Thursday, January 09, 2020

Prepare to be counted and analyzed. The Donald has found a workaround.

Remember that pesky Census 2020 question about citizenship that Trump wanted to put on the census? And the courts stopped him?

Well, he found a workaround via executive order. And so, on December 20, the Department of Homeland Security quietly released a privacy assessment about an agreement to exchange information with the Census people.

Now, I figured there was something up Trump's sleeve, but I didn't expect it to be this pernicious. This isn't about gathering numbers anymore. It's about Donald Trump's executive agencies specifically matching names, addresses, social security numbers, visa applications, race, etc. etc. to decide whether you -- yes, you personally -- are a citizen of the US. 

Here's some of the language DHS buried in the middle of the report:
     The Census Bureau plans to use several administrative data sources of citizenship and immigration status in a statistical model that will produce a probability of being a U.S. citizen, a lawfully present non-citizen, or an unauthorized immigrant on April 1, 2020, for each person in the 2020 Census. The citizenship and immigration status probabilities will be used together with age, race, ethnicity, and location information from the 2020 Census . . . . 
     ... Person records in each administrative and survey data source, including the 2020 Census, will be validated and assigned a unique person identifier, called a PIK. The PIKs will be used to link each person’s citizenship information to his/her 2020 Census record. The validation process ... involves comparing records received by the Census Bureau to reference files using fields such as SSN or ITIN, name, date of birth, gender, and residential address.  
     ... The model will produce a citizenship and immigration status probabilities for each person, which will then be combined with age, race, ethnicity, and location information from the 2020 Census to produce the CVAP statistics.
In other words, the United States government is going to combine all the information it has about you (which is considerable), and then take a guess as to whether you're here illegally.

What could possibly go wrong?

DHS says that the purpose of this project is "to determine the number of citizens, lawfully present non-citizens, and unauthorized immigrants in the country."

Just the number? Just statistics?

Then why the need to create an identification profile for every single person at every single address?  Just so they can count us?

Or is it so they can go door to door and round up the people they think don't belong here?

It just keeps getting better and better.

1 comment:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete