By Dan Murdoch 

DROWNED out by the cacophony of the Great Credit Crunch ’08 (please Mr Peston, explain it again) is a tale of deeply malevolent black boxes. Not the kindly, indestructible devices that record the final frightening moments of our passenger jets, but a square yet troubled sci-fi villain with a special talent for recording internet traffic. Your internet traffic.

Evening Standard: “'Black box' will store all traffic on Net”

Guardian: “Government black boxes will 'collect every email'”

The news was leaked after a meeting convened at the Home Office to discuss the scary sounding Interception Modernisation Programme and attended by a host of major ISPs from AOL to BT.

The Indi quoted every security correspondent’s favourite - a ‘source close to the meeting’ - as saying: “It was clear the 'black box' is the technology the Government will use to hold all the data.”

Who are these folk who hang around close to meetings? “Well I was adjusting the drapes in the room next door when I heard something about black boxes.”

And what is a Black Box? I asked the Home Office which replied: “We do not recognise the term ‘Black Boxes’ and this was not a term used during the conference held last Monday with the Intercept Modernisation Programme and Communication Service Providers.”

Hmm so maybe our source near the meeting did mishear. Perhaps it was pack boxes and we’re to be monitored by a strange affiliation of unmade Ikea furniture?

The kind person at the Home Office directed me to the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s latest statements on the issue: "There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online.”

Well that clears that up then, it was a horrible mishearing. So there are no plans to monitor the contents of my communications? All well and good. But hang on. As every street magician knows, the name of the game is distraction. Before you rock back with your bifta safe in the knowledge that the next high wont be punctuated by brain-wrenching fears of GCHQ spies spanking off over your letters home, let’s just look at what’s missing from that list. Other than ex-girlfriends, choice of antiperspirant and pubic hair trimmer setting (8mm). Internet searches. Aaah internet searches. So the government may possibly perhaps want to keep a record of my Internet searches. Either you’re feeling a terrible pang of guilt or you’re completely unabashed and therefore a eunuch, a bodybuilder or a Catholic (in which case you’re feeling unabashed but also strangely guilty).

To gain a feel for what such searches reveal we need only look over yonder pond. In 2006 AOL published three months worth of search logs for ‘research purposes’. There was such an outcry that the logs were pulled within days, but not before they had been copied and spread around the www. So what do you think of the interweb searches of this woman, which were released by AOL:

little dogs licking the pussies of women

women sucking the cocks on little dogs

women who are sexually pleasured by their small dogs

what are the signals that a dog is in a sexual relationship with a woman

are little dogs aroused by women

lonely women sexing small dogs

lady getting her pussy licked by a shitzu

sexing her ten pound dog

teachers like dog cum too

women allowing the penis knots of dogs to be inserted into their vaginas

why do small dogs sniff a female’s panties

is a neutered dog interested in licking a woman’s pussy

I’m not judgemental, and if you ask me the dog was gagging for it, but still I’m not sure the woman would like to openly flaunt her strange sexual peccadilloes. Now although the searches were only linked to IP addresses, it was possible to work out who inputted them from the many clues including so called ‘vanity searches’- searching for your own name. So my log might read:

Dan Murdoch

Donating to the BNP

Mel Gibson What Women Want

From this you might guess that I’m a vain, fascist homosexual. That was just an example, but we can agree it is fairly intrusive. I probably wouldn’t want any potential employers seeing that, nor friends and family.

But they wouldn’t, or so the government always claims. And yet you would have to have been living deep inside your shiatsu’s rectal cavity not to notice that our kind and benevolent leaders aren’t leading lights in looking after information. How long until your searches turn up on a train/bus/second hand hard drive?

And we shouldn’t assume the government will always be benevolent. Racists, Nazis and homophobes do come to power, whether in Weimar Germany, Tsarist Russia, McCarthyite America or The Daily Express. And these are exactly the types of regimes that want to know your perks and perversions in order to more accurately target their discrimination. Rulers that don’t want gays, liberals, Buddhists or little dog fuckers.