This piece of mine appears in today's Daily Mail:

When Ted Rogers offered a booby prize to contestants on his Saturday night game show, 3-2-1, I’m sure he didn’t think that in a few years time the Dusty Bin – which losers took home with them – would mark another stage in the encroachment into privacy and freedom in Great Britain.

But yesterday it was revealed that some 500,000 wheelie bins across the country have been fitted with electronic ‘spy bugs’. The gadgets – which have mainly been installed in secret, and with no consultation – record information about the contents of each bin, and the waste habits of individual addresses. The devices have a unique serial number which can be scanned when the bin is tipped into a refuse lorry. That information is then transmitted to a central database.

The plan is that within two or three years this technology will be used across the country.

The official explanation is that such information will boost ‘efficiency’. Preposterously, one explanation given for its implementation is that it will settle disputes between neighbours about the ownership of wheelie bins – hardly, one would think, an issue of such scale that it necessitates such a major erosion of individual privacy.

The reality, however, is very different. Yesterday, the Institute for Public Policy Research - a think tank which provides many of the ideas adopted by the Labour government – proposed that rubbish collection should move to a "pay as you throw" system. According to the IPPR’s Director, Nick Pearce, "The government should give local authorities powers to charge for collecting non-recyclable waste”.

It does not take a psychic to realise what is happening here. Whenever the justification of ‘efficiency’ is used in justifying a policy, make no mistake that there is always a hidden agenda. To government, all individual behaviour is a hindrance to the smooth running of bureaucracy. Things would run far more ‘efficiently’ if we acted precisely as we were instructed by officials who know best.

In this case, it is obvious what is going on. The government is preparing to take refuse collection outside of the normal council tax and to impose extra charges – a new rubbish tax.

But in some ways that is the least of it. When one looks across the whole range of government activity, a pattern is clearly emerging. Our privacy – and thus, inevitably, our freedom – is increasingly under attack.

Take driving. Britain has become the first country on the planet which is to record the movement of every car on the road. Even North Korea does not hold such records. Using a national network of cameras, a huge database is to be built up to enable to the police and security services to trace the journeys of every car – and, of course, every person who drives. Held on a central database alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, the computer will hold details of 35 million daily number-plate "reads".

Add that o the existing behaviour of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the worrying potential becomes clear. We already know that the DVLA sells the names and home addresses of motorists on its drivers' database to all sorts of people – including, as was revealed last year, to convicted criminals.

The justification given for the number-plate database is – of course - that it will aid ‘efficiency’ in the fight against terror and other crime. No-one wants to jeopardise that. But those who have lived under the tyranny of totalitarian regimes will recognise the usual words, and the usual justifications. All encroachments on privacy and freedom are justified on the grounds that they are part of a fight against crime.

Taken together, the information which government agencies already hold on us amounts to the most detailed and personal records of our behaviour ever maintained. Our innocence or guilt has nothing to do with it. Our lives are now recorded, with ever increasing detail, by government agencies. And the scope and scale of such records are growing.

The monster of all such databases will be the National Identity Register, set up under the Identity Cards Act which was passed earlier this year, to enable the introduction of ID cards.

There is already almost no part of lives which is not part of a government database – even supposedly private consultations. The computerisation of the NHS may, so far, have been a chaotic – and hugely expensive - farce, but when it finally comes together then our medical records will be maintained online. And in October 2004, the then Home Office minister, Hazel Blears, said that there would be a biometric scanner in every doctor's surgery.

That is not all. Last week, a small pilot database scheme in Manchester was hailed as a terrific success. The UK Biobank project is intended to be a DNA database which includes health information and all sorts of lifestyle factors. It has been welcomed as a tool for helping to find cures for killer illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Pooling all relevant information was, we were told, far more ‘efficient’ – that tell-tale word again.

But there is a more worrying way of looking at it. There is already another national DNA database: the Police National DNA Database. That one contains DNA fingerprints and human tissue samples not merely of convicted criminals, but also of innocent people - and even of innocent children.

On their own, almost all of these databases appear to have a justification in terms of ‘efficiency’. The worry, however, is when the information which they contain is combined – an awesomely frightening prospect of the state’s power and knowledge of every part of our lives.

The government argues that this sort of fear is nonsense. Legislation, it says, stops this sort of cross-fertilisation of information.

But anyone who has faith in such self-denying powers must have a very naïve view of the state. Take such apparently benign databases as the UK Biobank. Can anyone seriously believe that, in time, its operators will not start to suggest that it makes sense for them to have access to the National Indentity Register, or even the Police National DNA Database – so that they can do their job, as they will put it, more ‘efficiently’?

And, even if it is not done legally, there is simply no such thing as a totally secure database. When I was researching my biography of the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, a very senior member of the security services told me that there was some critical security information about ensuring Home Secretaries’ and Prime Ministers’ safety which was not put on computer anywhere. The information needed to be as near 100 per cent secure as possible, and in the last resort all information on a computer was vulnerable.

Each time we allow the state to keep a further record of our movements, our habits, or our health, we get nearer to the day when, one day, we will wake up and realise that the state is no longer our servant. Instead, it will be our master. And, knowing everything there is to know about us, there will be no escape.