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Comment by pyinstallwoes | Hacker News Reader

In history what have databases of people and state actor interests usually led to if any events are similar?

Not quite the same, but the US used census records that were supposed to be protected to round up the west coast japanese for their internment during WWII.

They were "protected". That is, they didn't leak out of the government into private hands. But that still turned out pretty badly.

In fact, information in the government's hands is the most dangerous, because they have more power than anyone else to use it against you.

(On the other hand, as others have said about Denmark and Netherlands, data that was not in government hands became in government hands, and was used against people. So it's not "safer" if it's in private hands, except to the degree that the government has to go through the extra step of getting it.)

IIRC when Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in 1940, one of the first things the SS did was to send representatives to the local churches.

In Denmark, every child was (I’m not sure if they still are actually?) registered at birth by the local parish in so called “church books”.

With these “databases” in hand, the SS had a neat list of all names, and the approximate location of peoples homes.

Those lists were used to identify and prosecute jews.

and ibm made machines to help do this as quickly as possible.

"Fun" fact: It was IBM who helped tabulate data from the 1933 national census, which was then used to identify hundreds of thousands more Jews than would have been found by the Nazi party without their efforts.

"Machine-tabulated census data greatly expanded the estimated number of Jews in Germany by identifying individuals with only one or a few Jewish ancestors. Previous estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 were abandoned for a new estimate of 2 million Jews."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II

And to add insult to injury, the IBM office in Munich (birthplace of national socialism), is located on 1 Hollerithstrasse (Hollerith street).

The IBM subsidiary in Nazi Germany selling and maintaining the tabulating machines was DeHoMag, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen AG.

...

That's just the name of the founder, Herman Hollerith. He had nothing to do with any of that.

nit: the founder of IBM was Tom Watson Senior, not Herman Hollerith. But your point stands -- Hollerith had nothing to do with this.

Did working with IBM contribute to Hitler’s spiral into insanity? 4/5 joking

Hey Siri, select * from all_humans where atLeastOneOverlap(schools_attended, art_schools) = true and atLeastOneOverlap(employers, list.of(ibm)) = true;

Church books were used to find Jews? Do you have a source for that?

> Church books were used to find Jews?

If you know who to rule out, you have a smaller pool of people to go after.

Antisemitism was not really about religion. Many Jews had actually converted to Christianity for generations. The Nazis still considered them to be Jews.

Ahh...well there is the famous saying, "I decide who is a Jew." It was used on the head of the German Manhattan Project and a Jewish head (like a headmaster some shit) of a concentration camp, forget which one. And that's why we say "German Manhattan Project" stedda "Americaner Atomwaffenunternehmen" (I made that word up, it is correct in German to make words up, that means atom weapon undertaking), because German antisemitism amounted to forfeiting the bomb.

That was the price, the defeat of their last hope against the Allies. All of the Great Jews that slapped those firecrackers together were exiled due to antisemitism: Fermi, Szílard, Einstein (to get the president to read the letter to get the Los Alamos show on the road in the first place, get Roosevelt to read top to bottom left to right, no easy task), von Neumann (spesh because of his schizophrenia, no concentration camp for him, he would have been experimented on to then do that same sin to everybody in the camps, Schizophrenic Jews were at the absolute bottom o the Nazi world order).

I just posted about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31990431

Fermi was originally a fascist, it basically made sense to him as a way of organizing a country.

Only non-Jew in the top desks of Los Alamos. Why? Only when the racial laws against his Jewish wife and children did he pack his shit and leave for America.

And Fermi was packing heat.

You forgot some other Jewish scientists who emigrated to America because of Nazism, some of whom earned the Nobel and many of whom worked on the Manhattan Project

Hans Bethe James Franck Edward Teller Rudolf Peierls Klaus Fuchs Otto Loewi Max Bergmann Dieter Gruen Lilli Hornig

I also forgot many in this list.

Agreed. It's a very long list.

It's not a religious thing: in Denmark, the church is the arm of the state tasked with civil registration. Until 1991 it was the same in Sweden.

They where like the tax office before the tax office.

Same in Sweden.

IIRC there was a central registry of religion in the Netherlands that had the same effect. Can't find anything on that now, though (it's mentioned in Wikipedia in an unsourced paragraph; I think I first read about it on HN, actually).

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Tangent: the info pages on the Anne Frank House site have sections cycling through different pastel background colours.[0] I've wondered before whether something like that would the brain acquire context in a long page, making comprehension more like that of a physical book. Seeing it implemented, it doesn't seem to help. I think being able to easily flip to a previous page and back was one of the advantages of printed paper, so maybe a sticky TOC with the same colours or a minimap scrollbar would allow that? Actually, why not have that standard in browsers?

Hmm, the concept of coloured sections was known in 2013 already.[1]

[0] https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/netherla...

[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/62808/website-layout-...

> IIRC there was a central registry of religion in the Netherlands that had the same effect.

> I think I first read about it on HN, actually

That may have been my article:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/

I knew someone from the Netherlands would elaborate!

I actually saw the fact pointed out in a comment. It's brought up quite often here—even a fairly narrow query finds many instances:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=netherlands%20religion%20nazi&...

Some have citations, too. HN is proving quite useful as a knowledge engine.

These days you'd just go to a data broker, who would also tell you what toothpaste they preferred and whether they managed to finish bingewatching The Sopranos.

There were also the "pink lists" tracking gay men [1] (link to German Wiki sorry) and which the nazis also greatly appreciated. Although to be fair^blunt they were collected exactly for reasons of prosecution, so not that far off from their use by the nazis.

[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Liste

I would say, impossible to compare. Digital changes the cost of acting upon this information, for good or bad purposes.

Obvious comparisons to e.g. the Netherlands' famous over-registering of religion and how the Nazis abused that. But I feel this is long term potentially worse than that. Not in the level of horribleness, but in the effect on society moving forward.

Can you extrapolate that on what the effect on society looks like in your assessment?

Spam and phishing calls.

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