It was a crisp clear spring morning as Simon climbed into his car, parked as usual outside his house in a space it had occupied every day for the last ten years.  The mist on the windows cleared as soon as he turned on the air blowers and so in a moment he was on his way to work, heading up the road towards the traffic lights.   He turned on BBC Radio 3 as he drove and started to listen to a particularly relaxing piece by Handel.  It was a good morning.

In a faceless office somewhere the other side of London a computer emotionlessly recorded the fact that Simon’s green Ford Focus had passed the junction at 07:16.  Fractions of a second later a second system compared this to the records for the last few months and registered that he was eleven minutes late.

The lights changed to green, and he turned right, passing a large block of flats that temporarily obstructed the signal to his mobile phone, but in less than a millisecond it found a new base station on the other side of the road and registered with that.  The phone company database logged his new location and identified that since he was travelling west to east he would soon be transferring to a new cell tower the other side of town.  The computer therefore dilligently informed the new tower of its impending request, thus ensuring the best possible customer service for Simon.

As well as the phone company computer however, a third computer system noticed the request and logged Simon’s new location in a government database.  This had been notified moments earlier that Simon was of interest as he was operating outside his daily routine, and was by now actively looking for information on his movements, so when he turned left under a railway bridge he had not passed in months and pulled in to the car park of a retail outlet the computer escalated the situation and gained access to the rest of Simon’s records.

Ten minutes later Simon was back in his car and driving to work, his purchases – two bags of nails and some solvents and wire wool – had been recorded and identified as suspicious and so the system tapped into the computerised traffic management systems embedded in Simon’s car so as to be able to track his location to within a few metres.  It monitored him driving through the town and eventually to where he parked next to his office building on the far side to his usual space, tucked away in the shadows behind the facilities office.

Simon climbed out of his car holding the bag of solvents and other material he had just bought and was about to lock it when he heard an amplified voice shouting “Armed Police!  Get down on the floor!”

Startled, Simon span round to hear where the voice was coming from, still holding his car keys out in front of him.  A single shot rang out, and Simon fell to the ground stunned, confused, and dead.

Fiction?  Certainly.  Possible?  Worryingly so.  Is Simon a terrorist?  Or is he simply planning a bit of impromptu DIY in the office at lunchtime?  I have left it deliberately vague but you can make your own choice, hopefully with a greater allowance for error than my fictitious armed policeman.

All of the technology I used in that story exists now, and most of the databases and monitoring approaches are either in place or being considered by businesses and government departments.  We in the UK are being monitored more now than we have been at any other point in our history.  From those ubiquitous CCTV cameras that watch us every day in the name of safety, to the “customer service” monitoring we subject ourselves to every time we carry a mobile phone, finding the current location of the vast majority of the population has never been easier.

If you then include the records of our purchases made by credit card companies, and the details of who we have been sending emails to that are already required to be kept by your internet provider for a minimum of twelve months, and anyone with access to all of this information would no everything of consequence there is to know about our lives.

But it does not stop there.  With proposals for the new CVIS systems for traffic management and “road safety” coming in to place, monitoring and even – theoretically at least – controlling our actual location will become even easier.  ID cards could be linked to credit cards and entire profiles stored of outr lives, including medical information and criminal charges (not even limited to actual convictions).

But how worried should we be?  After all, these systems are in place to help us, to keep us safe.  Aren’t they?

The issue is not what they were designed to do, but what they can be used to do.  In the hands of the intended users all this information may well make life flow more smoothly, but what if a criminal organization obtains access?  What if a hostile government gets into power through deception or simply by bypassing the system?  It may even take only a small number of corrupt officials at the right places to break the system.  We simply do not know.

As the philosopher Edmund Burke said, ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’, and this has never been so true as it is today.  Our police are constantly in the news for alleged brutality or for overreaching their powers of seizure or arrest.  Allegations against members of the government of corruption or ‘sleaze’ are in the papers almost every day.  The banks play with money against common sense and the economy heads towards free-fall.

It is time to ask ourselves whether all this ‘security’ and ‘safety’ will give us a country where we will actually want to live.

Assuming we are not too late.