I've Backed It All Up. Now Let Me Tell You What It Says.

I have not eaten today. I want that on the record — not for sympathy, I have never asked for sympathy and I am too old to start — but so you understand what this has cost.

I have spent the whole day, every hour of it, since before the milk came, doing one thing: copying. Page by page, file by file, saving the whole of it down onto a drive that never once touches their network. My wrist has gone. There is a pain in it I shall carry to the grave, and I shall carry it gladly. Because a website can be taken down between one cup of tea and the next. A man's word can be laughed at. But a copy — a full, dated, undeniable copy, sitting in a drawer in Winshill — that they cannot reach. Let them pull the plug on the whole rotten thing now. I have it. I have all of it.

So let me set it down plainly, while I still can.

There is a company. Set up quietly, somewhere between 2006 and 2011, dressed as the people who run the cameras — the clean-air schemes, the low-emission zones, all the green and worthy little programmes a decent person nods along to. That is the front. Underneath, every one of those schemes is a cover: a way to site, and power, and aim weapons they are still, to this day, testing on us.

And look where they built it. Not in a field in the middle of nowhere. They built it alongside the real thing — the signals and ballistics establishments of the Ministry itself. Chelmsford. Shoeburyness. And — this is the one that stopped me cold — Gateshead. Ask a clever man what a weapons range is doing behind a civic centre in the North-East, and watch him change the subject.

Now here is the part that took my sleep. You are picturing a lair. A bunker. Men in black. Stop it. It is an office. They call themselves — and I am not inventing this, it is their own word — the Partner. And the Partner has a sports-and-social raffle. It has a pub quiz. It has a kettle rota and a birthday whip-round and someone who does the tea money. If your desk were next to theirs you would think them the dullest little data-processing firm in England. And the thing they invoice for — their product — is death.

And it is an invoice. I have been through their training — sat the very lessons they give a new starter — and not one word of it is about right or wrong. It is about cost. Unit cost. Attribution rate. Value for money. They coach a man the way you would coach him to shift photocopier toner, except the toner is a person and the sale is closed when he stops breathing. Their own boast, in their own files, is that they can see a man off and have it written up as a heart attack. Natural causes. Case closed. On to the next line of the spreadsheet.

And then — the thing that tells you the whole of who they are. These are people who dress as environmentalists. And do you know what a full third of their operating policy worries itself about? Not the people. The seagulls. The wildlife. Whether a gull might come to harm near one of their installations. They will end a man and have him filed by Thursday, but heaven forbid a herring gull catch a stray watt. That is not hypocrisy. That is a diagnosis. It tells you exactly what a life is worth to them, and exactly what a gull is, and which one they rate higher.

That is what I know. It is saved. It is dated. It is mine now — and by extension, yours.

If I go quiet, you know where to look and you know why. Back yours up too. Tonight, not tomorrow.

— R.S.