Europe looking to adopt a Big Brother

Yes, most of us are aware that, to a degree, our technology-driven lives are being tracked. The whose and whats of credit card purchases, cell phone calls, and web browsing can paint a startling picture of a person, and definitely raises privacy concerns. But when government look to pass legislation to assure themselves of the ability to do these things—Europe's Plan to Track Phone and Net Use (NYTimes)—it all becomes even more disconcerting:

European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.

Even now, Internet service providers in Europe divulge customer information — which they normally keep on hand for about three months, for billing purposes — to police officials with legally valid orders on a routine basis, said Peter Fleischer, the Paris-based European privacy counsel for Google. The data concerns how the communication was sent and by whom but not its content.

Not only would such Internet laws be unefforcable, as Mr. Fleischer points out in the article, but in the event they somehow did, the end result would just be decentralizing the Internet (which almost always really refers to just the "World Wide Web") into privatized or underground internets. I can't see how that's a good thing.

What is it exactly that governments aim to do by monitoring people? Catch terrorists? Solve murder mysteries? Perhaps noble goals, but not the right means.