cock-ups will occur.

What I can see is a clear image of an unkempt, overweight burned out Big Brother shovelling in the Prozac.