[LINK] Surveillance Will Always Be Abused, With Mathematical Certainty

[Kim Holburn]

Because Godwin.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2013/11/collected-private-data-will-always-be-abused-with-mathematical-certainty/

> More specifically, the data point is from when the Netherlands included people’s religion as part of the public population records.
> 
> It could be trivially observed that somebody’s faith, while still private, is several orders of magnitude less sensitive than somebody’s complete communications, movement, search, and browsing history. But this data was still private – what was the justification at the time for asking people for their faith in order to include it in the public records?
> 
> Urban planning.
> 
> Not national security, not any “war on terror”, no pedophile scare, not propping up an obsolete copyright industry or anything like that. The citizen wasn’t an enemy in this case.
> 
> It was as simple as making sure that city planning met the needs of the citizens by having a somewhat proportional distribution of synagogues, Catholic churches, and Protestant churches that matched the density of respective faiths and the locations of where the people wanted them lived. It was the most benign reason imaginable for collecting private data – and it wasn’t even collected forcibly.
> 
> What happened next is in the history books. World War II came around. The Netherlands were swiftly invaded by Germany, who had a profound dislike at the time for one of the faiths listed in the public records.
> 
> There were almost no Jews at all in the Netherlands after World War II.
> 
> Having this private data collected made the German genocide campaign horribly effective in the Netherlands


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
T: +61 2 61402408  M: +61 404072753
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request