Thread by @WebDevLaw

This is a thread for those of you who say coders and developers should take no role in politics. Those of you who watched my #WCLDN talk last year already heard this story. You can hear it again.

This was Rene Carmille, and that is a punch card.

Rene Carmille was the comptroller general of the French army. He eventually headed up the French census. Census data - innocuous, straightforward facts about people - was tabulated on IBM punch cards. Then the Nazis came.

Rene Carmille had all the data about all the people. He saw what the Nazis wanted to do with that data. So he made a decision about what to do with it. He did his job, externally, for the Nazis, of course.

In the background, he sifted through the data to find recruits for the French Resistance. He and his team went further than that. They did things like leave boxes of census records - thousands of people's data - in a back room, unprocessed.

Then he and his team engaged in - if not invented - ethical hacking. They physically hacked their IBM punch card machines so that nothing could be entered into column 11: religion. That data, for those thousands of people, was missing.

He and his team were caught, and interrogated, and tortured. Rene Carmille died at Dachau. I have been there. There is a smell of burning flesh in the air. It is still there.

As is his legacy. In the Netherlands, 73% of Dutch Jews were found, deported, and executed. In France, that figure was 25%. It was that much lower because they couldn't find them.

They couldn't find them because Rene Carmille and his team got political and hacked the data.

On #HolocaustMemorialDay , as the people in the data we collect and store and share face threats we never thought we would see again, you need to be prepared to go that far when the day comes when it is you handling the data.

You can, and you will.

Sign on a Parisian nursery school.