The utopian goal of totalitarian secret police

 The modern dream of the totalitarian police, with its modern techniques, is incomparably more terrible [than that of its predecessors]. Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy: and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. 

-- from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Hannah Arendt.