1984=2007?

Read Part I, Chapter VIII. This brings us to the end of Part I. You have two days to do this. Written assignment: Post to your blogs -- What are your thoughts and analysis of Part I? Describe in detail your personal feelings and mood taken from reading Part I? Questions to consider: How does life in 2007 reflect society in 1984? How has reading this book impacted the way you view society? What do you think will happen as the story unfolds?

There has been times when I've thought about the probability of this book describing what we are all living in today. The cameras in the street, stores, buildings, subway, etc (which on the book would be the telescreens)...Are they really put up by the government so they could watch our everyday, every moment steps? I have concluded that is not a trick of the government to justify their interest in spying on us. Why would the government want to watch millions of people everyday, what can they possibly do if by that one camera in the subway hundreds of people pass by and the image isn't even clear enough to distinguish who that person that just passed by is, on top of that, that person they might be spying on might pass by that camera just once a month or so, I find this probability of cameras being used for the government to spy on us very doubtful.
In the book the party claims there is "Thought Police", this is something I also highly doubt because how can they possibly read anyones mind, plus it takes a while for the "Thought Police" to go after the thought criminals. So what I think is that the party is trying to terrify the citizens making them believe there's thought police always watching for their thought so that way plebescites won't have any thoughts which might affect the party like going against them.
Although I doubt many things about the book being compared to the world we live in today, there was this one things that really caught my attention and still disconcerts me. The day Mr. Sipkin came back from getting "fired", he told us, "If I would have really gotten fired, they wouldn't have let me speak to you guys, they would have just told me to leave right there and then and come back for my stuff some other time when no students were around." I started to compare these words with what happens in the book, if someone commits a crime, the police breaks into their home and takes them and no one ever knows what happened to them. So my question is, are we living in a world where people can get extinct?
It's said that in Winston's job, no one talks to anyone because they don't trust each other. Winston is always aware of what facial expressions he makes because just with that he can give himself away. For example the time when they were giving an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty, at the end of it, he noticed a girl looking at him with curious intensity. This filled Winston up with questons, 'Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about?' 'He thought that she was not actually a part of the Thought Police but that it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen, the smallest thing could give you away.' I have known from previous experiences that you cannot fully trust anyone, but reading this book has made my believe stronger.