McCarthyism Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump indicated that he would consider setting up a database to track Muslims.

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Nov 30 2015   2:49PM GMT

13 Ways (Besides the Obvious) Trump’s ‘Muslim Database’ is Bad

Sharon Fisher Profile: Sharon Fisher

                             

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump recently indicated that he would at least consider setting up a database to track Muslims. While he’s since to some degree backed away from it, it still makes an interesting thought experiment in the context of database design and public policy – if only to point out how very, very fraught such a thing would be.

Needless to say, the whole notion of such a database is problematic. Any student of American history, ranging from the Japanese internment to McCarthyism, can explain this. But simply as a technical issue, here’s all the reasons it’s impractical.

1. How do we define “Muslim”? Self-defined? Your parents were? What if one parent was? How devout do you have to be to “count”? (Theoretically, the U.S. could use the definition of Jewish that the Nazis used, but that might be politically unpopular.)
2. Similarly, which people “in” the U.S. would need to register? Citizens? Students? (That should go over well with the colleges and universities that count on foreign student tuition.) Visitors? How long do you have to be in the country before you sign up? Do they get removed from the database when they leave?
3. Just what information is going to be tracked? And how does it get updated when it’s changed? Keep in mind how challenging it is even to ensure that voter rolls are kept up to date.
4. How do you get people to sign up? If it’s voluntary, do we really think that people with terrorist leanings are going to meekly put their names on a database? If not, how do you enforce signups? Where do you get the data to begin with to find the people you want to sign up? The census, for example, no longer tracks religion.
5. On the other hand, how do you keep non-Muslims from signing up as an “I am Spartacus” act of protest? Following the (sadly untrue) belief that World War II’s King Christian of Denmark wore a yellow star to show solidarity with Jews, a number of people have already indicated that they plan to identify as Muslim should any such system be implemented. Do we just shrug and say ok, if you want to say you’re Muslim, you are?
6. If you don’t just register yourself, how do you deal with false positives? Remember that even Senator Ted Kennedy has been put on a terrorism no-fly list.
7. Who’s going to provide this database? While companies such as IBM reportedly worked with the Nazis during World War II, many vendors these days consider themselves progressive. It’s difficult to believe, for example, that Google or Facebook would cooperate with such an effort.
8. Similarly, who’s going to set this up and work on it? Presumably this would be a government effort, perhaps through the Department of Homeland Security. But how many techies are actually going to consent to work on this? It doesn’t seem like the sort of project where outsourcing is going to be a good idea, you know?
9. More to the point, how do you ensure that protesting techies don’t sabotage it in some way? Does anyone think that Anonymous – which is doing its own work to help reduce terrorism – is going to let this database stay up and functioning properly for more than ten seconds? Won’t an effort like this spawn a dozen Edward Snowdens who want people to know what their country is doing?
10. Aside from the politically motivated hackers, how is the database going to be secured, both for the amount of personally identifiable information it would have and from the people who might decide to use it to take out their Muslim neighbors?
11. How much is this going to cost? And where’s the money going to come from? Michigan, for example, has paid HP $33 million to develop a replacement for its Secretary of State’s system. The state’s population is about 9 million, right in the 5 to 12 million range estimated for the number of Muslims in the U.S.
12. How long is this going to take? Going back to Michigan, the state is now suing HP for $49 million after the company took more than ten years and still didn’t deliver a working product.
13. Finally, keep in mind that every organization from the ACLU to the EFF would be taking the government to court on this, which would mean development would take even more time.