Having just got 5 minutes to check my RSS reader I’ve been catching up on the events of the day and the Guardian Media feed has informed me that my social networking contacts could be being watched.

A Home Office spokesman this morning announced that the government will be looking at monitoring all internet sites that allow users to communicate. That means Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, even Skype.

Apparently there are already plans to store every phonecall, email and internet hit made in the UK on a database and these social networking observations would be added to that plan.

In a quote I find probably inappropriately funny the spokesman points out “We have no way of knowing whether Osama bin Laden is chatting to Abu Hamza on Facebook. Or terrorists could be having a four-way chat on Skype”.

Oh dear. I suppose there’s no reason that this couldn’t be true (apart from the lack of wireless signal in caves) but it does seem a little OTT.

I agree that it makes sense to consider communication on social networking sites as on a par with more traditional forms but it does strike me as more than a little hysterical to suggest an ‘axis of evil’ Facebook group.