Blunkett's bill will end up with his besieged police force

Ah! Privacy. What does it mean? Ask your average Brit, even today, and he or she will rattle on about the tabloids, Liz Hurley, Sophie Wessex and stuff.

But this is a tale of two Blunketts, of the thing he promised to do last week and the thing he will try again to do this week. And there are too many pigs in the middle: including us.

Last week was about shaking up the police (yet again). "Detection and conviction rates are appallingly low," says our home secretary. Here, then, comes the bog standard New Labour brace-up kit: league tables, targets, central pressure.

There'll also be (the familiar stick) a purge on sickness days, early retirement, general inefficiencies - plus the equally familiar carrot of increased recruitment numbers and "volunteer" sort-of-cops to walk our streets. Mr Blunkett is very keen on the outward and visible show of foot leather pounding pavements. It's what he thinks the public wants.

Well, very good, up to a point. Here's a pot which does need stirring (though, on examination, he could equally be talking about teachers, not policemen, and you rather wonder how that helped recruitment in the classrooms he left behind). But now for the other - utterly dissonant - thing.

This week Blunkett will try once more to get the Lords to keel over on anti-terrorism - on internment without judicial review, incitement to religious hatred, on the headline debates we all understand. He's hanging tough, too, on a debate we've barely come to terms with.

Police and MI5 access to bank statements, health records, private files in private places? That is only the beginning. The Home Office wants to sit astride the digital revolution. It wants internet service providers to keep (not junk) the records of every log on, every site visited, every email sent or received - and to produce them on demand.

In parallel with that will go records of every mobile phone call you make, identifying (in the third generation) where you were and when to within a radius of 10 yards. And all this isn't limited to combating terrorism itself. No, it affects anything "that might be relevant to a criminal inquiry". The Lords compromise - a form of words about inquiries "directly or indirectly relevant to national security" - doesn't suffice.

Let's pause over that. If the police reckon your medical file or the details of the web sites you visit and the phone calls you make might be useful, then they get them. If they want to track when you came home or went out, then burglar alarm records will tell them.

Credit cards chronicle every shopping trip. They can even find out when you turned on your washing machine - thanks to the handy computer inside. We are never alone. We are always under surveillance.

The inevitable price of fighting terrorism? Not quite. Hi-tech terrorists have their sophisticated "stealth techniques" that none of these powers can counter. Low-tech terrorists can merely log on once in an internet cafe or pinch a mobile phone then chuck it away. Such trawls, for the most part, will be routine business. And here comes the link between last week and this.

I listened the other day to an intelligent and transparently honest senior cop in one of Britain's bigger police forces talking about cyber crime. Such crime grows almost exponentially year by year. The FBI reckons it presently nets between $600m and $1.5 trillion (including terrorist money laundering). The big banks are scratching their heads over a fourfold increase. How are Blunkett's boys in blue equipped for the fight?

Hum, said my honest informant. We're almost ground zero. He was only allowed to send emails himself 18 months ago. He only got on the net in the office six months back. The five managers in the unit he works for have had to scrabble through other budgets, raising the £100 a head they need to log on.

The rest of the department is still on the outside, sucking its collective thumb. The computers inside HQ don't interface with each other, let alone those of other forces. Force recruiters don't ask whether the new men and women coming in have IT skills.

It's not a question on their screens - and if you do, by luck, happen to hire a slick operator, you lose him quick. Of course. The money outside is so much better.

A bizarre scandal? No: perfectly understandable. Eighty-five percent of police budgets go on personnel, on manpower. The public wants plods it can see on the beat. The Home Office wants targets on burglaries, drugs and car thefts met. Mr Blunkett, another politician with elections to fight, has just sung that song louder than ever. Because the net doesn't have public salience, it scratches along the bottom of the priorities bucket.

This, by way of quavery reassurance, isn't a British-only predicament. It applies worldwide. In America, banks that want to battle computer fraud sometimes have to buy the police their laptops to investigate it - but more frequently they are their own police.

It's they who track the hackers and the launderers, because the police haven't got the expertise or resources to do it. De facto privatisation. It sheds a new, still less kindly light on the Blunkett agenda.

Orwell? More Orwell meets the Keystone cops. Why are those who advise the home secretary so keen to throw anything that "might" be relevant to a criminal inquiry into this stew? Well, they would be, wouldn't they? Never opt for a limited power when a generalised one is so much comfier.

But the home secretary - like us - needs to ask who is licensing whom? Where are the dedicated squads of expert officers who know what to look for and how to look for it? What use is traffic data from AOL when you haven't got a terminal to call your own?

There is a true debate here - about that old Blair favourite, joined-up government. It has barely begun. The public are tutting over Liz and Bing. The bobbies are still on the beat. The scope of what Mr Blunkett proposes has barely been recognised.

The little matter of who will enforce it, and how, remains utterly mystic. (Yes, there is a small central hi-tech coordinating unit established this year - but it's still recruiting.) Yet off we go, trying to blast the Lords into submission.

No wonder the government's own information commissioner, Elizabeth France, is alarmed. No wonder she thinks this bit of the bill indefensibly broad, lacking all "proportionality", an affront to the European convention on human rights, a mockery of "data protection".

But how many wake-up calls do we need? We used to talk about freedom of information, until Mr Blair deferred it till 2005. For the moment, we ought to be talking something far simpler: just freedom.

p.preston@guardian.co.uk