Is it the future already?

Just a quick note about some very disturbing news I saw from ZDnet a couple of days ago. [It's not online anymore, so to view the article, click here.] It seems that not content with the idea of biometric ID cards being introduced into society, we may now have to contend with the proposal of having similar technology embedded into our forearms. Sound familiar? Hey, I though that's what they did in the concentration camps, right? [OK, not quite the same, but whose counting?] When we are being bombarded by the idea of 'organic' technology and the idea of 'self-creating' nano-technology, this seems all too natural as the next step on the downward spiral of handing over control to the machines, or at least the controllers of the machines. In the event that we would be required to go along with such a thing, [ID embeds in our forearms], we would be told: 'You only have something to fear if you have something to hide.' But as the daughter of someone who grew up in Nazi Germany, and who saw what happened when the Communists crossed over the border at the end of the war, I could never believe in such a concept. Totalitarianism begins with centralised data of who is who in society. Not having freedom of information, not being privy to the secrets that are held on file, not having access to this information, is the basis of a police state. It is only safe when those in power rule benignly. And you cannot expect to be warned when a society has lost control of it's leaders, or when information is used "un-benignly."