SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the those-who-do-not-learn-from-the-past... dept.
On 27 March 1943, a cell of the Dutch resistance committed an attack on the municipal register of Amsterdam. The German occupier had found this register to be extremely convenient: it contained the details of 70.000 Jews in Amsterdam. Also, it proved useful as a means of cross-checking information on identity cards.
Gerrit van der Veen, Willem Arondéus, Johan Brouwer, Rudi Bloemgarten and a number of others had thoroughly prepared the assault and decided there could be no casualties. They entered the building disguised as policemen. Guards were overpowered, given a sedative and taken out the back to be parked in the Artis zoo for safekeeping. The filing cabinets containing public records were turned upside down. After soaking the files in benzene, the group set the largest possible fire.
That night, the fire department played a crucial part. A few resistance sympathizers among the firefighters had been notified of the attack. When the alarm sounded they intentionally delayed the deployment of trucks in order to give the fire time to do maximum damage. Water was used extra generously during and after the extinguishing, in order to add water damage to the havoc of the flames.
In the end, the attack turned out less successful than planned. Due to the tight stacking of the identity cards, a lot of information was saved. Approximately 15 percent of the documents was destroyed by the fire, a few thousand were rendered illegible by the water and of course the overall disarray was enormous.
There are modern lessons to be had from the "big data" collection in states that turned authoritarian during Word War II.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday November 14 2016, @09:03PM
I'm old enough to remember, first-hand, life before it was on-line.
I'm beginning to think it is important to document how it was, otherwise people will never know. A bit like experiences of the first world war.
Life before nearly everyone had a mobile phone integrated with a computer - even Star Trek TOS didn't have that (TOS has communicators, speech interfaces, and tablet computing. It didn't integrate them all. For that you need to see a 1987 BBC TV series "Star Cops" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Cops [wikipedia.org] and the companion 'Box')
There was a time, not so long ago, when you didn't need to have a bank account. It was entirely normal for a factory worker to be paid in cash every week, and for example, a man from an insurance company would come regularly to collect premiums. If you did have a bank account, it was recorded manually in a ledger held at your branch. Cheques had to be sent to that branch to be debited from your account, and as a matter of courtesy, you would get the physical cancelled cheques for your own accounts. Not only did mobile phones not exist, but not everybody had a fixed-line phone - my family did not, and for many years, if we needed to telephone relatives, we have to walk 2 km to the nearest phone-box with a stack of coins and telephone them with the help of an operators, as there was no long-distance dialling.
This meant that only the bare minimum of necessary information was collected on a national scale. It was too expensive in resources and manpower to do otherwise. A shop might give you a handwritten itemised bill and keep a copy: but no-one analysed everyone's purchases across an entire country. The details of your bank account might be know to the manager and a few clerks. Payments by cash were anonymous (not completely: banks recorded the serial numbers of high-value notes they issued to hinder certain types of crime). No-one knew where you were at any particular time. These days, mobile phone records will say which base-station your phone was connected to, financial records will say which shops you used credit and debit cards in (or NFC payments), the shop will have itemised details of what you bought, transport travel-cards will give a history of their use, CCTV cameras may show you walking around and between shops, number-plate scanning systems will have a history of where your car was. We have gone from a society which worked, and yet people remained unmolested by 'big data' to one where is is remarkably difficult to live 'off-net' and unrecorded, and this is entirely normal.
You do not need to be paranoid to see that a huge change has occurred. I can't comment on whether it is a change for the better, but it is certainly different.