if you read nothing else today, read this.

[sophiaserpentia]

lady_babalon, I might be joining you in that boycott of air travel. Thanks to ravenia for the link.

Data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau came from respondents to the 1990 census and included "information on both households and individuals," the NASA study said. The NASA experiment used 5 million census records from each of two data sets it created, "one that stores household records and another that stores person records."

... However, Mr. Steinhardt, who sits on the Census Advisory Committee, said releasing information on households and individuals is "a major breach of trust." "The advisory board specifically asked this question, whether they were providing data to any other government agency, and the answer was 'no,' " Mr. Steinhardt said. "We will have to look carefully at what they provided NASA and why."

.... The Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS II) system under development by the Homeland Security Department will use passenger records that include name, address, phone number and date of birth. The information will be used to confirm the passenger's identity and will be compared with criminal and terrorist watch lists. A color-coded threat assessment will be assigned to each passenger: green for standard security, yellow for additional screening and red to prevent the passenger from boarding a plane. Security officials estimate the error rate at 4 percent to 8 percent, which Mr. Steinhardt said "means 4 [million] to 8 million Americans will mistakenly be labeled as terrorists."

from Study used census information for terror profile

Comments

[alobar.livejournal.com]

I sent a letter of non-cooperation to the census bureau comments@census.gov telling them I would no longer cooperate with the census takers & I would be suggesting others do likewise. I urge you to drop them a note telling them of your feelings.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

This is *precisely* the sort of thing has been promised for 200 years would never happen with Census data. This is a betrayal of the most fundamental sort of trust between American citizens and (what was once) their government.