Oh, the irony!

Both of these articles are from El Reg:

The government is pressing ahead with plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a massive central silo for all UK communications data, The Register has learned.

Home Office civil servants are working on plans for the database under the banner of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). The team has recently been expanded and a director-level official appointed to run the project, which is not yet official policy in public.

Sources said secret briefings revealed the cost of the database would run to nine figures and has already been factored into government spending plans.

Nine figures, eh? That means at least £100,000,000 pounds. Given the government's track record in general, expect that to treble; and given the government's IT track record, expect it to treble again. So, roughly £1 billion pounds of your money on something to help them spy on you.

But wait!

UK government departments have managed to leak a total of 29 million personal records over a single year.

In addition to the 25 million records spilled in the infamous lost child benefit CDs debacle, another four million records went astray in other stuff-ups, some of which have previously gone unreported.

Since the HMRC data loss fiasco, Whitehall departments have begun to include data of information leaks as part of their annual financial statements. An analysis of these figures by the BBC revealed that personal information disclosures across UK government departments, excluding information on the lost child benefit CDs, averaged 300,000 records a month in the year up until April 2008 (the end of the UK tax year).

Hmm ... right. No one has ever been called to account for most of these losses, and even the guy who went at HMRC wasn't the person who was ultimately in charge (which would have been Badger Brows, or even better, the bloke who created the Frankensteinian monster of HMRC, one G. Brown, Esq.) But then, can you imagine one of the oleaginous slimeballs of New Labour ever being accountable for their fuckups?

So they're going to be collecting vastly more information on us and going to have lots more information to be lost in the future. And we're paying for it!

Hooray! Trebles all round!