In my new column for ANewDomain.net, I argue that the case against Big Data and NSA spying isn't that the Obama Administration is about to round us up and send us to camps - it's that some future government might. The only way to stop that from happening is to make sure we stop creating those databases today:
The gendarme returned. “Perpignan?” he scoffed. “Monsieur,” he continued authoritatively, “you are not from Perpignan.”
This is true. I was born outside Boston and grew up outside Dayton. Yet if a policeman or any other government employee in France — even an agent of the DGSE, the French equivalent of the CIA — runs my passport, their computer will tell them I was born in Perpignan. If you’re born overseas, the French government assigns you a birthplace of record in France.
Which, in cases such as mine, can cause confusion. My French, though decent, is heavily infected by my half century living in the United States. Many French natives guess I’m Quebecois. Perpignan, culturally part of Catalonia, is in the far southeastern corner of the country along the Spanish border.
Despite the weirdness — this is the equivalent of asking a Bostonian to pass as an Alabaman — there’s good reason for assigning fake birthplaces. During World War II, collaborationist French police turned over their census and residential registration records to the Gestapo, who used them to find people whose ethnicity was marked “Jewish” or “Gypsy,” and those who were born abroad. (Under the perverted logic of the Nazis and their Vichy allies, foreign-born Jews went to Buchenwald before those with French birthplaces.)
After the war, the French realized that data collected for innocent purposes during the 1930s under a leftist government headed by a Jewish president had facilitated the murder of thousands of people who might otherwise have escaped or stayed hidden.
The whole thing is at:
http://anewdomain.net/...