I didn't answer even that question. I did not return the form. My result was the same as yours: No visits or inquiries. That's a shame. If I get fined $100, I can write a column about my experience and sell it for much more. -Declan On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 04:08:42AM -0400, Lucky Green wrote:

I only answered the first question in the last census: how many people live at that address (or something to that effect). The rest I crossed out with fat black permanent marker. The result: no visits from the census taker. No inquiries from the Census Office. No fine. No repercussions of any kind.

I am puzzled why anybody would have bothered to answer the remaining questions.

--Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>

"Anytime you decrypt... its against the law". Jack Valenti, President, Motion Picture Association of America in a sworn deposition, 2000-06-06

...

-----Original Message----- From: cypherpunks@openpgp.net [mailto:cypherpunks@openpgp.net]On Behalf Of Trei, Peter Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2000 14:07 To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: Congress proposes raiding census records.

Let us remember that the last time the privacy of census records were violated on this scale, they were used to imprison tens of thousands of law abiding American citizens, whose only crime was to have Japanese ancestry.

Peter Trei

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http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/opinion/23MONK.html (free registration required)

New York Times, 23 October, 2000

My Data, Mine to Keep Private

By LINDA R. MONK

WASHINGTON -- I was one of those paranoid Americans who chose not to answer all questions on the long form of the 2000 census. My husband and I decided that the government did not need to know, or had other ways of finding out, what time we left for work, how much our mortgage payment was or the amount of our income that came from wages. We were willing to risk the $100 fine to take a stand for individual privacy in an increasingly nosy and automated age.

Editorial writers across the nation chided people like us for being so silly, insisting that only right-wing nuts with delusions of jackbooted federal invaders could possibly object to the census. Think of all the poor women who need day care and disabled people who depend on public transportation, we were told. And don't listen to the warnings of Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader - they're just another Republican ploy to get a low count on the census.

Now, however, my concerns don't appear quite so ridiculous. The Congressional Budget Office, with the surprising help of some Congressional Republicans, is angling to get its hands on Census Bureau files. The budget office wants to create a "linked data set" on individuals - using information from the Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration and Census Bureau surveys - to help it evaluate proposed reforms in Medicare and Social Security.

Under current law, census data on individuals can be used only to benefit the Census Bureau, which has balked at turning over files to the budget office without greater assurances of individual privacy. However, the Congressional number crunchers are not taking no for an answer. Republicans may tack an amendment allowing Congress access to census data onto an appropriations bill before Congress adjourns for the elections.

The records the budget office wants are not themselves from the 2000 Census; they are voluntary responses to monthly surveys, with confidentiality promised. Forcing the bureau to give them up would set a disturbing precedent. Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta, who supervises the Census Bureau, warned Congress this month that amending the census law would "seriously compromise" the department's ability to safeguard taxpayers' privacy and "to assure continued high response rates of the American public to census surveys."

Chip Walker, a spokesman for Representative Dan Miller, a Florida Republican who chairs the House subcommittee on the census, sees no problem with congressional access to census data. "The Census Bureau is the government, and Congress is the government," he said.

Well, that's exactly what I'm afraid of. It's not surprising that a federal agency that stockpiles information would be raided by other federal agencies. If Congress changes the census law, the government will be well on its way to becoming another Amazon.com, which abruptly and retroactively weakened its privacy policy this year. I expected as much, because I don't believe either the government or businesses when they promise me privacy. That's why I routinely lie about personal information when applying for shoppers' discount cards and the like. And it's why I don't answer invasive questions on census forms. Keep your hands off my data set.

At 12:38 PM -0400 10/25/00, David Honig wrote:

At 09:45 AM 10/25/00 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:

...

I didn't answer even that question. I did not return the form.

My result was the same as yours: No visits or inquiries.

That's a shame. If I get fined $100, I can write a column about my experience and sell it for much more.

-Declan

Some folks who didn't send theirs in did get visits by (otherwise unemployable) censusworkers. They went away when told to do so, I'm told.

My favorite census story was the (true) one where the (nice old lady working for the Fedz) census worker got literally eaten by the dozen or so dogs some nonresponding dude kept in his yard.

I had a "pre-visit" by a pair of women--perhaps Census workers, perhaps not--about a year before the actual Census. They told me they were listing structures on properties so that Census workers could then make accurate tallies of the outbuildings, structures, etc. While one of the women engaged me in conversation about how many rooms my house had--I didn't tell her anything--the other woman started to enter my side yard, through an archway. I yelled over to her, "Please don't trespass on my property." She retreated, and the first woman mumbled something about "not liking a threatening tone." She said they were required by the rules to check properties for evidence of numbers of residential units, out-buildings, "granny flats," etc. Angry by this time, as I am wont to get, I told the both of them that the U.S. Census exists for one and only one purpose: counting the population for the sole purpose of the apportionment of Congress. It doesn't exist to track races (Japs, for example), to make pretty maps of income, marital status, computer usage, sexual preferences, numbers of pets, numbers of televisions and computers, and so on. It just doesn't. They retreated down my driveway (they had walked in...I assume they were walking to all houses on the street). I half-way expected Yet Another Stern Call from the Sheriff, but it never came (either that or my phone line was busy, as is usually the case during the day). When the Census form eventually arrived I got the short one. I answered only the question about the number of adults living at the address. I wrote "Aryan" for my race...I figured if the "favored minorities" got to have dozens of sub-classes ("Asian American, Pacific Islander, but not Chamorro Islands," or somesuch), then I could certainly write down "Aryan." [For those not in the U.S., the Census is a slave to political correctness. We have the spectacle of those of Spanish descent, as in "from Spain," writing down some variant of Hispanic for their "race," even though a Spaniard is of course of European, aka white, stock, while most Mexicans are much different. Amerindian, or whatever. And the Asians are divided into a dozen or so groups which lobbied for inclusion in the Census. Meanwhile, Finns, Irish, Poles, Israelis, Russians, Arabs, BUT NOT SPANIARDS, are all lumped in as "white." Bizarre.] In the Censuses of 1980 and 1990 I think I wrote down "Human Race" or something like that. Now I try to be as politically incorrect as possible. Fucking statists. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.

I am puzzled why anybody would have bothered to answer the remaining questions.

I did the same thing and the census worker came by 4 times trying to get my wife or I to divulge more information. -- Matt Elliott High Performance Data Management Team 217-265-0257 <mailto:melliott@ncsa.uiuc.edu>

I'd been planning to take the Fifth and write a rant to go with it explaining why. There were half a dozen things wrong with the forms and associated package purely aside from the questions themselves. But it wasn't a high priority, so I ended up not returning the form. At 09:45 AM 10/25/00 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:

I didn't answer even that question. I did not return the form.

My result was the same as yours: No visits or inquiries.

That's a shame. If I get fined $100, I can write a column about my experience and sell it for much more.

-Declan

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 04:08:42AM -0400, Lucky Green wrote:

...

I only answered the first question in the last census: how many people live at that address (or something to that effect). The rest I crossed out with fat black permanent marker. The result: no visits from the census taker. No inquiries from the Census Office. No fine. No repercussions of any kind.

I am puzzled why anybody would have bothered to answer the remaining questions.

Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, jim bell wrote:

Not "mexican-american." The average American's illusion is that when an illegal alien is found he's immediately kicked across the border. Well, the first time maybe, but there is now a 2-year sentence for illegal entry for repeat offenders.

What's the history of this particular piece of legislation? A naive person might think there has to be something special about the crime if jurisdiction can be obtained merely via the presence of an individual.

Very convenient, because the majority of prison guards are probably ex-US Military-types who "need" to be kept in the Federal fold. For every couple of beaners they keep, they get to hire another guard.

OK. This would be 'rent-seeking', right? ;) Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university

sympathy. I'm also aware of a similar example in Mountain View, CA - it's pretty hard for them to bother people who use even elementary measures to protect their privacy and security.

I always lie on the forms and send them in. No blowback. The Net has had a major impact on this Census since all the politically active types seem to be aware of the $100 fine which was not true before. My brother refused to return his form and was contacted by his *Neighborhood Watch* representative who had been contacted by Census. Just like the Chinese block ladies who keep an eye on things. Of course, he lives in the most commie state in the union. He could sue in a case like this for a privacy violation by Census. I doubt there will be any prosecutions this year. There weren't any in 1990 or 1980 and the 1970 prosecutions ran into First Amendment selective prosecution problems. DCF ---- "SENATOR: Mister Witness, do you advocate the overthrow of the government of the Yew-nited States by force or violence? WITNESS: Well, Senator I've never quite thought about it in those terms before but if I had to choose, I guess I'd choose 'violence'."