But just as the plan to exempt MPs from the FOI bill spurred an impressive new generation of campaigning via Twitter, the big mad database plan has prompted some novel forms of protest.

“CC your email to Jacqui Smith Day” is a group and a fan page on Facebook that has spilled out onto the wider internet.  The premise is deliciously simple, and the plan is simply on a named day, copy all your email to Jacqui Smith’s Home Office email address.  ”If she wants to know what we’re saying, let’s show her,” is the theory behind the move.

As civil disobedience goes, I think it’s an excellent idea.  It’s time limited.  It’s legal.  The reason for doing it is clearly linked to the measures being protested about. There are already over 7,000 people signed up to the group on Facebook, so if we all CC only one email during the day, we will take up serious space in Ms Smith’s inbox.  But the effect will be no more serious than to cripple an email account for a day – and will be reasonably easy for technical staff at the Home Office to circumvent.  That said, it will still make a serious point in a light-hearted way.

The plan is not for everyone, of course.  It would probably not be a good idea for Lib Dem staff to reveal party confidential information to the Home Secretary, for starters.  

But we got the Government to back off the FOI plans just by tweeting about it.  Maybe we can get them to give up their big mad database plans with just a few emails!

Personally, I was annoyed enough to join millions of others on the march against the war in Iraq – now it’s time to hold them to account.

I’m not so sure how I will react if and when I get the orders from the Government to present myself at the interrogation centre in nearby Derby and hand over more personal information than is currently demanded from sex offenders.  I’m not certain I’m ready to join Simon Hughes in jail for refusing an ID card.

I’ve never yet been arrested, so my DNA is not amongst the millions of samples wrongly held by the Police.

I have to queue for longer than ever in my surviving local Post Office or the one in the city centre since many so others have been shut.

Now I’m no longer even safe in my own home.  

If I become a debtor – or if my local council again wrongly summonses me for Council Tax non-payment, and sends the summons to an address I have told them I no longer live at – bailiffs have been given new powers to break into my house, use violence against me and physically restrain me.

And if somone accuses me of some nefarious internet or computer crime, the police don’t even need to knock on my door or get a warrant, before remotely accessing my computer and reading my files.  And this is on top of other mad Government plans to track my every move on the internet and every phone call and text I send.

In a long posting last week, James Graham examined the state of play with the current government and civil liberties.  His conclusion – it’s terrifying, and all right thinking people need to inform themselves about what’s going on and then get angry.  Specifically, he said, take these steps:

1. Bookmark the Convention for Modern Liberty website and sign up to their news alerts.
2. Attend a Convention event, either the one in London, one of the regional and national events happening on the same day or a local event. If there is no event happening in your area, start organising one!
3. Join a pro-democracy and human rights organisation. Whichever tickles your fancy (although, obviously, joining Unlock Democracy helps pay my wages!) and get involved.
4. Join or set up a local group. It doesn’t have to be affiliated to anything, and it needn’t be anything more than you and a couple of your mates to start off with.
5. Write to your MP and ask them their starter for ten: “what do you think about the dillution of civil liberties over the past couple of decades and what do you intend to do about it in 2009.” And keep writing to them.
6. Go to the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library if you can, before it closes at the beginning of March.
7. Tell everyone you know to do the same.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.