Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

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The federal laws regarding US Census privacy-breaching disclosures are stiff, being substantial felonies enshrined in statutory law, not just a nonbinding "policy" or an informally-binding "regulation" or a downright insulting backroom "interpretation". They may conflict with privileges people assume under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, but they were not repealed with the passage of the Patriot Act. They are explicitly and repetitively opposed to the contents of the Census surveys being used against the respondent in any law enforcement capacity. In a talk I attended, the ranking US official in charge of the Census at the time, Rebecca Blank, fielded questions incredulous of this point. The cost of being able to collect the data credibly is not being able to use it for any legal purpose in the context of the individual.

Census officials, employees, or associates who cooperate with the NSA on breaching privacy need to go to prison under these provisions for them to mean anything; They have always pitted the Census against other agencies that would like to feast on that data. The laws are not required to protect against Amazon marketting, they are required to protect against the IRS, FBI, DEA, ICE, NSA, et al, and ensure that the Constitutional duty to enumerate the populace cannot be contravened by the respondent's fear of repression. Perhaps the Patriot Act immunizes the FBI from asking, but if it immunizes the Census Bureau from answering, we might as well not have a Census Bureau at all.

An intelligence agency that keeps a list of demographic minorities for the purposes of spying & persecution is Holocaust-precursor-grade stuff, and something we have fought against for most of our existence since our inception as a country.

I fortunately (or unfortunately) was the target of one of the "extended survey" forms in the last US Census.

I ignored the mail. A Census worker came to my address and I would not let him in, multiple times (the first time, he was without any ID).

Fortunately for me, there is a way for the Census worker to complete each blank on his form with "declines to answer" (he did it by pressing Shift-F11 if that helps you).

Of course, that is at the whim of the Census Bureau, and is not the same as legal protection against Census surveys. In other words, I ultimately sat down with the Census worker and we went through the questions outside my address. I had him press Shift-F11 for each answer, he thanked me for my time, and that was that.

It helps to be courteous and considerate (I offered him a cold drink). It probably made the difference in getting him to admit there was a Shift-F11 option.

Out of genuine curiosity, why did you decline to answer? It seems that accurate census data would be really useful for planning many things.

Japanese internment camps. McCarthyism. Blacklisting. Post-9/11 legislation.

I would only be willing to grant a government more power under two conditions. It is independently verifiable at any time that it is both ethical and competent. The power could be revoked if it fails to be either ethical or competent.

Grant of personal information is a non-revocable act. And the current government structure appears to me to be either competent or ethical, and sometimes neither, but very rarely both. I often watch videos from independent blogger-journalists where a person will conduct a lawful request to view public records while recording, and be subjected to physical force or punitive arrest as a result.

You want me to disclose my personal information? Stop keeping nasty secrets about how you really run things. Stop stonewalling freedom of information act requests. Stop the "parallel construction" nonsense that turns the fruit of the poisonous tree into jelly and spreads it on justice's breakfast toast.

And perhaps be able to name a single thing I might consider to be good, that was made possible only through availability of long-form survey information. For all the supposed potential benefits, I have difficulty actually identifying any. Wait. Here's one.

Census survey income data were used to identify relatively poor areas for the Community Reinvestment Act. Fannie Mae was subsequently directed to buy more loans for mortgaged properties in those areas. So it lowered its standards for qualifying loans, particularly with respect to documented incomes. A lending boom resulted, followed by a fraud- and greed-driven bust that wiped out all the equity I had in my house (which was bought with a 25% cash down payment). THANKS, CENSUS.

No, I prefer not to encourage any "help" from the government. Ethics and competence first, please.

That would all be more reassuring if the Census Bureau hadn't assisted in rounding up Japanese Americans during WWII. Whether or not intelligence agencies track minorities now is irrelevant. If Congress ever decides all Arab Americans, or Japanese Americans, or Mexican Americans, or any other hated minority de jour, are a threat to National Security, they'll repeal the laws protecting census data again, and the FBI will have those records within days.

This threat is obvious to everyone who supports the Census. That's why the laws were created - to establish the principle and tradition that Census data is sacrosanct, and ensure that nothing short of overt repeal (such as interpretations, regulations, policies, executive orders, politely worded requests, or FISA orders) will unseal the files. If we breach those laws in the midst of a perceived crisis, especially without punishment for the violators, we are essentially giving up the opportunity to have honest Census responses for several generations.

> If we breach those laws in the midst of a perceived crisis, especially without punishment for the violators, we are essentially giving up the opportunity to have honest Census responses for several generations.

After seeing the hysteria after 9/11, and the power of propaganda, I don't think that what you mentioned will deter people.

> 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...

> The federal laws regarding US Census privacy-breaching disclosures are stiff

So are those for torture, domestic spying, and many other things. It is well established at this point that the U.S. government will not hold its officials accountable, except for leaking information to the press. In other countries, presidents go on trial (Israel and France come to mind); it's unthinkable in the U.S. Even Nixon was pardoned.

> > The federal laws regarding US Census privacy-breaching disclosures are stiff

> So are those for torture, domestic spying, and many other things.

Not so much torture. The only US federal law on torture per se applies only outside of the United States, and expressly excludes civil liability (and, therefore, private action), and uses a limited definition of "severe mental pain and suffering" to limit the scope of prohibited torture (identical to those in the US reservations to the Convention Against Torture itself.)

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