How Spyware Reaches Oppressive Governments

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How Spyware Reaches Oppressive Governments

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 9, 2012 @03:53PM from the appointment-and-business-card dept.

New submitter blando writes "Between February and March of 2011, at the height of Egypt's tumultuous revolution, protesters stormed the offices of their feared State Security Investigations Service in Alexandria and Sixth of October city, on the edge of Cairo. It was there, amongst evidence of detentions, torture and surveillance at SSIS's headquarters, that information first came to light regarding a sales pitch by UK-based Gamma Group to Egypt's security agency for their FinFisher spyware."

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IBM and Nazi Germany by drkim · 2012-09-09 16:39 · Score: 4, Informative

This has been going on for decades.
IBM assisted the Nazi Holocaust by providing the card reading/sorting technology which Nazi Germany used to locate and kill the ethnicities that the Germans wanted wiped out. (Jews, Gypsies, Catholics, etc.) "IBM's German subsidiary (was) known as Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft"
The actual punch card code for each concentration camp were:
Auschwitz — 001; Buchenwald — 002; Dachau — 003; Flossenbürg — 004; Gross-Rosen — 005; Herzogenbusch — 006; Mauthausen — 007; Natzweiler — 008; Neuengamme — 009; Ravensbrück — 010; Sachsenhausen — 011; and Stutthoff — 012.
1. Re:IBM and Nazi Germany by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 17:37 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Just vague recollection here, but I seem to recall the german subsidiary solely designed it for this task.
  I think the opposite is true. The technology in question was developed for the US Census. Germany wanted such equipment for its own census. A census is a quite legitimate thing for a government to undertake. That this census information was useful in locating jews was tragic, but it seems a misuse of the data.
  From the wiki article the GP cites: "Richard Bernstein, writing for The New York Times Book Review, wrote that Black's case "is long and heavily documented, and yet he does not demonstrate that IBM bears some unique or decisive responsibility for the evil that was done."
2. Re:IBM and Nazi Germany by guttentag · 2012-09-09 19:09 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  The Hollerith Machine was developed for the task of processing the massive amounts of data for the census in the United States. It was the only solution in the world that could handle the job. Decades later, Germany was using these machines for its own census. Most of the data the Nazis compiled with IBM's technology was between 1934 and 1939. While the Nazis were collecting this information to track "undesirables," IBM was so proud of itself it had a plaque affixed to greet visitors to its Madison Ave (NY) headquarters in 1938 which read: WORLD PEACE THROUGH WORLD TRADE.
Re:Stalin once said ... by rohan972 · 2012-09-09 21:54 · Score: 5, Informative

isn't "putting profit over all else" the very foundation of the free market capitalism?
No, at least not according to Adam Smith. As with all ideologies practice can vary considerably from the theory. I would guess that not many people who read The Wealth of Nations take the time to first read The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and presumably can not then understand the context it was written in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a 1759 book by Adam Smith. It provided the ethical, philosophical, psychological, and methodological underpinnings to Smith's later works, including The Wealth of Nations (1776)

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