Some readers were sceptical about my earlier column on the use of computers and cameras (here). Since I wrote that column, there have been one or two new developments in the world of computer-aided surveillance. First, according to consistent reports in the motoring press, a new type of speed camera has been introduced, a digital camera system that uses machine vision to recognise car number-plates. Your average speed between two cameras is calculated and the details are sent to the DVLA computer. The system can process thousands of offenders every hour, with no need for human intervention. You speed, you're nicked. And the cameras are far cheaper than the conventional GATSO devices, too, because they're all digital.

Dangerous driving should be prevented, but these new cameras are on motorways, which are Britain's safest roads. They are also the roads where most speeding (i.e. exceeding a speed limit introduced thirty years ago) occurs. Almost everybody speeds - royalty, government ministers and even my mother have been known to bend the limit on occasion. The words 'revenue' and 'generator' scream out. Expect thousands more such cameras to follow across the country, at which point it will be easy to locate and track any vehicle throughout the UK mainland. So in the future, a summons for a traffic offence could read "While proceeding from his girlfriend's house in Coventry to his flat in Datchet, Mr X exceeded the speed limit on three separate occasions. He also failed to indicate when turning left, shouted abuse at a van driver and ran over a small dog."

There are also new CCTV cameras springing up in towns and cities all over the country. Yet these cameras do not cut down on violent crime. Think about it: you're pissed, you're angry and you're not very bright. You stagger out of a pub at closing time, broken glass in hand, and you're about to lay into some poor unsuspecting old lady when you stop and think "Hmmm, no, better not, there are cameras about". So you carefully place the glass in the nearest bin and walk away. Unlikely, isn't it? And according to reports from the city centres in which CCTV is used, it just doesn't happen. The violent crime rate has been unaffected by the introduction of such cameras.

Given the speed with which traffic and town centre cameras are springing up, how long will it be before all such cameras are linked together to track not just cars but people too? With a concerted effort it could probably be done within ten years. All you need is a CCD camera, a thin-client Web server and a wireless intranet connection. And, as luck would have it, a new digital wireless network is under development for UK police forces. Using this technology, each camera node could cost less than £300. Now take the data from each camera and feed it to a central computing system. There each face is processed and recognised; the technology for this exists already, and is being used. At that point, it will be possible to locate almost any UK citizen using the camera network, aided by other techniques such as mobile phone triangulation and credit card tracking.

One of the strongest arguments against Communism by the West during the Cold War was the unpleasant system of spying on the population - the KGB/NKVD in the USSR, the Stasi in East Germany, and so on. Where these forces eventually failed, Britain looks set to succeed, by potentially introducing a means to spy on everybody electronically. Where's the virtue in being a good citizen if you have no choice, if you're being watched because your government doesn't trust you? In 1984, many of us laughed about how wrong George Orwell's 'Big Brother' predictions had been. But in 1984 computing was still in its infancy, so the potential for such massive data management was not foreseen. Who's laughing now? Certainly not Donald Dewar.