Reply #3: In the hands of an authoritarian regime, RFID technology would ensure dictatorship for decades.

[AdHocSolver]

Of course, we in the United States have nothing to fear of an authoritarian regime ever gaining power, lying to the people, spying on its own citizens, starting unnecessary wars, or savaging political opponents.

However, there is a not so distant example of a dictatorship using the data processing technology of its time to wage wars of conquest, terrorize its own citizens, and exterminate its enemies.

(snip)

..........

IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.

Only after Jews were identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.

But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.

..........

Of course, every American can be assured that no government could ever come to power in the U.S. that would be devious, vindicative, or ever willing to use technology for such nepharious purposes.

However, once you let the technology proliferate and become ubiquitous and widespread, there is no controlling how it is used and abused.


http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/