Inevitably, the UK government is now demanding snooping powers after the recent Paris attacks. The hypocrisy never fails to boggle the mind when it comes to technology and British people in power. They’ll slam ‘regimes’ for heavily censoring the internet while simultaneously arguing the internet should be censored by default in the UK; and now the argument is that the government should be able to access everyone’s digital communications, potentially stopping the use of anything it can’t access, despite the same government having previously criticised other countries for doing much the same thing.

Of course, our government and our police would never use these powers for anything other than good, right? (And it’s doubly baffling to see Labour doing what opposition parties do right now and opposing the government, regardless of what it’s saying. Labour’s history is peppered with ramming through similar legislation, and so I don’t believe for a second a majority Labour government in 2015 wouldn’t put into place similarly intrusive legislation.)

Still, it’s more ammo for election campaigns as we barrel towards May. Politicians must be seen to be doing something. Even better if it supposedly protects people from harm, even if the reality is rather different. Probably best if we ignore the fact more data isn’t terribly helpful if algorithms cannot rapidly extract critical information. And also probably best to ignore the Met placing journalists under close surveillance for, well, reasons.