ICE & Facial Recognition, Punchcards & Hollerith

I usually do not write about politics, but in this case, it involves technology and its impact on people and their data, so here we go. It also hits close to home; I am from Germany.

Over the last few days, The Washington Post released a story about the FBI and ICE using facial recognition software to track immigrants in the U.S. The story arrived via records of searches that were obtained by Georgetown Law researchers. The surveillance effort happened without the knowledge of the people that were targeted. Access for this was given by DMV offices directly, without going through state legislators.

The parallels between this and Nazi Germany are just awfully striking. The usage of technology here is what resembles a lesser known story from Germany’s most tainted part of history. Germany, unfortunately, was not alone.

“In the early 1880s, Herman Hollerith (1860–1929), a young employee at the U.S. Census Bureau, conceived of the idea of creating readable cards with standardized perforations, each representing specific individual traits such as gender, nationality, and occupation. The millions of punched cards created for the population counted in the national census could then be sorted on the basis of specific bits of information they contained — thereby providing a quantified portrait of the nation and its citizens. In 1910, the German licensee Willy Heidinger established the Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (German Hollerith Machine Corporation), known by the abbreviation “Dehomag”. The next year, Hollerith sold his American business to industrialist Charles Flint (1850–1934) for $1.41 million ($34 million in 2012 dollars). The counting machine operation was made part of a new conglomerate called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). In 1924, Watson assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer of CTR and renamed the company International Business Machines (IBM).
On April 12, 1933, the German government announced plans to conduct a long-delayed national census. The project was particularly important to the Nazis as a mechanism for the identification of Jews, Gypsies, and other ethnic groups deemed undesirable by the regime. Dehomag offered to assist the German government in its task of ethnic identification, concentrating upon the 41 million residents of Prussia. This activity was not only countenanced by Thomas Watson and IBM in America, Black argues but was actively encouraged and financially supported, with Watson himself travelling to Germany in October 1933 and the company ramping up its investment in its German subsidiary from 400,000 to 7,000,000 Reichsmark — about $1 million. This injection of American capital allowed Dehomag to purchase land in Berlin and to construct IBM’s first factory in Germany, Black charges, thereby “tooling up for what it correctly saw as a massive financial relationship with the Hitler regime”. The 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country’s Jewish minority.”
- via Wikipedia from “IBM and the Holocaust” by Edwin Black

The punchcard counting systems were simpler and non-digital data processing machines — the predecessor of the modern governmental databases. One of the most worrying parts of Edwin’s story is that maintenance crews had to check on the devices. Punchcard system had been set up in every major concentration camp. This was years before the war started, without raising any eyebrows.

Technology is just a tool, an enabler. It can be used for good or bad. If facebook’s practices make you flinch, then the above story should truly give you sleepless nights. It always starts with a small minority but quickly expands upon anyone who does not agree with the perceived status-quo.

This is beyond a slippery-slope now. It just happened.

Washington Post : FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches : https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/07/fbi-ice-find-state-drivers-license-photos-are-gold-mine-facial-recognition-searches/

BBC : ICE and FBI used facial recognition to search driver-licence databases : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-48907026

Wikipedia: IBM and the Holocaust
: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Edwin Black : IBM and “Death’s Calculator”
: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ibm-and-quot-death-s-calculator-quot-2