IBM, Holocaust

[Monte Davis]

I liked the response to that two months ago from William Binney, a former
NSA technical lead, on  NewsHour. He had the temerity to point out what
should be obvious to anyone who’s bought a 2-terabyte drive at Best Buy for
$99 :

“Well, I don't believe that for a minute. OK? I mean, that's why they had to
build Bluffdale, that facility in Utah with that massive amount of storage
that could store all these recordings and all the data being passed along
the fiber optic networks of the world. I mean, you could store 100 years of
the world's communications here. That's for content storage. That's not for
metadata. Metadata
 if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we
built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world. That's all the
space you need. You don't need 100,000 square feet of space that they have
at Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content.”

I think it was during the week after that that NSA spokesclones fell back to
the next trench line: ‘OK, well, yeah, technically speaking we do store the
content. What we meant to say was that we don’t LOOK at it except as part of
a FISA-approved investigation
’  

---
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Carvill John
Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 1:45 PM
To: montedavis at verizon.net; lorentzen at hotmail.de; pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: IBM, Holocaust

While we're on tech, I wonder did anybody share my mild surprise at how
readily the mainstream media, in the wake of the Snowden revelations,
swallowed govt explanations about 'metadata', including their assertion
that, for example, which phone numbers I dialled on a given day are just
'metadata' whereas 'content' would only refer to what I said on those phone
calls. It all struck me as a somewhat wide interpretation of 'metadata',
given the context.

________________________________________
From: montedavis at verizon.net
To: johncarvill at hotmail.com; lorentzen at hotmail.de; pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: IBM, Holocaust
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 13:40:04 -0400
[repost]
Agreed. The IG Farben, Shell and GE of Gravity’s Rainbow are in between the
WWII “merchants of death” (Krupp, Vickers, DuPont et al) and the
aerospace-centric military-industrial complex of the 1960s and 1970s 
 which
have given ground in turn to the predominantly IT villains – or scapegoats
-- of today.
 
Tangentially: as a former science writer, I’ve noticed that at the NY Times
and quite a few other newspapers, IT has essentially taken over the sections
labeled “Technology.”  Coverage of all other technologies -- mechanical,
electrical (and non-IT electronic), chemical, materials-science,
biotechology, etc -- when it appears, is in the business section, or when
applicable in "environmental" coverage. In practice, that means any
technology news that isn’t IT and doesn’t [yet] have major business or
environmental implications is a hard sell in editorial conferences.  Now,
I’ve made much of my living writing about business computing, and have been
thoroughly addicted to personal IT since an Eagle CP/M machine in 1979, but
that still strikes me as tunnel vision. 
 
 
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Carvill John
Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 9:27 AM
To: Monte Davis; lorentzen at hotmail.de; pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: IBM, Holocaust
 
>For me, the enabling role of IT (and IBM) in the Holocaust simply doesn't
stand out from the enabling roles of many other technologies and many other
corporations. 
 
I would suggest that you also need to factor in a consideration of how those
particular technologies (and technology companies) have accelerated
and grown, in terms of their role in society, between WWII and today. There
is often greater focus on their roles due to today's tech-centric world
- understandably so.
 
 

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l