D.N.A

George Orwell must be rotating quietly in his coffin.
All the scary bits from 1984 have either been welcomed with open arms, or treated with a good deal of apathy by the populace. Big Brother is alive, well and rather than having been forced on the people by an evil regime, has been introduced slowly, willingly and become accepted as inevitable.
It isnt enough that we are give a number at birth - under a rather clever scheme called 'school portraits' we then have yearly photos taken, logging our development and which our parents are then conned into actually paying for! (Has anyone out there actually met someone who works for one of these photographic companies?)
We are given a national insurance number when we leave school. We then fall over ourselves in the rush to apply for passports, driver's licences, buy cars with personalised registration plates and, now, tracking devices (purely for 'insurance purposes',you understand).
We are photographed in almost every street we walk in, along every motorway we drive on and in every public building we enter - and if that wasnt enough, we may end up with our D.N.A. stored on yet another database which will be farmed out to some private company anywhere in the world, for processing and possible misplacing when one of their employee's has his/her laptop stolen.
The possibilities for chaos will be endless. A stolen cigarette butt or hair placed at the scene of a crime will become a nightmare for someone wrongly accused - whilst making it relatively easy for real criminals to implicate a person they dont like and walk free from court on the grounds of 'reasonable doubt'.
And what of the people who hold this information? Can we ever really trust any government? What happens when we have a government we really know we can't trust? Who are the people who will have access to the databases. Worse still, who will be able to just simply buy them?
If an American company can be given DVLA data as happened in a recent scandal, just who else will be able to purchase or process all this new information?
We sit watching c.c.tv footage of yet more criminals committing crime while being filmed by camera's that they know are there - seemingly oblivious to the obvious irony.
We will accept ID cards because we are told that they will help in the fight against terror - and we will do that despite the fact that most of the suspected terrorists that have been apprehended in the UK & America have been bona fide citizens complete with passports.
Just what will it take to make ordinary people sit up and call a halt to this - will we accept cameras in our homes? Our telephones tapped? Or has the moment passed and its now too late to stop any of it?