Posted by Orin Kerr:
Bogus Privacy Scandal in the <i>New York Times</i>?
A week ago, the New York Times ran a [1]story about the Census Bureau
discosing information about Arab Americans to the Department of
Homeland Security. The story makes it sound like a disturbing
violation of privacy by overzealous government officials. Here are the
key parts of the NYT report:
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.
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 New York Times is not
telling you: All of the information disclosed has been publicly
available from the Census Bureau's own website for years. You can
access the data yourself from [2]this page.
As best I can tell, all the Census Bureau did was run a few quick
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 handed the
story to the Times wasn't very clear about this, either. The
disclosure became public thanks to a FOIA request made by
[3]Electronic Privacy Information Center, aka EPIC. EPIC's [4]page
about the Census Burea disclosure bears a strong 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 [5]Chris
Hoofnagle, who confirmed that (to his knowledge) all of the
information the Census Bureau disclosed was publicly available from
the Census Bureau website.
Am I missing something, or would this have been no story if it had
been reported accurately?
References
1. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2710086
2. http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2002/sumfile3.html
3. http://www.epic.org/
4. http://www.epic.org/privacy/census/foia/default.html
5. http://www.epic.org/epic/staff/hoofnagle/
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