Re:Rand Paul: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communicatio...
by jacquesm on Monday March 13, 2017 @03:17PM
(#13861335)
> The Nazis didn't have anything like modern surveillance, and they didn't need it to enact the Holocaust. So I'm not sure what your point is; could you clarify?
If they had there would most likely not be a Jewish people to speak of, as it was the little bit of automation they had coupled with a stereotypical dose of German thorougness already did a very good job (good is not really applicable here). Now combine that with say a twist of 'big data' and some nice pattern recognition algorithms (facial recognition for instance, or maybe DNA analysis) and it would have been possible to round up a significantly larger chunk of the Jewish population than what already happened.
The fact that we now have wall penetrating radar doesn't help either.
> The Nazi's logistical problems in enacting the Holocaust were more in moving and killing Jews, less in finding them.
They had a hard time actually, because the local population did a reasonably good job of hiding them in the strangest spots.
> Surveillance enables many kinds of government oppression, but large-scale ethnic cleansing doesn't seem to be one of them, in that it's already possible and efficient.
Yes. But it won't be made any less efficient by all this helpful identification technology we have nowadays, most likely more, and communications intercepted long before a conflict might even help to identify those that would aid the hunted.
If they had there would most likely not be a Jewish people to speak of, as it was the little bit of automation they had coupled with a stereotypical dose of German thorougness already did a very good job (good is not really applicable here). Now combine that with say a twist of 'big data' and some nice pattern recognition algorithms (facial recognition for instance, or maybe DNA analysis) and it would have been possible to round up a significantly larger chunk of the Jewish population than what already happened.
The fact that we now have wall penetrating radar doesn't help either.
> The Nazi's logistical problems in enacting the Holocaust were more in moving and killing Jews, less in finding them.
They had a hard time actually, because the local population did a reasonably good job of hiding them in the strangest spots.
> Surveillance enables many kinds of government oppression, but large-scale ethnic cleansing doesn't seem to be one of them, in that it's already possible and efficient.
Yes. But it won't be made any less efficient by all this helpful identification technology we have nowadays, most likely more, and communications intercepted long before a conflict might even help to identify those that would aid the hunted.