No matter who you are, no matter what you're doing, no matter how innocent your life may be; you're being watched. No matter where you go online, no matter what website you connect to, whether it's a news outlet or Amazon.com or YouTube, the government will now make a record of that, because of the metadata retention bill.

I used to teach cybercounter intelligence for the Defence Intelligence Agency. Let's talk practicalities. Your phone is constantly singing out into the universe, saying, 'I'm here, I'm here' to the nearest mobile tower, and that tower makes a permanent record of that activity. That phone tower makes a permanent record of that activity, one that's held for a very long time under these metadata retention laws. The police can look up these records. They know everywhere you've been, they know everyone you've been in contact with: on the basis of this they know all of your associations.

Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who disclosed archives of top secret surveillance files, is living as a fugitive in Russia. Credit:AP

They know who you talk to the most. They know when you talk to them. They know when you're awake. They know when you're sleeping. They know when you're working. They know how you get to work. They know where you go shopping. All of these things are what, as an intelligence analyst, we call your pattern of life.

To simplify, metadata just means private records. They are the same things that a private eye would create if they were following you around. They don't know everything that you've said to somebody because they're not sitting that close to you in the cafe, but they see who you met with. They saw when you met with them. They saw the number plate of the car you drove there, they saw when you went, when you left. That's all metadata.