Rise of the spies - this MP isn't the only target

The constituent, Babar Ahmad, has been imprisoned since August 2004. He has never been convicted. He has never been charged. He's facing extradition to the US, though his alleged crime took place in Britain. What he is supposed to have done may not even have been a crime here at the time.

He doesn't know what the evidence against him is. Under our new, almost unique extradition agreements with Washington, the Americans don't have to provide any evidence.

The MP, Sadiq Khan, is a member of the Government. The same Government which last year reiterated its explicit ban on bugging MPs. So was this a rogue operation? Or are our laws, as well as our extradition cases, now made in secret?

But it was the little details which struck me most. Six tables in the prison visiting room kitted out with permanent bugs. The fact that there wasn't even anyone listening; the tapes were picked up two days later.

What that shows me is a fishing expedition. And what that, and last week's even more disturbing recent report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner, shows me is a country in which bugging and snooping have gone from exceptional to routine, a democratic East Germany.

A power that needs to be tightly justified and proportionate to the real risk has become a securocrat's free-for-all. Bugging MPs is only the logical culmination of a process in which everyone is a target.

From the commissioner, we learned that 653 separate official bodies, including every local council in Britain, are empowered to collect communications data. Councils used that power 1,694 times in nine months against such targets as "suspected housing benefit fraudsters and fly-tippers".

Of what use is a list of someone's telephone calls in solving housing benefit fraud? How can something once reserved for the most serious crimes have come, without any public debate, to be used against fly-tippers, sorry, "suspected" fly-tippers?

I'll tell you how. It's because we'd rather not face the truth about the sort of country Britain is becoming.

We are still a democracy but we have suffered some of the greatest retreats in freedom of any democratic state.

Privacy is our right. Rights should not be abridged without due process. But it is not clear to me what, if any, process needs to be gone through to decide I am a " suspect" who can legally be spied on. And since information is power, the more information the securocrats collect on us, the more powerful they will become.

The outlook, though, is not hopeless. British people have long been indifferent to civil liberties. But they do cherish their privacy. Maybe that is the issue on which they will finally fight back.