One for Edward Morbius’ “Data are liability” file.

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This is a thread for those of you who say coders and developers should take no role in politics. Those of you who watched my #WCLDN talk last year already heard this story. You can hear it again.

This was Rene Carmille, and that is a punch card. Image of Rene Carmille

Rene Carmille was the comptroller general of the French army. He eventually headed up the French census. Census data – innocuous, straightforward facts about people – was tabulated on IBM punch cards. Then the Nazis came.

Rene Carmille had all the data about all the people. He saw what the Nazis wanted to do with that data. So he made a decision about what to do with it. He did his job, externally, for the Nazis, of course.

In the background, he sifted through the data to find recruits for the French Resistance. He and his team went further than that. They did things like leave boxes of census records – thousands of people’s data – in a back room, unprocessed.

Then he and his team engaged in – if not invented – ethical hacking. They physically hacked their IBM punch card machines so that nothing could be entered into column 11: religion. That data, for those thousands of people, was missing.

He and his team were caught, and interrogated, and tortured. Rene Carmille died at Dachau. I have been there. There is a smell of burning flesh in the air. It is still there.

As is his legacy. In the Netherlands, 73% of Dutch Jews were found, deported, and executed. In France, that figure was 25%. It was that much lower because they couldn’t find them.

They couldn’t find them because Rene Carmille and his team got political and hacked the data.

On #HolocaustMemorialDay , as the people in the data we collect and store and share face threats we never thought we would see again, you need to be prepared to go that far when the day comes when it is you handling the data.

You can, and you will.

And in reply: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/957722588641419266.html

This seems like a good place to mention that the US Bureau of the Census likes to talk about how strict they are about privacy, even once turning away FBI agents who arrived at the Colorado Springs BOC office with a warrant for confidential Census data. But…

…during WWII the BOC provided block-by-block data on people of Japanese ancestry for the purpose of sending them to concentration camps, something that was officially denied or simply ignored until records research confirmed it in 2000. And…

…in 1943, the BOC provided specific names and addresses of all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Washington DC area, on the request of the US Treasury Secretary, which was also denied until further research confirmed it in 2007.

And the specifics of the request and response indicate that other requests may have been made and fulfilled prior to the one now documented, to the extent that this was then a routine transaction.

What especially disturbs me personally about this is that I worked on a federal contract for BOC from 2007-2008 and again from 2012-2014. Our mandatory data-confidentiality training included the Colorado Springs story…

…but no acknowledgement that the Census Bureau had ever been less than perfect and morally upright in its protection of the confidentiality of respondents’ data.

has officially apologized for the WWII block-level data disclosures, but this is far from just ancient history: in 2004 records requests revealed the previous year, BOC supplied ZIP-code-level data on residents of Arab ancestry broken down by nationality to DHS…

…only apparently later requesting the required statement justifying the need for such data.

When popular fervor or official policy turns against a group, we must not assume that things we always thought were bulwarks against abuse actually were or will continue to be — in fact they are often turned into tools of the very oppression they are supposed to protect against.

Sources: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/957256426392494080.html