In total, over 12 million records were kept containing personal and identifying information for people who had born, lived, or traveled through Berlin since the system began. observers given tours of the Berlin police filing system were shocked to find dozens of rooms filled with files. One of the most infamous examples was the massive trove of information collected and housed by Prussian and other German police and city governments in the early twentieth century. No matter how secure you think the data is-and no matter how much you trust the current government to use the information responsibly and benevolently-there is always a risk that either priorities and laws will change, or an entirely new regime will take over and inherit that data. This is, unfortunately, a side effect of the collection and retention of data on individuals. There has always been concern and protest over how the U.S military used this information, but now that concern takes on new dimensions. military or Afghan state-building, policing, and counter-insurgency measures. This database contains detailed information on every member of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police -prompting renewed fears that this information could be used to find people who assisted the U.S. They did raise alarms, however, on the wide-reaching and detailed Afghan Personnel and Pay System (APPS), used to pay contractors and employees working for the Afghan Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense. Some sources, including those who spoke to the MIT Technology Review, claimed that the HIIDE devices offered only limited utility to any future regimes hoping to use them and that the data they access is stored remotely and therefore less of a concern. With the Taliban retaking control of the nation, reporting about the HIIDE program prompted fears that the equipment could be seized and used to identify and target vulnerable people. The military reportedly had an early goal of getting 80% of the population of Afghanistan into the program. Ostensibly built in order to track terrorists and potential terrorists, the program also was used to verify the identities of contractors and Afghans working with U.S. HIIDE, the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, are devices used to collect biometric data like fingerprints and iris scans and store that information on large accessible databases. For two decades, the United States spearheaded the collection of information on the people of Afghanistan, both for commonplace bureaucratic reasons like payroll and employment data-and in massive databases of biometric material accessible through devices called HIIDE. As the United States pulled its troops out of Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation, byproducts of the prolonged deployment took on new meaning and represented a new chapter of danger for the Afghan people.
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