Echelon in practice: Orwellian database

The British government has some wonderful ideas about how to implement the Big Brother 1984 society. As if the country doesn´t have enough to worry about with more surveillance cameras per head of the population than other European countries, now they want a database to monitor all telephone and internet traffic and store it for two years. Apparantly it will be only point to point information and not the contents of emails, but one wonders how easy it will be to extend the system once the basics are in place.
Considering how the the british government, tax office and even the military have managed to compromise hundreds of thousands of personal records through IT mismanagement (lost USB sticks, selling old servers on eBay without wiping them first, sending sensitive CDs through regular mail), they can´t really say that your personal data is safe with them. Where is it going to end.