Census: American Community Survey

[Kat Kanning]

el presidente resisted them also:

http://forum.soulawakenings.com/index.php?topic=58.msg66532#msg66532

[Spencer]

Reading the link re el presidente and the census folks' assurance that your data will be kept "confidential" under U.S. law reminded me of the Census Bureau's admitted link to the location and internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.  However, they assure us that:

Adherence to these safeguards preclude a repeat of the 1941/42 behavior.

Of course they also noted that:

I would also like to state clearly that for many years the Census Bureau was
less than forthcoming in publicly acknowledging its role in the internment
process. Silence was not the worst offense, for there is ample evidence that
at various times the Census Bureau has described its role in such manner
as to obfuscate its role in internment.

Oh, yeah, they turned over the records for the draft in WWI:

Government requests for access to individual census records increased during
World War I. Since the 1910 census law did not prohibit disclosure, the Census Bureau
furnished many transcripts to the U.S. Department of Justice, local draft boards, and
individuals, especially in connection with cases where the individuals had been arrested
for draft evasion.

[Dave Ridley]

pat let me know how i can help.   Send me whatever info you have, if you like, or post it here if you like.

[Pat McCotter]

Thanks Dave.

I wish I had a brochure to hand him when he shows up at the door but I wouldn't know what to put in it. As it is I will be in Maine this week so Gloria will just tell him that we don't do surveys.

I'll keep you posted.

[Spencer]

You could just quote the relevant portion of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, section 2, Clause 3):

The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

Just ask the nice census person to write you a five page essay (with sources) explaining why he / she should be allowed to ask you a bunch of personal trivia questions in light of the above language from the Constitution. 

The intent of the Founders in having a census was merely to apportion representatives among the several States.  There is no constitutional reason to request additional information (during the days of the 3/5 compromise, I suppose that asking whether one was a slave or not would have been a relevant question for determining population for purposes of apportionment).

So, maybe you could just give the nice census taker a free copy of the Constitution with the above passage highlighted (don't forget to write nhfree.com somewhere inside the cover).

[David]

They've been sending these surveys to me also.  I haven't recieved phone calls, me having a cell phone probably has something to do with that.     I have wondered when they are going to stop by for tea and gossip.  But to my knowledge that hasn't happened yet. 
Congrats Pat on your CD. 

[error]

I haven't seen a survey, but one of the neighbors got one. I saw them returning it.

[Spencer]

I haven't seen a survey, but one of the neighbors got one. I saw them returning it.

Did you shout, "Traitor!" and point at them?

They will either feel ashamed or think that you're crazy; either of which is good for you.

[Dave Ridley]

I like the idea of a quickie flyer that just is a copy of spencer's quote from the constitution, and a copy of the tenth amendment.

at the end you could summarize in one sentence what these two passages, put together, mean.

I may try to write up such a flyer but in the meantime that's the concept, which I think is powerful.

Imagine more and more fed employees runnning into more and more people who are just quoting the constitution's restrictions on them and declining to be very cooperative when they stray beyond those restrictions. 

Another thought....probably it is useful to ask them to wait for a bit while you close the door and stop to think a bit about how you'll react.  I hope you'll give me a call on my cell or someone else who you can let know they are there.

[error]

You can also call Porc-411 and let (almost) everyone know at once. 413-0411

[Kat Kanning]

Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese Americans in WWII
Government documents show that the agency handed over names and addresses to the Secret Service
By JR Minkel


   Science Image: Japanese-American prisoners
   Image: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
   REVELATIONS:  Records show that in 1943 the Census Bureau revealed names and addresses of Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C., area. Prior research had found that the Bureau provided the government with less specific information about Japanese Americans in California and other states to round them up (above) for imprisonment in internment camps.
Despite decades of denials, government records confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The Census Bureau surveys the population every decade with detailed questionnaires but is barred by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals. The Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily repealed that protection to assist in the roundup of Japanese-Americans for imprisonment in internment camps in California and six other states during the war. The Bureau previously has acknowledged that it provided neighborhood information on Japanese-Americans for that purpose, but it has maintained that it never provided "microdata," meaning names and specific information about them, to other agencies.

A new study of U.S. Department of Commerce documents now shows that the Census Bureau complied with an August 4, 1943, request by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau for the names and locations of all people of Japanese ancestry in the Washington, D.C., area, according to historian Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin?Milwaukee and statistician William Seltzer of Fordham University in New York City. The records, however, do not indicate that the Bureau was asked for or divulged such information for Japanese-Americans in other parts of the country.

Anderson and Seltzer discovered in 2000 that the Census Bureau released block-by-block data during WW II that alerted officials to neighborhoods in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Arkansas where Japanese-Americans were living. "We had suggestive but not very conclusive evidence that they had also provided microdata for surveillance," Anderson says.

The Census Bureau had no records of such action, so the researchers turned to the records of the chief clerk of the Commerce Department, which received and had the authority to authorize interagency requests for census data under the Second War Powers Act. Anderson and Seltzer discovered copies of a memo from the secretary of the treasury (of which the Secret Service is part) to the secretary of commerce (who oversees the Census Bureau) requesting the data, and memos documenting that the Bureau had provided it [see image below].

Science Image: memo    
Image: COMMERCE DEPARTMENT FILES/COURTESY OF SELTZER AND ANDERSON    
SMOKING GUN:  This letter from acting Commerce Secretary Wayne Taylor to Treasury Secretary Henry Mogenthau, dated August 11, 1943, documents that the Census Bureau provided the Secret Service with a list of Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C, area. The memo is initialed "JC," for Census Bureau Director J.C. Capt. The Census Bureau has previously denied disclosing specific information about individuals during 1942 to 1947, when legislators made it legal.

Click here for a larger image
The memos from the Bureau bear the initials "JC," which the researchers identified as those of then-director, J.C. Capt.

"What it suggests is that the statistical information was used at the microlevel for surveillance of civilian populations," Anderson says. She adds that she and Seltzer are reviewing Secret Service records to try to determine whether anyone on the list was actually under surveillance, which is still unclear.

"The [new] evidence is convincing," says Kenneth Prewitt, Census Bureau director from 1998 to 2000 and now a professor of public policy at Columbia University, who issued a public apology in 2000 for the Bureau's release of neighborhood data during the war. "At the time, available evidence (and Bureau lore) held that there had been no ? release of microdata," he says. "That can no longer be said."

The newly revealed documents show that census officials released the information just seven days after it was requested. Given the red tape for which bureaucracies are famous, "it leads us to believe this was a well-established path," Seltzer says, meaning such disclosure may have occurred repeatedly between March 1942, when legal protection of confidentiality was suspended, and the August 1943 request.

Anderson says that microdata would have been useful for what officials called the "mopping up" of potential Japanese-Americans who had eluded internment.

The researchers turned up references to five subsequent disclosure requests made by law enforcement or surveillance agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, none of which dealt with Japanese-Americans.

Lawmakers restored the confidentiality of census data in 1947.

[Kat Kanning]

Officially, Seltzer notes, the Secret Service made the 1943 request based on concerns of presidential safety stemming from an alleged March 1942 incident during which an American man of Japanese ancestry, while on a train from Los Angeles to the Manzanar internment camp in Owens Valley, Calif., told another passenger that they should have the "guts" to kill President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The incident occurred 17 months before the Secret Service request, during which time the man was hospitalized for schizophrenia and was therefore not an imminent threat, Seltzer says.
ADVERTISEMENT (article continues below)

The disclosure, while legal at the time, was ethically dubious and may have implications for the 2010 census, the researchers write in a paper presented today at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America held in New York City. The U.S. has separate agencies for collecting statistical information about what people and businesses do, and for so-called administrative functions?taxation, regulation and investigation of those activities.

"There has to be a firewall in some sense between those systems," Anderson says. If a company submits information ostensibly for documenting national economic growth but the data ends up in the antitrust division, "the next time that census comes they're not going to get that information," she says.

Census data is routinely used to enforce the National Voting Rights Act and other policies, but not in a form that could be used to identify a particular person's race, sex, age, address or other information, says former director Prewitt. The legal confidentiality of census information dates to 1910, and in 1954 it became part of Title 13 of the U.S. Code, which specifies the scope and frequency of censuses.

"The law is very different today" than it was in 1943, says Christa Jones, chief of the Census Bureau's Office of Analysis and Executive Support. "Anything that we release to any federal agency or any organization ? all of those data are reviewed," she says, to prevent disclosures of individual information.

The Census Bureau provided neighborhood data on Arab-Americans to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2002, but the information was already publicly available, Jones says. A provision in the controversial Patriot Act?passed after the 9/11 attacks and derided by critics as an erosion of privacy?gives agencies access to individualized survey data collected by colleges, including flight training programs.

The Census Bureau has improved its confidentiality practices considerably in the last six decades, former director Prewitt says. He notes that census data is an increasingly poor source of surveillance data compared with more detailed information available from credit card companies and even electronic tollbooths.

Nevertheless, he says, "I think the Census Bureau has to bend over backwards to maintain the confidence and the trust of the public." Public suspicion?well-founded or not?could undermine the collection accurate census data, which is used by sociologists, economists and public health researchers, he says.

"I'm sad to learn it," he says of the new discovery. "It would be sadder yet to continue to deny that it happened, if, as now seems clear, it did happen. You cannot learn from and correct past mistakes unless you know about them.

[Tom Sawyer]

Even if we could trust the Census Bureau not to reveal the data at some future point in time, how do they keep the NSA and other spooks from just grabbing the data as it is transmited over data networks?

[powerchuter]

The last time the census people came to the place where I was at...  I yelled through the door that they were trespassing on private property and I considered that I direct and immediate physical threat to my family and I...  I further yelled that I was armed and prepared to defend my property against all trespassers and they were to leave immediately...  I also said I was going to call the authorities and report possible heavily armed(they looked like "big women" but who knows what they might be hiding under those clothes...knives, guns, bombs, etc.) attackers trespassing on my property with the stated intentions of gaining access to my family in our home!

They left as quickly as they could lumber away with all that hardware stuffed under their clothes...
And they never returned...
Good Riddance!

Unintended Consequences by John Ross...
Henry Bowman would have loved "V"...

Hey Claire, It's way past time now!

[LiveFree]

Powerchuter, I LIKE that response!