Watch Out For Data Gluttony In Governmental Population Registries

While the NSA is collecting vast amounts of data about everybody, we need to learn from history that even basic population records have been used for systemic discrimination and genocide. This includes the most basic data like gender and creed, and there’s reason to be wary of governmental data gluttony even at the fundamental level.

Most nation-state governments keep some kind of register of their citizens, residents, or population in general. There is no reason for this register to contain anything more than name, address, and possibly a unique identifier. Yet, most governments happily include tons of other data – which will, without exception, be used against the person so registered.

Let’s take something as simple as gender. Most if not all population registries have a field for that, which accepts one of two values: “Male” or “Female”. Let’s put the bigotry of this aside for a moment (how it excludes transgender people and non-binary people), and just observe how it was used.

It was used for discrimination. That was even its very purpose.

Before most laws were made gender-neutral, you were only legally allowed to marry somebody of the opposite gender, and only people marked “male” in the population register were allowed for some jobs – in the military, for example. The very purpose of a “legal gender” was to discriminate, and it is still used that way in many countries that haven’t modernized their laws.

To get even more horrifying, let’s look at the population register of the United States. It has “race” – as if there were such a thing among Homo Sapiens – as part of its population register. The initial purpose of this registration was the same as for gender; to discriminate based on a person’s skin color. (For an interesting experiment in this regard, see what happens when schoolchildren are subjected to discrimination by eye color instead.)

Whenever a government is collecting more data about a person than name and address, the collected data will be used against that person.

Other registries contain people’s religion as part of their population register, and this, too, is used for discrimination – or worse, much worse. The most horrifying example was in the Netherlands, where this data collection was seen as completely benign – it was used for city planning, to make sure that Protestant/Catholic/Jew citizens had a convenient and proportionate access to places of worship. The purpose of this data collection couldn’t get more benign.

Then, World War II happened. The invading administration found the population records very convenient, and as a result, there were almost no Jews at all in the Netherlands after World War II. The population records had not only been used for discrimination, but for outright genocide.

What we learn from this is that even the most benign data will be horribly abused. Studies into genocide-resistant identity cards (yes, that’s a real thing) has barely started.

It’s noteworthy that this article doesn’t even begin to touch the data gluttony of the NSA and their global accomplices. This deals solely with genocides and systemic discrimination based on the most basic of population records.

The only thing a government needs to know is your name and address, so they have a means to reach you. They may have assigned you a unique identifier for their own convenience (which, if so, should stay in governmental use only). Be very wary of anything else.