A week ago, The New York Times ran a story about the Census Bureau discosing information about Arab Americans to the Department of Homeland Security. The story creates the impression that this was a serious violation of privacy rights by overzealous government officials. Reuters ran a piece on the Times report, and the news spread through the blogosphere in a hurry. Here are the key parts of the Times story:
Homeland Security Given Data on Arab-Americans
The Census Bureau has provided specially tabulated population statistics on Arab-Americans to the Department of Homeland Security, including detailed information on how many people of Arab backgrounds live in certain ZIP codes.
The assistance is legal, but civil liberties groups and Arab-American advocacy organizations say it is a dangerous breach of public trust and liken it to the Census Bureau’s compilation of similar information about Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The tabulations were produced in August 2002 and December 2003 in response to requests from the Customs and Border Protection division of the Department of Homeland Security.
One set listed cities with more than 1,000 Arab-Americans. The second, far more detailed, provided ZIP-code-level breakdowns of Arab-American populations, sorted by country of origin.
The categories provided were Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian and two general categories, “Arab/Arabic” and “Other Arab.” . . .
Census tabulations of specialized data are legal as long as they do not identify any individual.
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, said the data sharing was particularly harmful at a time when the Census Bureau is struggling to build trust within Arab-American communities.
“As this gets out, any effort to encourage people to full compliance with the census is down the tubes,” he said. “How can you get people to comply when they believe that by complying they put at risk their personal and family security?”
In 2000, the bureau issued a formal apology for allowing its statistical data to be used to round up Japanese-Americans for internment during World War II.
Disturbing, right? Well, hold on a second. It turns out that there is an important piece of information that the Times is not telling you: All of the information disclosed has been publicly available from the Census Bureau’s own website for years. As this e-mail from the Census Bureau explains, the information had been released to the public already and was “merely packaged . . . in a more usable format” for Homeland Security. You can access the data yourself from this page.
As best I can tell, all the Census Bureau did was run a few queries from their own public website and then e-mail the information to the Department of Homeland Security. The Times story doesn’t tell you this, though; instead, it rather artfully describes the information as “specially tabulated.” Yes, it was specially tabulated; Census Bureau employees ran the queries from its public data and put it in tabular form just for Homeland Security. Ergo, specially tabulated.
Why didn’t the Times tell its readers that the information was publicly available? One reason may be that the group that fed the story to the Times wasn’t very clear about this, either. The disclosure became public thanks to a FOIA request made by Electronic Privacy Information Center, aka EPIC. EPIC’s page about the Census Burea disclosure bears a significant resemblance to the Times story, and uses almost identical artful wording. Here is how EPIC reports the story:
Department of Homeland Security Obtained Data
on Arab Americans From Census Bureau
EPIC has obtained documents revealing that the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security statistical data on people who identified themselves on the 2000 census as being of Arab ancestry. The special tabulations were prepared specifically for the law enforcement agency. There is no indication that the Department of Homeland Security requested similar information about any other ethnic groups. The tabulations apparently include information about United States citizens, as well as individuals of Arab descent whose families have lived in the United States for generations.
One tabulation shows cities with populations of 10,000 or more and with 1,000 or more people who indicated they are of Arab ancestry. For each city, the tabulation provides total population, population of Arab ancestry, and percent of the total population which is of Arab ancestry.
A second tabulation, more than a thousand pages long, shows the number of census responses indicating Arab ancestry in certain zip codes throughout the country. The responses indicating Arab ancestry are subdivided into Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian, Arab/Arabic, and Other Arab.
. . .
During World War II, the Census Bureau provided statistical information to help the War Department round up more than 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans and confine them to internment camps.
I called up EPIC and spoke with Associate Director Chris Hoofnagle, who confirmed that (to his knowledge) all of the information the Census Bureau disclosed was publicly available from the Census Bureau website.
Maybe I am missing something, and if so, I would be happy to retract this post and to apologize for the misunderstanding. But if I’m not missing anything, doesn’t the story seem to rest on a rather sneaky misrepresentation of the facts?
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