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A comment on The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years. Parent comment

Re:The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years by avar on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @09:43AM (#1490923)
If that policy's really derived from WWII I daresy they've completely missed the point. The Data Protection Directive wouldn't help if you Europe were to fall under Nazi control again.

It's just a law that says the government can't process the data in certain ways, they still have the data though, and could start mining it by changing the law, or ignoring it.

If they actually cared they wouldn't be gathering this data in the first place. The U.S. (officially) keeps a lot less data on its citizens than the average European country, but that's been changing in the recent decades since the FBI, NSA and others were founded.

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Re:The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years by yummyfajitas on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @01:35PM (#1491664)
"...but that's been changing in the recent decades since the FBI, NSA and others were founded."

I wouldn't exactly characterize the last 6-8 decades as "recent".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsa

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Re:The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years by avar on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @04:33PM (#1492273)
Relatively speaking. The first census was taken in 1790, the records being kept about US citizens today are a relatively recent thing compared to that.
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