The European Union's Justice Commissioner, one Franco Frattini, last week came up with a plan to collect and store such data on anyone flying into or out of the entire European Union, thus creating a vast no-fly list. Though as one opponent of the expense pointed out, "political activities like opposing the Iraq war lead to people getting on no-fly lists [in the U.S.]." There you go.

Granted, the offenses and penalties I listed before the jump are far-fetched, and initially, at least, the plan will only ding travelers who raise the usual border-crossing red flags -- narcotics arrests, military AWOLs, and the like -- but we're getting used to seeing the outer limits of personal freedoms and civil rights pushed, extended, and ignored.

The United Kingdom plan is called Project Semaphore, and it involves the creation of an "e-Border" ringing the UK -- "e" for electronic. The people patrolling that electric fence say that "all data that we are currently legally able to obtain when a passenger enters the UK will be collected," and that the data will be "captured prior to the passenger's arrival."

Identifying potential terrorists is a valid pursuit. But somehow, using that intent to also target every other variety of malfeasance bothers me. "Data searches have already led to the tracing of persons wanted for murder and other serious crimes," the UK's Border and Immigration Agency says. "[It] has identified several sex offenders. Alerts have led to the seizure of large quantities of cocaine, cannabis and tobacco [and] have led to the identification of persons traveling on forged documents, suspected asylum abuse and facilitators. Successful trials of the new system have already led to more than 1,000 criminals being caught and more than 15,000 people of concern being checked out by customs, immigration or the police."

Yes, but what's next?