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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

Of course, the German government that made lists did so without credit card records or electronic ids or anything like that...

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This misses the point - the spying-on-your-citizens was decided by the state on purpose, going completely cashless enables dragnet surveillance that makes it really hard to evade if one has to (journalists, dissidents)

Oh, I was just answering the German comparison. I agree that mass surveillance is a terrible idea and is incomparable with democracy.

> the German government that made lists

Governments. We didn't stop making lists after 45, in neither the FRG nor the GDR, the outcomes were just not as severe if you ended up on one of them.

Not quite -- they did have some powerful support from IBM... so you are correct, not electronic IDs, but they did have a machine-readable datastore of everyone's address and other details (punchcards, I believe).

And just think what they could have accomplished if that modern tech had existed.

It wasn't fully manual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

I never thought I'd see "IBM" and "holocaust" in the same sentence, but here I am.

They're not exactly advertising it =)

Just like Hugo Boss don't mention their Nazi Uniform Design Division in investor calls.

That's a common misconception. Hugo Boss didn't design the Nazi uniforms, but they manufactured it.

I'll throw out Bayer, Volkswagen, Ford, and GM as companies with Nazi ties worth reading into.

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