Colin Murphy: Is Sinn Féin’s Abú database a step into dangerous territory?
The questions being asked of the party by the Data Protection Commissioner on Sinn Féin‘s alleged gathering of intelligence on political opinions on a national level are legitimate ones
Data protection can seem like a very abstract issue, but its roots are anything but. In the 1930s, the Nazis pioneered the automated mass processing of population data using early IBM technology.
By registering people by ethnicity and other criteria, they created the means by which they could later sort the Untermensch, or “inferior people”, from the rest, ultimately facilitating the Holocaust. After the war, the Stasi in East Germany built a notorious archive on ...