In this essay we attempt to answer the question raised in the title. The reason this is asked in the first place is because the technology to achieve this in principle is now, very close at hand.
             A police state is merely a highly organised centrally controlled system by its very nature. Like any organised system, it must have lots of sensor information that flows to a central system. Any animal such as a frog, cat, bird or human is a centrally organised system in terms of control. This would not be true though for it's biochemistry. It follows therefore that to have a global police state requires many inputs from all levels of society to the greatest detail possible or to whatever level is required by the system to operate. All this information would flow to a few high level data processing centres, from where control can be implemented based on the inputs it is receiving from the system, or society in this case.
             Thus the question is asked ! Since all these technical pieces of the jigsaw are more or less available, is a global police state inevitable and or possible One only has to look back in the last few years at the massive increase in survelliance cameras, data storage capacities, networking and of the software systems behind these. Database software is now easily able to search across multiple databases across multiple sites. The latest object databases can easily store text, audio and video and recent break-throughs in fractal compression and recognition techniques allow faces to be scanned and searched for in databases. There are no major technical barriers which cannot be easily overcome in the near future that would prevent the continuing increases in all of the above areas. It would be a safe bet to say that for the next 10 years, there are no real limits in sight. In a few years time the storage of Terabytes will be nothing unusual. As an example, take the surveilliance a!
             ...