One of the countries Paul is probably thinking of with regard to the large scale genealogy databases to keep track of its citizens pedigrees is Iceland. Actually, I find it difficult to imagine any other country being able to do so. Iceland is unique in that the 'Book of Icelanders' records more half of all Icelanders who have ever lived, and goes back to the 9th century. DNA studies on the maternal and paternal lines have shown it to be around 98% accurate. It's always been in the public domain, so entering it into a database doesn't make much difference.
The aim of tracking pedigrees is not, thankfully, political, in Iceland. Instead, it's aimed at researching hereditary diseases, and half of the adult population have volunteered to give a blood sample. Also their medical records are linked to the database. While it may sound a bit dodgy, they assure participants that the data "is anonymized, identifiable only by an encrypted ID generated by the Icelandic government's Data Protection Authority. This third-party encryption system is the only one of its kind, and enables the company's scientists to cross-reference various data sets about large groups of people without ever knowing who they are."
See:
http://decode.com/main/view.jsp?branch=43019By the way, although factory-produced CD-ROMs probably will last 30 years or more - certainly my earliest music CDs from 1985 are still ok - the figure of 7 years applies to home burned CDs - the dye inside the disk which changes colour when hit by the laser spreads out from the initial point, eventually making it impossible to distinguish 0s from 1s. It's a chemical process inside the disk - you can store them under controlled humidity, temperature, in a vacuum, etc, but it won't help. In a recent test of a number of well-known makes of CD-ROM, some failed after only a year in such controlled environment.
