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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

Before the Nazi's invaded the main guy who advocated for the civil registry which allowed the Nazi's to easily find jewish people went to his grave believing he did nothing wrong in advocating for such a database.

Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.

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I think the hard counterpoint is - some ways that American government function are patently insane compared to other industrialized countries. Having moved from US to Nl just having one single source of truth about where I live and who I am for all sources of government is much less of a headache in day-to-day life. Mail forwarding, authentication for municipal governments, health insurance, etc, just takes 0% of my life (compared to the pain of authenticating myself separately to every part of the government, sometimes by answering questions about my life trawled from _private_ data aggregation companies - the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens. Gathering this data for everyone is certainly more tedious but i think avoiding the dragnet completely for the average member of society is functionally impossible.

These kind of systems work perfectly and smoothly as long as the human in question lives his life within the box decided by the government. If not, these systems are hell.

Where "the box decided by the government" means having a mail address?

Most advanced countries also view that as a basic human right...

In some hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your individual tax number. In other hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your bank account.

It can also be tied to a postal adress in some nations, which makes it hell for people like sailors, seasonal workers, or other very mobile citizens. You're basically dependent on having to know somebody which you can completely trust to make sure they relay your mail to you. One of the "boxes" the government wants to put people in is that they reside at one adress, but many people do not live like that.

> the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens.

What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?

So I'm in general agreement, especially as things stand. But there is one hell of a counterargument that says if the US govt had an authoritative database of all citizens+residents, and effectively enforced that database, then there wouldn't be so much energy based around demands to remove "the illegals" in the first place.

Once again I do generally agree with the desire to limit the abilities of the government, especially pragmatically in the context of the current situation. And politically I'd say that the general topic is being used in bad faith to drive support for fascism rather than earnest policy fixes (eg killing bipartisan immigration bill, in favor of this).

But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.

> But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.

Can you provide some examples of this phenomenon?

One of the big ones is the calling to naively eliminate government regulation, imagining that will always make things "more free", while ignoring that corpos are perfectly willing to create private regulations on their own. This often ends up amounting to facilitating de facto government, despite some epsilon of choice.

There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward and less-partisan one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of uses, and do so basically in lock step, despite those uses not actually being illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable by fooling people with narratives of "avoiding regulation".

Because they DO have whatever data they want: From Palintir.

Preventing the government from accumulating a database is meaningless. But it doesn't matter anyway. Even if they didn't have any data, that's not an impediment, because there is zero pushback to literally blackbagging people off the street and sending them to another country. They just want to harass brown people and you don't need a damn database for that. Bootlickers have eyes.

This bullshit about government databases has always been a meaningless distraction. Oppression doesn't want to be precise or efficient, it's counterproductive to the goal of scaring people into compliance.

Tell me, how do you believe they are stymied at all? They've arrested anyone they want.

This administration went in and just flagged people on Social Security as deceased. They said 'those people can just get it fixed'. They also said people that complain are cheats.

There are many people on fixed social security that can't afford missing a payment, let alone the 3 it would take at a minimum if it all works out to get this fixed. By that point they could be homeless, their credit could be ruined. These aren't easy things to fix if you are 80+ and depend on Social Security and renting.

Concentrated power even for the best on intentions (in this case deciding in the 1930s 'old people shouldn't have to eat dog food') is extremely easy to abuse.

What can we even change? It's likely HN will also go to the grave demanding deregulation amidst a maelstrom of consumer protection malfunctions. We're already there in many respects; the DOJ's case against Google and Apple both seem to have stalled-out while the EU, Japan and South Korea all push forward with their investigations.

In many respects, the attitude of "we'll fix this one day" is exactly why we don't think deeply about these issues. Client-side scanning was proposed only a short while ago, and you can still read the insane amount of apologists on this site who think that unmitigated data collection can be a good thing if you trust the good Samaritan doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741

It will take an utter catastrophe before the deregulation bloc sees what's at stake. This is far from over, despite the unanimous desire to put security in the rearview mirror.

Go out, tell your non-techie friends how data can be misused.

"But I have nothing to hide"

And then tell them the story about the Jewish people in the Netherlands....

Alternatively, ask them how accurately an email need to describe their medical history before they believe it's real and fall for a scam.

That has never been convincing to them because they are fundamentally incapable of putting themselves in the shoe of an "other" like that. Look at all the people who voted for Trump literally to deport all the illegals and cry foul when he arrests their significant other or parent.

This phenomenon is well documented, from "the only moral abortion is my abortion" to suddenly accepting gay people when your child comes out to a huge quantity of Americans only being accepting of gay marriage rights after watching a damn sitcom, to "deregulate everything" types suddenly screaming for the government to do something after they get scammed/screwed/used as expected like most of the crypto community.

True, but there is a large fraction of people who are not like this, but haven't given the dangers of data collection enough thought. You can reach those. Are that enough people? Let's hope so.

I really fear for our older generations and those who are less tech-affine. What chance do they have to not be scammed by AI generated videos, fed by exfiltrated private data of them and their family. Grandparent scam on steroids.

The Nazis didn't actually need the pre-occupation data from the civil registry to easily find Jewish people.

In January of 1941, the Nazis ordered all Jews in the Netherlands to register themselves and virtually all of them, some 160,000, provided their name, address and information on any Jewish grandparents to the government.

If the lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that one shouldn't collect data just in case some genocidal group comes to power, then I fear one has learned the wrong lesson.

Who was this guy?

I am having a very hard time finding his name, but there was a section on him in the dutch resistance museum.

I highly suggest visiting it! Sorry for the lack of an online source.

The simple counterpoint is that lack of data didn't stop the nazis a single fucking bit, and ICE has no problem breaking down random doors and harassing legal establishments.

This absurd idea that all we have to do is "defang" the government and we can safely ignore it, as if the problems that these data sets are built to work towards fixing would magically go away, or magically mean that people who experience those problems wouldn't still try to get something done about them, except now outside of a legal framework of any sort.

Do you actually think people with broken governments are more free in their world of arbitrary penalties and non-existent solutions?

A blinded government isn't less dangerous when it gets hostile. It just makes it more random and less well targeted. But that won't STOP it.

The holocaust would have happened just the same even if we never made counting machines. The main difference with IBM helping the Nazis is that we have good data about who died in the camps and good documentation. Funny that doesn't seem to matter to morons who think it's a hoax though.

Or do you honestly believe Jews faced no oppression and extermination in the areas without good data on them?

The actual answer is, as always, the hard one: Suck it up and pay attention to your government, participate in democracy, advocate for good politicians, understand how our system is somewhat broken and non-representative, and vote for people who will make it more representative.

There's no option to disregard politics and stay safe. If enough people in your country want you dead, no government can protect you of that if you stay disengaged. Ask the native americans how safe they ended up without a comprehensive database of their existence. We nearly exterminated the buffalo to solve that "problem". Because it was popular. No IBM needed.

Not having the data readily available slows it down. Having more random and less well targeted actions hit the supporters, so weakens the support. Is that enough? No. But I still lock my door, even if this will only slow down a determined thief.

Additionally, data collected by the government can also be misused by others. So it's still better to not collect unnecessary.

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