Well, nearly all of us. One in 78 apparently.

Official bodies made a shocking 504,073 requests last year to have covert surveillance carried out on people. That’s one person every minute who will have their phone calls, email accounts and activities monitored without their knowledge. the law that is used to enforce this surveillance was originally set up to observe terror suspects but is now being used to spy on us for all sorts of reasons from storing petrol without a licence to bringing unquarantined animals into the country.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 is the law being used by 653 state bodies and 474 local councils to investigate the public for all types of reasons – terrorism being only a small minority of these reasons. Only the phone calls or emails destination is allowed to be recorded – not the content – hardly seems worth the effort. If no wrongdoing is found, the spied upon person will never know.

These figures show that a 44% increase on snooping by authorities has occured over twelve months and nobody in authority thinks this is a problem? How abotu the 595 mistakes made during these operations that could cause people untold problems. Mistakes as simple as entering a wrong phone number and collecting information on the wrong person because of this.

There has been debate over whether or not social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been used in surveillance and authorities are shady on whether or not this happens. I have been told, on very good authority, that it does.

There can be no doubt that covert surveillance will always have a place in keeping us safe but is it neccesary to use this resource to check how full our bins are etc??