Peep into future

Open any tech news site these days and invariably there are stories about privacy concerns being raised due to some government legislation or the other. Most of these relate to data being gathered and analyzed for people. Its ubiquitous, you travel abroad and you'll find your face, fingerprints, retinas being scanned and stored. You buy online, your credit card history being stored. Google itself tracking and correlating your mails, blogs, communities.
The amount of data being generated and tagged for each individual is immense. We have already seen big corporations or corporate like entities often getting access to such data, to think that governments not having access and using such data would be naive.
History shows that while authorities assure a lot in beginning about how the data collected will not be used for xyz purpose in future, the future end up authorizing exactly those xyz. So we do not really see the frightening uses of such personal history available to people who you have never even seen or talked to.
Lets face it, knowledge is power. It makes me think- what happens when say a government (analogy holds for corporates too) has complete data on me, my family, my friends, my friends' friends... They know what I bought, looked at, talked about all my life. In short a complete record of my life and ideas (right or wrong) about my thought process. To what use could such information be put to? To deny me opportunities (maybe a coveted career opening)? The scope of power over me in the hands of someone who I cannot confront is frightening.
We do seem to be moving towards such a society. A case in point maybe the file sharing lawsuits in US. A non government agency often got access (some by rights given to them by laws made for the purpose) to search personal computing freedom. And a lawyer may make smart analogies with what (s)he finds by such search in order to destroy the defendant. After all, isn't this a technique in debate? If you can't think of something, why not question the topic itself? And a trial is basically a debate. So if I am fighting an individual and decide that while I do not have a strong case, if I have information about the person that may potentially cause people to look down upon the person, it can be valuable.
Currently this is just a the beginning of the information age and we have not yet seen the ramifications of such data mining. In future agencies can have immense amount of power over individual due to this.
All this leads me to conclude that in long term future (a few 100 years maybe), the structure of the governments may itself change. Democracy is good because the assumption is that the people know the best. But what when some people know while most don't? Will the model work? What if the current government know the best and the electorate doesn't? Should then the electorate be allowed to replace those who know by those who don't? Technology will ensure that a small group of those in know will wield disproportionate power. And this group will typically be that which traditionally found itself more in authority over a period of time and start leveraging the power of information over others such authority permits. Slowly the institution will start pulling levers in order to protect itself from loosing any influence - a classic case of elite rule.
If you look at most SF movies, the future is always a fight between forces, typically under an emperor or a league. If we take SF writers as visionaries (and many might be, as Jules Verne indicates), is this really the future. Will 3000 see Earth and its colonies under an emperor appointed by a league?