Thursday, March 28
For the activists of today’s infowars against ‘massively organised information’ there is even a counter narrative to be told. The most astonishing hero to emerge from this history is a military technocrat by the name of Rene Carmille. A punchcard enthusiast and an originator of the Personal Identification Number (PIN code) he undertook the effort of conducting the French census by IBM punchcard on behalf of Nazi Germany. Oddly, his data was never used and Black shows how efforts to round up Jews in France relying on a traditional paper population census yielded poor results. Compared to neighbouring Holland where the punchcard data harvested a bumper crop of Jews, only a fraction of the French Jewry were ever deported to the camps. With the liberation of France it became clear that Carmille had in fact used the census results to organise and mobilise the French resistance, having gathered details of every worker, gunsmith, farmer and mechanic. Indeed he had never even collected the relevant ethnicity data - in record after record that part of the punchcard was left unpunched. Although Rene Carmille was arrested, sent to the concentration camps and died for his treason, he probably saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives by withholding and redeploying data in the service of the resistance. In telling his story Edwin Black has uncovered an Oskar Schindler for the hacker generation to claim as their own. If for his inspiration alone, read this book, then open your
