Those tattoo's on Holocaust victim's arms? They were serial numbers directly tied to IBM punchcards designed by IBM for the Third Reich.
It gives context to former NSA chief Michael Hayden's comment, "We kill people with metadata".
The book details how Thomas Watson was directly involved in all this, and when the US made Nazi dealings illegal, he handed over direct control of his Nazi business to local branches instead of halting the relationship. After the war, those local branches all rejoined greater IBM.
It's kind of crazy to see how IBM has avoided scrutiny and continues to celebrate Watson through their naming conventions.
The case against IBM could be made against any multinational of the era, like Ford and General Motors. The fact that IBM's business was information processing does not add or subtract to their level of supposed conspiracy.
From the time of declaration of war (against the US), all american companies were hands off - even before that the relationship between Dehomag and IBM NY became more and more distant from 1933 on.
Beyond that, the technology was not held by IBM alone, Powers/Remington-Rand and Siemens and Halkse also had similar equipment and technology - so while IBM may have been the market leader, they were by no means alone - and choosing IBM over Powers in my mind is different than buying a Ford-werke truck over an Opel one.
In the case of South Africa, it seems IBM aided in the creation of South Africa's national ID system. What I can't tell from the evidence presented is if this aid was illegal or unethical at the time it took place. As a reminder, the United States didn't officially outlaw segregation until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I really haven't made up my mind one way or another about this, but I do think people have a tendency to interpret historical events using the knowledge and ideology of the present day.
There are many cases where people have done something they knew was wrong, but were afraid to stop doing them (or refuse to do them in the first place) because the risk of not being able to eat (or - worse - their children not being able to eat) was far greater than the risk of being punished for committing such a moral atrocity.
This is probably not a reasonable context for IBM's actions, but to paint all people who "were just doing [their] jobs" or "were just doing it for money" with the same brush of indignation and scorn is incredibly unfair to those who actually needed the money.
"The use of punched cards in the Jacquard loom influenced Charles Babbage, who decided to use punched cards to control the sequence of computations in his proposed analytical engine. Unlike Hollerith's cards of 50 years later, which were handled in decks like playing cards, Babbage's punched cards were to be strung together like Jaquard's. Despite this and the fact that he never actually built an analytical engine, Babbage's proposed use of cards played a crucial role in later years, providing a precident that prevented Hollerith's company (and its successors) from claiming patent rights on the very idea of storing data on punched cards."
http://www.adbranch.com/how-ibm-helped-automate-the-nazi-dea...
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Art...
"Auschwitz historians were originally convinced that there were no machines at Auschwitz, that all the prisoner documents were processed at a remote location, primarily because they could find no trace of the equipment in the area. They even speculated that the stamped forms from Auschwitz III were actually punched at the massive Hollerith service at Mauthausen concentration camp. Indeed, even the Farben Hollerith documents had been identified some time ago at Auschwitz, but were not understood as IBM printouts. That is, not until the Hollerith Büro itself was discovered. Archivists only found the Büro because it was listed in the I.G. Werk Auschwitz phone book on page 50. The phone extension was 4496. "I was looking for something else," recalls Auschwitz' Setkiewicz, "and there it was." Once the printouts were reexamined in the light of IBM punch card revelations, the connection became clear."
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/census-tabulator...
"And in this day and age of high resolution bitmapped displays with millions of colors, driven by the supercomputer-crushing performance of modern graphics hardware, your xterm window emulates an 80 column VT100 in order to provide some semblance of compatibility with 80 column Hollerith punched cards that date to the 1920s and were common on the IBM 1604."
http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cardint.htm
Windows command prompts and xterm windows have a default width whose lineage traces back to 1801 (or earlier if the loom's history is considered).
It is painful to learn how our industry (software and computational hardware) can and have been abused for such unfathomably despicable, misguided purposes.
Some may say "but why does this matter now? It's all in the past."
The problem is I think we're going to see many more such cases in the next couple of decades (at least). There are already companies that knowingly help governments spy on their citizens and help them catch dissidents or even kill journalists (think the self-driving cars of the future or cars that have remote controls).
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. It's important to punish the people responsible in helping totalitarian leaders (even within "democratic" countries). Maybe such a case will prevent say Intel from installing a backdoor in their chips in the future, or giving certain governments their future SGX keys to secure applications.
Also, IBM already got off with helping the Nazis. If they would've been punished for helping the Nazi, maybe they would've thought twice about helping with the Apartheid.
EDIT: Apparently punishing companies that helped in the Holocaust and the Apartheid isn't popular on HN.
You expressed your opinion eloquently, and well within the rules of good discourse.
Downvoters, you should reply to this post explaining what you find wrong with it, rather than simply downvoting in silence.
Mass surveillance has only become possible via scale-out solutions. The NSA isn't running HP-UX, Solaris, AIX or Windows to track your metadata - they're running Linux.
What responsibilities do distro of scale-out solution contributors hold? Are they immune while scale-up platform execs and developers should be swinging in the Hague?
What happens when Google maps are used in a war zone by ISIL? Or twitter search engines are used to target protestors? We're dropping bombs today on people via targeting from the their android phones.
Or the folks at Palantir and comparable companies that help enable mass surveillance of populations.
I upvoted.
Given that corporations are people these days, I guess they can be charged with knowingly facilitating war crimes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuala_Lumpur_War_Crimes_Commiss...
Yes, one does.
> The Kuala Lampur War Crimes Commission tried and convicted George W. Bush and Tony Blair for "crimes against peace" in 2011 under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Ignoring the question of the legitimacy of the KLWCC (as others have addressed that issue effectively), the principle of universal jurisdiction is a basis under which to assert jurisdiction, so its use is an acknowledgement of the need to establish jurisdiction, rather than support for the claim that jurisdiction is unnecessary for such a trial.
The former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Param Cumaraswamy, has suggested the tribunal is a private enterprise with no legal basis and questions its legitimacy.[13] The tribunal does not have a UN mandate or recognition, no power to order arrests or impose sentences, and it is unclear that its verdicts have any but symbolic significance.[14]
In light over overwhelming evidence that vinceguidry has published news that is fallacious and quite frankly silly (The idea that GWB and Tony Blair are being held accountable for War Crimes because some self-appointed group of people in some backwards state can hold a war crimes tribunal and publish a document), I find him guilty. His sentence is execution, disembowelment, being kicked off the internet, and being tickled with many soft feathers. News of his sentence will be published to a registry of war criminals located here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029804
Without the Hollerith card machines, Hollocaust would have been impossible to perform at that massive scale that eventually became evident. Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) that sold the equipment to Germany at the time, later changed name to International Business Machines.
Apartheid was awful too.
Someone gets into power, they don't like those 'upstart hackers' .. well then, HN seems like a pretty good resource for who goes up against the wall, then ..
the national identification system was highly
customized, requiring close collaboration with the
South African government;
Now granted, IBM probably shouldn't have been doing business with the South Africans in the first place, customizations or no. However, IBM wanting to create a customized system for the specific needs of a major customer is not out-of-the-ordinary by any means, nor is it any reason to be up-in-arms.
racial classification was a primary identifying
characteristic;
and the equipment was leased.
The EFF article is trying to claim that - by the mere merit of IBM having helped South Africa develop a citizen identification system - it's complicit in human rights violations. Guess what? There exists a staggeringly-large quantity of countries with citizen identification systems[0]. It would be one thing if IBM designed the system specifically for the purpose of discriminating against blacks, but this article hasn't really made a convincing argument of that (namely, it hasn't provided any real proof that enabling apartheid was indeed IBM's goal). As far as I can tell, IBM was simply helping South Africa develop the same sort of system that most other countries either already had or would soon have. In other words, IBM's involvement was to implement a general-purpose product which was then subsequently abused by the South African government.
I will admit that the implementation of a race code in the identification numbers themselves is suspect, and perhaps that's what the EFF is going after (if IBM was indeed involved in that particular element of South African citizen ID numbers; the article doesn't really go into detail on that). It's also suspect that IBM proceeded with this (according to the EFF, at least) after having been disallowed from doing so by the U.S. government, and that IBM was secretive about it. However, the act of creating an identification system - on its own - does not seem as if it can be classified as "directly facilitating" anything, let alone racism. The EFF would have a better case if they focused on those individual elements rather than trying to claim that the ID system in its entirety was designed to facilitate that institutionalized racism.
This is all not to mention that IBM actually has a very positive track record for eschewing racial discrimination in its hiring decisions and workplace environments[1]; creating something specifically to oppress a particular racial demographic is quite a bit out-of-character for them.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number
I believe the point is that IBM retained title to the equipment and was part of an ongoing business relationship. If they'd sold equipment to the South Africans, then anything after that was out of their hands (excepting perhaps a support contract). With a lease, every time it came up for renewal, they would have the option not to renew and pull back the equipment.
In general, I feel like you're looking at this as if it were a single over-the-counter transaction at a moment in time. Reality for an installation like this is that IBM were likely engaged directly with the S.A. government for a period of years, over which time it's likely that they got SOME sense of what the government was using this system for.
I do agree that trying to single-out IBM for designing products of war is unfair to IBM when various companies have done that (and, in many cases, have done that exclusively) without any particular complaint.
IBM is a company, an entity. it is made of people, but it is not a person (although americans might try to disagree..). it is a paper-clip maximiser, only instead of paperclips, it's cash.
it does not have morals, it does not have a conscience, irrelevant of the fact that the people that make it up do. to blame a company for doing exactly what it was made to do is madness.
if IBM didn't do it, another company would have done it. IBM could have failed, in fact, as a result. or at least, they might not be in the position they are now.
you may be tempted to argue that, morally, IBM should have not agreed to take part, regardless of the effect on the company. you wouldn't be entirely wrong. but a company does not have morals. not having morals is what allows them to make such vast amounts of profits.
when health insurance companies fight to the death (sometimes literally) to avoid paying out claims, where is this moral outrage? or when BP do literally whatever they want to environment, where does the outrage dissipate to after the media gets bored of talking about it?
we can not expect companies to be moral agents. we can not expect them to value human life over cash. to punish an entity with no conscience makes no sense. it would be akin to shouting at the wind for blowing, or kicking a hatstand for falling over.
the best we can hope to do is stop companies from engaging in "immoral" behaviour (whatever that means - they change over time) whilst they are committing it.
otherwise, lets start legal action with hugo boss for constructing nazi uniforms. or VW (literally, the "peoples car") for working with nazi germany.
The point of a corporation is not to have a legal person without morals.
The point of a corporation is to allocate resources more efficiently than could be done by legal individuals.
We can expect corporations not to facilitate mass murder. We should expect corporations not to facilitate mass murder.
The argument that we should not punish transgressions just because some corporations are not punished for transgressions is cowardice in the highest degree.
Take back your agency and your humanity and stand for something.
> The point of a corporation is to allocate resources more efficiently than could be done by legal individuals.
noise. tell me - which is more "efficient" (i.e profitable), avoiding paying out insurance claims over insignificant inaccuracies, or caring about the family of 5 with a household income of $30,000, who's dad broke his arm whilst cycling to work, by a driver who was on their phone and caused them to run a red light?
> We can expect corporations not to facilitate mass murder.
oh, so we should abolish arms manufacturers?
> We should expect corporations not to facilitate mass murder.
you should tell this to BAE, or Lockheed Martin, or.. well, literally anyone on this list; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defense_contractors
> The argument that we should not punish transgressions just because some corporations are not punished for transgressions is cowardice in the highest degree.
absolutely not. there is no cowardice in that statement at all. it's a recognition of what companies in this world behave like. look at the actions of pretty much every big company. ask yourself - is your world view more accurate, or is mine?
again, i don't like it. it's sickening. but to hate these creations for doing exactly what they are made to do (again, make cash) is just.. senseless.
Neither the American legal system, nor most Americans actually treat corporations as people or believe they should be treated like people. The fact that people regurgitate this falsehood is utterly ridiculous.
Our legal system uses a construct called legal fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction) as a convenient scaffold to extend existing laws to new domains (sort of like subclassing from a base class). In most of modern economies corporations have many, but not all, of the same properties as persons (they can own property, have to pay taxes, etc.) We use the legal fiction of corporate personhood as a structural aspect of the legal system to make this work.
Nobody actually believes corporations are people.
Corporations indeed work as you described, but strong enough back pressure on social and legal level changes the profitability landscape, and thus corporations will optimize in a way that is less harmful. You're right comparing them to artificial intelligences (i.e. very strong optimization processes) - they don't share humanity's goals, nor they should be expected to. But what we can do is force their goals to align with ours as much as possible.
how can we force an entity the size of large corporations to do what we want? we simply can't. look at the broadband problem in america. or bankers golden parachutes. or any of the immoral actions taken by corporations.
they are too large. once they get large enough, they have power over us, not the other way around.
tell me, what do you disagree with? why do you disagree with it? what evidence do you have to back up your assertions?
if i am wrong correct me. but to brandish me as ignorant because you don't agree with what i say is just you, spreading dogma.
The legal brief, from a quick skim, appear to reference actions taken in the 70's and 80's.
Is the IBM of today the same one that existed in the 70's? The same people running it and making the same decisions?
If the answer is no, I'm not sure what significance this lawsuit holds, other than a symbolic "sticking it to the corporations" one. The only people being punished in such a case are those that had nothing to do with the original wrongdoing.
You'll be telling me next countries should stop paying war reparations because none of the combatants are still alive!
This is just ridiculous, nobody holds the developers of Little Boy responsible, instead we should hold the people and governments who exploited the inventions.
Note, I'm not rationalizing or supporting any of the negative effects of such activities, merely trying to look at this issue through a different perspective.
IBM creating citizen tracking software - in both the Nazi German and Apartheid South African scenarios - is equivalent to a company building engines for tanks or parts for machine guns. Does the EFF plan on suing every last one of those companies?
And to be honest, building a citizen tracking system does seem pretty general-purpose; what government doesn't want to be able to store and manage information about its citizens in an easy manner? Yes, doing this requires working closely with a particular customer (in this case, it was a government of a country that happened to be infamous for institutionalized racism), but that does not automatically mean that every last action of that customer is condoned by IBM.