Credit Bureaus Were the #NSA of the 19th Century - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/mass-surveillance-was-invented-by-credit-bureaus/479226
Critics of the system were both fascinated and repulsed by the sheer scale of it all, with various commentaries referring to “an army of clerks,” “a little army of typewriter girls,” and thousands of spies scattered across the land, reporting back to a secretive New York office filled with thick leather-bound ledgers filed with tiny, “eye-blurring” script, marked up with cross-references that interlinked files across many different ledgers.
#histoire #surveillance #fichage #crédit via @snowden