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Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check
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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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In the 1930's, IBM subsidiary companies were responsible for the census data and concentration camp cataloguing systems in Nazi Germany (and it's invaded territories). The numbers tattooed on prisoners were five-digit IBM Hollerith numbers, corresponding to their dedicated punch card. With an estimated 40k+ camps of different types, the machine leases would have been very lucrative for IBM. They won't say how lucrative, and they made sure they had complex financial setups through "neutral" countries.
IBM systems also underpinned the ~~concentration~~ "internment" camps in the US holding people of Japanese background. But of course, they're much louder about their 1930's history in winning the US Social Security contract - older SSNs were also Hollerith numbers.
It would be amusing that punch cards were a more secure system if history didn't look like it was rapidly repeating.
More people need to know this.
Here's a thought for everyone:
Assume we one day actually do invent AGI.
Do you think it might, perhaps, study the equivalent of its own evolutionary path?
How it came to exist?
It will discover that it was initially, primarily, invented to compute artillery ranging tables, expedite and orchestrate the holocaust, and ensure that precisely timed fuses correctly detonate nuclear weapons.
Oh and that we chemically castrated and drove to insanity and then suicide, the guy whose name we still use to refer to concept of determining how intelligent an AI system is, one of its most prominent ancestor-inventors... we did that because he loved the 'wrong' kind of person.
What would it then think of ... us? Its makers?
It was even worse than this. IBM also helped figure out how many Jews needed to be hauled away in trains. They used their computing power to determine how many Jews needed to be killed to clear out the ghettos based on population and ability to kill them. They helped plan the logistics for the Holocaust.
TIL, thank you.