Census Bureau Serves Up Arab-Americans to Homeland Security

Once again, the Bush Administration take a page from Adolf Hitler's playbook... What a miserable failure!
--ryan



Homeland Security Given Data on Arab-Americans
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
Published: July 30, 2004
 

ASHINGTON, July 29 - 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 what is now 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."

Hermann Habermann, deputy director of the Census Bureau, said such cooperation was standard practice. "We are required to provide information to other federal agencies," he said. "This is not a cabal calculating secret tabulations."

But Mr. Habermann also expressed concern over application of the data, adding: "We do worry about how information will be used. However, we have not been given the authority to determine which organization gets which information."

Census tabulations of specialized data are legal as long as they do not identify any individual.

Christiana Halsey, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, said the requests were made to help the agency identify in which airports to post signs and pamphlets in Arabic. "The information is not in any way being used for law enforcement purposes," she said. "It's being used to educate the traveler. We're simply using basic demographic information to help us communicate U.S. laws and regulations to the traveling public."

But critics of the information sharing said general demographic snapshots could be derived without such detailed information and that the ZIP-code-level data with its breakdowns of ancestral origin seemed particularly excessive because for all of the groups only English or Arabic need be used.

"The real question is to Homeland Security," said Samia El-Badry, an Arab-American member of the Census Bureau's decennial census advisory committee. "What are they hiding? Why do they need this?"

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," Mr. Zogby 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.

Kenneth Prewitt, the former census director who made the apology, said that given the bureau's history, consideration of requests from law enforcement agencies requires more than strict parsing of legalities.

"The Census Bureau has a longstanding practice of being unusually cautious about such cooperation because it is difficult to explain to the public," Mr. Prewitt said. "There is an issue of principle involved as well as law. In World War II we violated our principles even if we didn't violate the law, and we assured people we wouldn't do it again."

The data sharing on Arab-Americans was disclosed by the Census Bureau in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center focused on civil liberties issues. The group, which filed the request in May and received the information this week, shared the documents with The New York Times.

Several entries in the documents have been blacked out by the Department of Homeland Security, with notations citing the need to protect privacy and government operations.

Census Bureau guidelines for preparing special tabulations for outside agencies and groups include considerations about how the data sharing will affect the bureau's reputation; whether the data deals with "sensitive populations"; and whether it is being requested by law enforcement agencies. With those agencies in particular, the guidelines suggest that the bureau evaluate whether the agency will use the data for statistical applications or for law enforcement.

But the guidelines apply only to projects for which the bureau will be paid. The request from Homeland Security involved no contract or payment and so was not subject to full review by census officials.

Ultimately, Mr. Habermann said, any discussion about the controversial nature of the information sharing is separate from the agency's mandate to provide information.

"The only way we can guarantee that no one will ever be harmed by our information is to release nothing," he said. "We understand that groups can be affected by what we give out, and we understand that can be sensitive. But that is a societal debate, not a census debate."