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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

Yawn. Every crisis, someone says "governments will use this crisis to expand the surveillance state!!!". Okay, how many more crises before their surveillance state is complete? Because by my count, they could have built it 99 times over. Also, since no one ever seems to care, and the surveillance state measures are enacted without (much) resistance, I don't know why the governments have to wait for a crisis to incrementally ratchet up the surveillance state. Maybe they haven't caught on yet. Shh, don't tell them.

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Sometimes the Western Governments test the waters during a crisis (or the threat of a crisis) to see if there is a public outcry.

Lots of people protested the Patriot Act and other post 9/11 stuff but the majority of people at the time were fine with it because it was to find the terrorists. Not sure if they ever found a terrorist on America soil but now we have TSA screens, Homeland Security, and a boat load of other extensions of federal power.

There’s also the Patriot Act renewals which happened at a relatively quieter time.

Each event adds a new layer of the surveillance state.

9/11 had the patriot act.. can hold you forever without a lawyer loss of freedom.

So far we've seen google give away location data on millions of people. Ditto for providers. The government used it to determine who was away from their homes over the weekend.

It's not one event but a series of events that changes a society.

Do you know why there are no Jews left in Holland?

They had the most efficient census of any European country. So when the Nazis came in and replaced the moderate Democratic Monarchy all they had to do to round up all the Jews was to select the column for religion on the IBM punch cards from the last census.

It's a travesty that next to no one knows the fact that the holocaust was the first large application of computers and the atom bomb was the second.

Same thing for the US census that has been used to round up Japanese in internment camps during ww2.

>It's a travesty that next to no one knows the fact that the holocaust was the first large application of computers and the atom bomb was the second.

Almost everyone knows the Nazis used census data to initialize the Holocaust, it's practically the number one argument given against mass surveillance and data collection of any kind, and of censuses in particular.

Also, Allied cryptanalysis of German ciphers (particularly the Enigma code) was, arguably, the second large application of computers, and by the time we got to the atom bomb, I think they had already been in widespread use for radar and missile trajectory calculations.

"Digital computers" would've been a more accurate usage in the comment to which you're responding. World War II guided weapons (mainly just the German V missiles) used very simple and rudimentary analog computers for coursekeeping, and World War II gun laying and fire direction was done with analog integrating machines of impressive heft and complexity [1]. They're actually very fascinating devices, not to mention being among the pinnacles of the manual machinist's art even in that art's own halcyon days, but they're not really relevant here.

[1] http://www.navsource.org/archives/01/57o.htm

If one searches around youtube there is quite a lot of films reels people have uploaded show the devices in action.

e.g. This is a fire control mechanism for ships.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

Very clever stuff indeed.

Fair enough, but I think any definition of "digital computer" that includes IBM electro-mechanical punch card tabulators would surely also include the Enigma, Allied Bombe and Colossus, which makes at least three feasibly large applications of computing between the Holocaust and Manhattan Project.

Right! Let’s destroy all census datasets....

Maybe instead of taking that as an argument to not have a census the solution here is to conclude that Nazis are bad and they ought to be stopped.

This is not a reasonable argument because it can be applied to anything. Telephones enables nazis to communicate better. Guns allowed them to shoot faster. Cars made it so they could round them up even more quickly. Without fuel they wouldn't have had any tanks. The list goes on.

The fact that technology empowers nazis as much as good people is trivial and obvious. As an argument against technology it's useless because by that logic we need to go live in a cave again.

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