Does anyone besides me remember the show Coupling? The British sitcom was actually an R-rated rip-off of Friends, and after its success in the UK market, an American version of the show was released—so Coupling US was an American version of a UK rip-off of an American show.

This sort of trans-Atlantic re-recycling of something that probably should never have seen the light of day isn't just confined to TV—the US and UK are also at it with a Big Database in the Sky program. Witness the latest surveillance state drama uncovered by the Sunday Times and The Register, which, though British, has the exactly same plot that we've seen repeated in the US multiple times already.

The story goes something like this: elements in the government become convinced of the (mistaken) proposition that if they can just build a big enough database to suck up all the digital data that citizens generate about themselves online, then they can use data mining technologies to spot bad guy plots and disrupt them before they come to fruition. So they set out to build such a giant database, until some enterprising reporters uncover the project and reveal its existence to the public. Public outrage and government inquiry ensue and the database project is shut down. Except that it isn't shut down; it still goes on under another name, until it's uncovered again a few years later and the whole outrage-inquiry-"shutdown" farce repeats.

So it was with home secretary Jacqui Smith's apparent capitulation to privacy advocates, in which she said that the UK's spy center would shut down its �1 billion Mastering the Internet (MTI) project, which had the ambitious goal of storing all British electronic communications, from phone conversations to website visits. Except that she didn't shut it down... or at least, not really.

And here we come to a familiar variant on the basic plot outlined above, a variant that I've now dubbed the Voltron Flim-flam, which goes like this: because one giant, centralized database is politically untenable, you make multiple databases in different places and link them to a single front-end via a federated query service, so that they function together exactly like one giant database. The US most recently pulled this trick with Real ID, and it turns out that this is what the UK did with MTI.

Smith announced that, instead of one giant �1 billion database, the government would put �2 billion towards helping ISPs and telcos retain customer data in separate databases. But what she didn't mention was that the �1 billion had already been allocated, and it would be used to link the individual databases together.

Both The Register and the Sunday Times cite sources that describe a large computing infrastructure build-out, with deep packet inspection capabilities and backbone traffic monitoring stations reminiscent of the ones that came to light in the US in 2006.

With progress on MTI still on-going, and with American defense giant Lockheed Martin joining the effort via a �200 million contract, it's worth asking if something like the ECHELON information-sharing agreement is still in place between the UK and the US. If it is, then MTI matters to more than just the Brits.