[taltman1]

> An intelligence agency that keeps a list of demographic minorities for the purposes of spying & persecution is Holocaust-precursor-grade stuff

Exactly. And that's how Jacob Appelbaum sees it too:

“There is just a very real historical awareness of how information can be used against people in really dangerous ways here,” Poitras says. “There is a sensitivity to it which just doesn’t exist elsewhere. And not just because of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, but also the Nazi era. There’s a book Jake Appelbaum talks a lot about that’s called IBM and the Holocaust and it details how the Nazis used punch-cards to systemise the death camps. We’re not talking about that happening with the NSA [the US National Security Agency], but it shows how this information can be used against populations and how it poses such a danger.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/berlins-digital...