Net Results: Proposals to force Irish citizens to register their mobile phones is one of the most ridiculous and intrusive "crime-fighting" measures that the Government has come up with yet, writes  Karlin Lillington.

And, again, in the name of our security, more details of our private lives are to be registered and tracked, scrutinised and stored.

What practical use is a list of every mobile phone registered to every man, woman and child going to be to law enforcement? Does anyone truly think this vast explosion of paperwork and computer record keeping is going to keep drug dealers and criminals from using mobiles, or enable the Garda to track drug dealers?

As with the State's grossly intrusive data retention scheme, whereby it is busy stockpiling three years' of call records for every child and adult who uses a phone, the value of the measures are unproven, the costs of implementation are high, and a State once globally admired for its strong stance on human and civil rights bolsters its shameful reputation as one of the leading surveillance nations of the world.

The idea behind the new proposal - which only last January was dismissed as a useless measure by the Department of Communications - is that if all mobiles in Ireland are clearly registered to individuals, it will be easier to tie individuals to suspect calls and there will be a knock-on deterrent effect.

In other words, criminals will not be able to obtain mobile phones or, if they have them, will not dare to commit heinous crimes such as, say, making calls to Liveline from supposedly secure prisons (come to think of it, maybe budgies should be registered at purchase so that, if one is found in a prison cell, the criminal owner can immediately be traced and charged).

Where does one begin to pick apart this foolish measure? It starts from the bizarre assumption that criminals cannot obtain a mobile phone except by strolling into Carphone Warehouse and selecting the desired model from a display. They then, presumably, would fill in their name and address on a registration form to be filed away in the Garda computer system to await the moment when the new phone is used to help to commit a bank robbery - you know, the same way that a criminal gang drives over to the car showrooms in Ballsbridge to purchase the model they will use as their getaway car.

This isn't, and never has been, the way that many people get their prepay or postpay mobile phones.

There is a lively second-hand market (on the legitimate side) and plenty of available stolen handsets too.

Anyone who pays attention to crime reports will know that mobile phones theft is often the reason for assaults.

And, as any stroll down a major Dublin shopping street will confirm, there are dozens of little shops that will unlock mobile phones - useful for enabling the use of a stolen handset.

In addition, anyone can buy a handset abroad, bring it back, and stick a SIM card into it - a prepay SIM card, say, which anyone can buy anonymously. The idea that criminals are stupidly unaware of these things is simply laughable.

All that a mobile phone registry will do is create yet another enormous database that will be rife for exploitation and misuse. A database similar to that holding all of our call records, as a matter of fact, which was accessed more than 10,000 times last year, yet still has absolutely none of the promised protections on its contents to prevent the casual use or misuse of call records by the Garda.

Indeed, one has to ask: is the Government now conceding that its vast data retention programme - archiving every one of our mobile and landline call records - is so ineffectual that it now needs a petty measure to register our mobiles as well?

Surely the most useful database of call information should be its own data retention scheme. Ireland has one of the longest storage periods in the world for this sensitive information, and has the expressed intention of adding e-mail and web-usage details to the stockpile.

Countries with larger populations, and far more limited data retention, do not seem to feel the need to impose mobile registration as well, so why is this needed here?

Nothing more pointedly confirms that data retention for long periods does little more than create a fascinating data haystack to be pored over and potentially abused, rather

than offering a method of accurately finding the criminal needles.

Adequate funding for the Garda and better, old-fashioned policing skills would do far more to address the problem of crime than gathering and storing ever more data on ordinary citizens.

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