Anger as Hungary far-right leader demands lists of Jews

[Xithras]

54. A list like this is trivially easy to make nowadays.

I didn't think about it until a co-worker pointed it out a couple of years ago. It took years for Hitler's henchmen to process millions of data cards and search birth records to build a list of Jews in Germany for extermination. Today, that same data could be compiled in hours.

Birth and death records are being rapidly digitized by most governments to reduce paperwork management (and all newer ones in most western countries are now digitized by default), and census data has both personally identifying information and religious affiliation. It would be trivial for a government to simply query out all users from past censuses to list those self-identifying as Jewish, and then run THAT list through birth and death databases to identify all of their relatives. Depending on the quality of the databases, we're potentially only talking about a few HOURS worth of work.

Computerization is great, but the march of technology has also made life much easier on those who would use it for evil.