Shami Chakrabarti, the new director of Liberty, is planning a monitoring operation on Britain’s giant retailers. Chakrabarti, formerly a high-flying legal advisor to two home secretaries, takes up her new post today.

Liberty is to set up a unit to monitor the experiments being carried out by various retailers with radio frequency identification technology. M&S and Tesco are pioneering the use of tiny microchips, the size of a grain of sand, which are inserted into the packaging of goods or sown into the labels of clothes.

Chakrabarti believes Britain, already the world leader in the use of CCTV cameras, is set to become the ‘surveillance capital of Europe.’

‘I have been away in France for a week and when I arrived home I was amazed to find that in the space of just three days plans had been unveiled to insert RFI chips in every car, M&S had admitted it was trying out chips in clothes, and the Home Office was about to trial a new high-tech, compulsory, national ID card.

‘If anyone had told me two years ago that we would soon be in a position where it would be normal for many of us to be under 24-hour a day surveillance, I would have told them not to be ridiculous. Now it looks like happening.’

‘RFI is an offshoot of military technology and it enables those controlling it to monitor every aspect of our lives. Supermarket executives would love to be able to ‘track’ every item of clothing we bought. It would enable them to build up customer profiles, which they would use for specific marketing campaigns.

Some customers will be comfortable with this, others will consider it a gross infringement of privacy. The important point is that the technology is too powerful to be unregulated. It cannot be right that corporate giants should be allowed to experiment when and where they want without consumers having any say in what is happening.

As from today Liberty will be monitoring the supermarkets and big chain stores. If we think a legal challenge can be mounted to stop their experimentation then we will make it. We will certainly be in touch with the company executives and we will do all in our power to let customers know what is happening. It is up to consumers to decide whether or not they want to boycott a particular store or chain but the companies must be made aware that this is the risk,’ she said.